Sheep Husbandry and Production of Wool, Garments and Cloths in Archaic Sumer.

• Author: Englund, R.K.
• Position: Book Review

Sheep Husbandry and Production of Wool, Garments and Cloths in Archaic Sumer. By KRYSTYNA SZARZYNSKA. Warsaw: AGADE, 2002. Pp. iv + 60, illus. [euro]12 (paper).

One wants to be kind to the short treatment of textile production in the Late Uruk period ca. 3300-3000 B.C. reviewed here. In this as in other research tasks, K. Szarzynska has evidently spent many hours gathering and considering a substantial number of proto-cuneiform records that ostensibly document the management of wool-producing sheep, and the distribution of the raw wool and the textiles that derive from these herds. Those who have worked on the early administrative record of Babylonia will immediately recognize the important social and economic role in labor rationing, and in domestic and foreign exchange that the concentrated-value textiles of southern Mesopotamia played in early history (see, e.g., OBO 160/1, 150-53, with its many unanswered questions).

Research into early textile production is, however, in no way served by this book. Woe to the reader who decides to make the effort to work through English that is in part incomprehensible (for instance, p. 26, "As instrument used to scratch the raw fleece (or wool) was a card presented by the sign U[R.sub.4]"), who studies the book's graphics that in print are either so pixilated as to be gray smears (most sign representations), or in the case of text copies are feeble ersatz, apparently created to avoid making a reproduction request of the editors of the series ATU and MSVO (that would have been...