The Inscriptions of Tiglath-pileser II, King of Assyria.

• Author: Grayson, A. Kirk

By HAYIM TADMOR. Jerusalem: THE ISRAEL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES, 1994. Pp. xv + 318, 60 plates + 1 acetate sheet. $60.

This is a scholar's book. Lucky are those of us who not only understand how valuable the research embodied in this tome is, but also have the opportunity at last to read it. For this book has been a long time in the making but now at last it is here and will endure as a monument to scholarship for decades, possibly a century or more.

After some prefatory matters, the book begins with a "General Introduction" followed in order by editions of the inscriptions of Tiglath-pileser III: "The Calah Annals," "The Stele from Iran" (in collaboration with Louis D. Levine), "The Mila Mergi Rock Relief," "The Summary Inscriptions from Calah," and "Miscellaneous Texts." There follows various "Excursuses," "Supplementary Studies," "Tables," "Indices" "Addenda et Corrigenda," and "Plates." The literature cited in this volume ends with the late 1980s. This is not the author's fault but due to the fact that the manuscript was so long - far, far too long - in press.

By far the most important contribution of Tadmor's tome is his edition of the annals of Tiglath-pileser III. The fate of the slabs upon which these annals were inscribed is too complex to outline in this review. Those readers interested in the minutiae must read Tadmor's book for themselves. In brief, the slabs were first mutilated in antiquity by one of Tiglath-pileser's successors, Esarhaddon, who wished to reuse them for his own palace - a practice unparalleled in Assyrian history. Esarhaddon never completed his palace and the slabs, when Sir Henry Layard found them, were stacked helter skelter. Sir Henry did his best to sort them out and make squeezes and copies. The slabs were eventually reburied, for preservation, so that the modern scholar is forced to reconstruct their sequence and decipher the inscriptions with only the squeezes, copies, and notebooks of Layard and other pioneers. This was a most unhappy and complicated procedure but one to which Tadmor, assisted by the late Richard Barnett in establishing the sequence of the slabs, has dedicated the best part of his professional life and expertise. He did this with consummate assiduity and skill; a task that no other scholar has endeavored to do before.

The result is that much of the commentary on the annals is taken up with a kind of archaeology of how the author spent years sifting through the manuscripts of...