Origins: The Ancient Near Eastern Background of Some Modern Institutions.

• Author: Toorn, K. van der
• Position: Review

By WILLIAM W. HALLO. Leiden: E. J. BRILL, 1996. Pp. xvii + 362. $75.

Among his colleagues, William W. Hallo, professor of Assyriology and Babylonian Literature at Yale University, is known as a prolific writer on a wide variety of matters pertaining to ancient Mesopotamia and its surrounding civilizations. The present volume is further proof of his erudition and desire to write. It is, as the title intimates, a book of a vast and ambitious scope. Inspired by Daniel Boorstin's The Discoverers: A History of Man's Search to Know His World and Himself (New York: Random House, 1983), Hallo decided in the early eighties to write a book showing "how ancient Near Eastern innovations or their consequences have survived into our own day and age" (p. xiv). His focus was to be on the debt of the modern Western world to the ancient Near East. His undertaking might be compared with S. N. Kramer's History Begins at Sumer (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1959), though Hallo puts greater stress on the continuity between us and the ancient Near East - or so he promises.

The book has ten chapters, nine of them grouped into three sections, the tenth being a conclusion. The first eight chapters are devoted to the "essentials of civilization" (city, capital formation, writing), the secondary aspects of civilization (agriculture and animal husbandry estimated as secondary to urbanism and the invention of writing), the refinements of civilization, the calendar, literature, kingship, religion, and women. Chapter nine, which is longer than its predecessors, seems rather out of place, even as an appendix. Under the title "The First Half of History," i.e., the period of 3000-500 B.C.E., the author gives a survey of the history of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Israel. Why Hallo decided to include this necessarily cursory treatment of ancient history is a mystery to me. All the information he offers can be found in four of his earlier publications (see n. 1 on p. 271) and merely reproduces earlier material, shorn of its footnotes. Such an abbreviated re-edition would be justified as part of a popular book, but Brill would not likely be its publisher.

Chapter nine is not alone in reproducing earlier publications, with half of the remaining pages having had previous life in published form; though sometimes revised and updated they cannot be called "new." Truly "new" are pp. 18-25, 44-52, 78-97, 120-53, 169-211, 243-70, 324-33; most of this "new" material builds upon earlier work of...