The Lower Stratum Families in the Neo-Assyrian Period.

• Author: Baker, Heather D.
• Position: Book review

The Lower Stratum Families in the Neo-Assyrian Period. By GERSHON GALIL. Culture and History of the Ancient Near East, vol. 27. Leiden: BRILL, 2007. Pp. xvii + 403. $162.

This book presents a study of 447 families identified by the author among the Neo-Assyrian legal and administrative documents as belonging to the lowest stratum of society. Following its introduction, the book is divided into two parts. Part one comprises three chapters: "The Sources," "A Survey of the Lower Stratum Families," and "The Terminology, the Formulation of the Texts, and the Status of the People." Part two consists of eight further chapters dealing with different aspects of family composition and structure: family types, family size, marriage patterns, childless families, children's age, single-parent families, numerical proportions among family members, and number of generations.

The book will be followed by a second volume devoted to middle and upper stratum families (pp. 3-4). Despite the author's explanation (pp. 1-5) of his approach to social structure, the rationale for using class--however one defines it--as the basis for studying the Neo-Assyrian family is not self-evident to this reviewer. Galil states (p. 4): "In the latter volume additional criteria will be proposed for distinguishing the middle and upper stratum from the lower one, including the amount of assets held by the family and the administrative standing of the family head." It seems to me that these issues are peripheral to the subject of family per se, unless one is trying to determine whether family structure and composition vary with social status. This is something the author does not explicitly claim to be doing, although on p. 347, anticipating the results of the second volume, he does in fact state that family status correlates with family size. He rightly observes (p. 4) that families of differing status are differently attested in the Neo-Assyrian documentation, with "lower stratum" families often occurring only once each, albeit with a full listing of family members, in contrast to families of higher status whose composition is typically more difficult (or even impossible) to reconstruct from the available sources and whose women in particular are under-represented.

This book is not an easy read: extensive appendices and appendix-style material are integrated into the main body of the text and, in fact, comprise the bulk of the book. A major problem for this reviewer is the fact...