Les Debuts de l'histoire: La Proche-Orient, de l'invention de l'ecriture a la naissance du monotheisme.

• Author: Snell, Daniel
• Position: Book review

Les Debuts de l 'histoire: La Proche-Orient, de I 'invention de l'ecriture a la naissunce du monotheisme. Edited by PIERRE BORDREUIL, FRANCOISE BRIQUEL-CHATONNET, AND CECILE MICHEL. Paris: EDITIONS DE LA MARTINIERE, 2008. Pp. 420. illus. [member of]39.

This attractively produced book is an introduction to the cultures of" the ancient Near East, it has cool vinyl covers that can take sonic bashing around, and the photographs, many in color, are magnificent. But the section on history is minimized. There is an introductory chapter that slogs through the dynasties in almost list-like fashion, hut that is far from the main interest of the contributors. Instead they want to tell you about the life and culture of the peoples of the ancient Near East.

The work is a laudable venture, and the authors pull it off quite smoothly, surprisingly so, since there are so many contributors. Only occasionally can one sense a personality beneath the lovely French prose, but one has the impression that the editors strived to minimize personality. In fact tinny-eight scholars have contributed to this effort, many of them leaders in their fields. Each chapter is full of slightly novel ideas, which, however, one cannot easily follow up since there are no footnotes but just bibliographies at the end of the whole book, and the works presented arc pretty general books over whelmingly in French. The target is the French history audience, a robust and interesting group, who, however, may want to know where some of the more farfetched-sounding ideas came from. Sometimes I could figure it out, but other times I could not.

The question for an English speaker reading this book is whether an English translation would serve a purpose. I think that this could be a useful textbook for a beginning class in the cultures of the ancient Near East, but if the framework is political history, one will need another text too. So I see it as supplementary to a more all-embracing history.

Still, I learned a lot from the authors, and the pictures knock your socks off. There could be more maps, but those on the endpapers, both front and back exactly the same, serve for orientation. The four supplemental maps are pretty but not too detailed. There is an index of proper names, another of gods, and yet another of places, but there is no general index, and that absence reduces the volume's usefulness to students. One has to rely on the table of contents to show where one might find a topic.

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