Riches Hidden in Secret Places: Ancient Near Eastern Studies in Memory of Thorkild Jacobsen.

• Author: Michalowski, Piotr
• Position: Book Review

Edited by TZVI ABUSCH. Winona Lake, Ind.: EISENBRAUNS, 2002. Pp. xvii + 333.

A memorial volume for a scholar such as Thorkild Jacobsen, who published so many original works on so many different topics, is an ambitious and risky undertaking. At a time when anniversary and memorial volumes threaten to overwhelm us, the quality suffers, and one would hardly want to end up with a volume unworthy of the recipient. In this case, however, all such fears can be readily dissipated, for the papers collected in this volume are uniformly of the highest order.

In addition to eighteen essays, the book includes a bibliography of Jacobsen's writings, and a welcome note on his Danish intellectual background by Bendt Alster, as well as an "appreciation" by the editor. If I may be permitted a small quibble, Alster states that "the later Copenhagen school of glossematic linguistics founded by Louis Hjemslev played no role in Jacobsen's writings" (p. xxvii). It may be true that Jacobsen was not a follower of glossematics, but he did admire Hjemslev and made much use of the latter's La Categorie des cas: Etude de grammaire generale (1935), which is crucial for the understanding of his work on the Sumerian verb.

The scholarly papers that follow cover a broad range of topics, and one can only mention some of them here, concentrating on those that have a direct bearing on the great man's legacy. M. Civil provides new information on the often-debated terms maru and hamtu that were used in the Akkadian language to describe the two stems of the Sumerian verb. The author demonstrates that they were definitely used to describe the Sumerian and not the Akkadian verbs, and must be glossed as "long" and "short," referring to the actual structure of the stems, with the latter being the unmarked citation form.

...