Letters from Assyrian and Babylonian Scholars.

• Author: Jas, R.M.
• Position: Review

By SIMO PARPOLA. State Archives of Assyria, vol. 10. Helsinki: HELSINKI UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1993. Pp. xxxix + 421. FM 396.

Assyriologists all too rarely get, or take, the opportunity to improve on their text editions. In such a quickly changing field this is really a pity, and it is therefore gratifying that Simo Parpola, who twenty-five years ago made the correspondence of Assyrian scholars for the first time truly accessible to a wider scholarly world, has reedited this group of letters.

Letters from Assyrian Scholars, a groundbreaking edition, was long out of print when, thirteen years after its publication, it was followed by a thorough and even more remarkable introduction to the corpus and a commentary of over five hundred pages. Letters from Assyrian and Babylonian Scholars renews the debt Assyriology owes to Simo Parpola for trying to grasp the meaning of this fascinating corpus.

This edition includes forty-three new texts, most of them in the Babylonian dialect, the most striking of which is the Assyrian letter ABL 1285 (no. 294 in this book). It was written by Urad-Gula, the "forlorn scholar," and it has been known since 1913. That this high-point in Ancient Near Eastern epistolography was fully appreciated only after Simo Parpola reedited it in AOS 67 (1987) once again shows how unsatisfactory the previous treatments of this group of texts were.

In contrast to the first edition, Parpola relies on material he collected for Letters from Assyrian Scholars, part II, to arrange many texts chronologically. In doing so, he still depends on the Assyrian way of classifying scientists, as known from several administrative texts and letters. This certainly remains the best possible way to present the letters despite occasional divergences like SAA 7, no. 1, in which the asipu's "exorcists" precede the baru's "haruspices/diviners."

The book includes a full glossary, a copy of a previously unpublished text, reports on many collations and a marvelous set of illustrations selected by Julian Reade.

A new introduction stresses the introspective nature of the Assyrians and is dominated by the author's interpretation of the tree in Assyrian art which is explained as an esoteric diagram for initiates only, symbolizing, among other things, the king as the perfect man and the perfect image of God.

The meaning of the difficult, glossed, proverb at the end of letter no. 207, entitled The Perfect Likeness of the God, by Parpola, (on which see also H...