Proche-Orient ancien; Temps vecu, temps pense: Actes de la Table-Ronde du 15 novembre 1997 organisee par l'URA 1062 ≪Etudes Semitiques.≫.

• Author: PARDEE, DENNIS
• Position: Review

Proche-Orient ancien; Temps vecu, temps pense: Actes de la Table-Ronde du 15 novembre 1997 organisee par l'URA 1062 [much less than]Etudes Semitiques.[much greater than] Edited by FRANCOISE BRIQUEL-CHATONNET and HELENE LOZACHMEUR. Antiquites Semitiques, vol. 3. Paris: JEAN MAISONNEUVE, 1998. Pp. 238, maps, illustrations. FF 260.

A large dictionary will indicate several meanings for English 'time,' French 'temps,' German 'Zeit,' etc., and dozens of idiomatic usages. In none of the ancient Semitic languages that I know, however, is a word attested designating the abstract concept of 'time' as "indefinite and continuous duration regarded as that in which events succeed one another" (part of the first gloss in the Random House Dictionary of the English Language, 2nd unabr. ed., 1987). There are, of course, words for units of time as defined by the movements of the moon and of the sun ('day,' 'month,' 'year'; 'week,' which does not correspond directly to a lunar or solar cycle, came into use much later than these); for repetitions ("he did it three times"--note that the participants in the French discussion would not have had to consider this aspect of time because their word for this 'time' is not 'temps' but 'fois'); for the undefined future and past (e.g., [subset]olam in Hebrew); and for time as a specific moment (e.g., [subset]et in Hebrew). In an epilogue, M. Sznycer discusses this absence in Northwest Semitic, and proposes that no such word is attested before z[contains] man was borrowed, ultimately from Old Persian, in the first millennium B.C. For this reason, the aspects of 'time' as an element of life and of reflection addressed by the various essays in this collection are primarily practical, having to do with man's attempts at placing his acts in a temporal context. The principal topic treated, in terms of space allotted, is that of various dating systems, functioning either in the short term (e.g., the fixing of a ritual to a day of the month or the dating of documents in terms of a king's regnal years) or in the long (e.g., attempts to retrace the history of a dynasty or a succession of dynasties). There is only one specifically lexicographic study, on Arabic terms attested in the Koran as having to do with time (pp. 211-22).

The weakness of this presentation of "time in the ancient Near East" is not that of the individual presentations, all of which are characterized by erudition and deep reflection, but that of incompleteness of coverage. One cannot expect a one-day round-table to discuss all aspects of the topic, but as one reads, one does note here the extreme spottiness of treatment of the earlier periods: all of Mesopotamian culture is treated in a single presentation, the second-millennium cultures of Anatolia-Syria-Palestine are represented by a single treatment (of the Ugaritic prose texts--there is nothing on what the texts of other types from Ras Shamra or those from Mari, Ebla, Emar, Hatti, etc., tell us about time), Egypt at all periods is absent, the Bible gets only spotty treatment (apocalyptic time and the chronological system of the Book of Daniel are discussed, and there is a very detailed presentation of the dating formulae attested in first-millennium texts from...