Studies in West-Semitic Epigraphy: Selected Papers.

• Author: Pardee, Dennis
• Position: Book review

Studies in West-Semitic Epigraphy: Selected Papers. By JOSEPH NAVEH. Jerusalem: THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY, MAGNES PRESS (www.magnespress.co), 2009. Pp. xviii + 544.

Gathered here are fifty-four of Naveh's opera minora originally published in various journals and collections. Some of the entries are reproduced photographically (e.g., those from Israel Exploration Journal), others have been re-set (e.g., those from 'Atiqot). There is a consecutive pagination at the bottom of the page, with these numbers placed in square brackets; if an article is reproduced photographically and the page numbers of the original were at the top of the page, they are visible here. Any illustrations in the original are here placed on a numbered page; in those cases where illustrations were presented in figures or plates outside the original article, the number of pages per entry and their arrangement will, of course, vary here, even in the cases of articles that are photographically reproduced, as compared with the original.

The collection is preceded by a brief preface from the hand of the author and a list of "Acknowledgments" in which the origin of each entry is indicated. At the end are a comprehensive list of the author's publications, a general index, an index of (ancient) names, an index of references (to ancient texts), and a glossary which is divided into two parts, ancient terms in transliteration and ancient terms in Hebrew script (here the mixing of Hebrew and Roman scripts has led to some awkward and even garbled entries).

The author's methodological stance as a "typologist" in the mold of his mentor Frank Moore Cross led him to one of his more controversial conclusions, on the one hand that the script of the Aramaic text of the Akkado-Aramaic stele from Tell Fakhariyah must date to earlier than the ninth-century limmu-dating of one of the protagonists (among other indications), on the other that this script is of no relevance for the question of the borrowing of the Semitic alphabet by the Greeks, which, according to Naveh, must for palaeographic reasons have occurred some two and a half centuries earlier than the late ninth--early eighth-century date adopted by most scholars on the basis of the presently available archaeological and epigraphic data from the Mediterranean. In one of relatively few specific topics addressed in his preface, the author here declares himself willing "to withdraw my theory on the transmission of the alphabet to Greece in the...