Kanaanaische und aramaische Inschriften.

• Author: Rollston, Christopher A.
• Position: Kanaanaische und aramaische Inschriften, vol. 1, 5th ed. - Book Review

Kanaanaische und aramaische Inschriften, vol. 1. Fifth expanded and revised ed. By HERBERT DONNER and WOLFGANG ROLLIG. Wiesbaden: HARRASSOWITZ VERLAG, 2002. Pp. xviii + 79. [euro]24.80 (paper).

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Mark Lidzbarski's Handbuch der nordsemitischen Epigraphik (Weimar, 1898) and G. A. Cooke's A Text-Book of North-Semitic Inscriptions (Oxford, 1903) were the most useful and authoritative handbooks of Northwest Semitic inscriptions, with fine selections of texts and accompanying philological and historical comments. These volumes were broad in nature, and treated Aramaic (including Nabataean and Palmyrene), Phoenician and Punic, Hebrew, and Moabite. During subsequent decades, a number of handbooks were published, but normally these reflected narrower foci. For example, epigraphic Hebrew was the predominant focus of both David Diringer's handbook entitled Le Inscrizioni Antico-Ebraiche Palestinesi (Florence, 1934) and Sabatino Moscati's L'Epigrafia Ebraica Antica: 1935-1950 (Rome, 1951).

For this reason, during the middle of the twentieth century, there was a distinct need for a new handbook of Northwest Semitic. Herbert Donner and Wolfgang Rollig's first edition (1962) of Kanaanaische und aramaische Inschriften (abbreviated KAI) was, therefore, a most welcome addition to the field of Northwest Semitic, and it rapidly became a standard reference work. It consisted of three separate volumes, comprising Texte; Kommentar; and Glossare, Indizes, Tafeln. The most important component of this handbook was, arguably, the philological notes (replete with variant readings) of volume two.

Several editions of KAI were published; regrettably, however, all three volumes have now been out of print for well more than a decade. Of course, John C. L. Gibson's three-volume Textbook of Syrian Semitic Inscriptions (Oxford, 1971-82) has been an important handbook of Northwest Semitic. Moreover, Shmuel Ahituv's (modern Hebrew) Handbook of Ancient Hebrew Inscriptions (Jerusalem, 1992) is useful not only for First and Second Temple Hebrew, but also (to some extent) for Ammonite, Moabite, Philistine, and Edomite. And naturally, Johannes Renz and Wolfgang Rollig's multivolume Die althebraischen Inschriften (Darmstadt, 1995-2003) is a sine qua non for Old Hebrew. Nevertheless, because of its broad and deft selection of Northwest...