Patavina Orientalia Selecta.

• Author: Beckman, Gary
• Position: Brief Reviews of Books

Patavina Orientalia Selecta. Edited by ELENA ROVA. History of the Ancient Near East: Monographs, vol. 4. Padua: SARGON SRL, 2000. Pp. xvii + 290, illus. (paper).

The venerable university of Padua has only been home to a professorship in the history of the ancient Near East since 1985, although the town itself can boast of a native son prominent among early Orientalists, the adventurer Giovanni Battista Belzoni. The present volume has been published in celebration of the first fifteen years of the Lehrstuhl, and includes fourteen essays by scholars trained under its aegis--principally by its initial incumbent, F. M. Fales--and by associated members of the Padua faculty.

Covered are areas as divergent as Assyriology (N. Bellotto, "La struttura familiare a Emar"; D. M. Bonacossi, "Marina sa sade, Marina, Burmarina: The Many Names of an Assyrian Town on the Euphrates"; F. M. Fales, "bit beli: An Assyrian Institutional Concept"), central Asian archaeology (S. Salvatori, "II cimitero del Bronzo Medio a Gonur...