Style and Form in Old Babylonian Literary Texts.

• Author: Fritz, Michael
• Position: Book review

Style and Form in Old Babylonian Literary Texts. By NATHAN WASSERMAN. Cuneiform Monographs, vol. 27. Leiden: BRILL-STYX, 2003. Pp. xxvii + 239.

In his book about style and form in Old Babylonian Akkadian literary texts Nathan Wasserman tries to establish "a wide perspective of the more prominent features of the Old Babylonian literary system, aiming to arrive at general conclusions regarding its distinctive style and to define what singles it out from prose texts" (p. 1). These features are Hendiadys, Tamyiz, Damqam-inim, Merismus, Simile, and Rhyming Couplets. These titles show that the author appropriately deals with Akkadian literature in the light of its own character and in the context of comparative Semitic studies.

Using the complete literary corpus of a single period, the author is able to analyze the use of elements of style and form in the entire Akkadian literature of that time. So he gives a broader basis of examples than a study of a single literary genre would offer--bearing in mind that due to the incidental and fragmentary nature of what we have, as the author states the field of "Mesopotamian literature is constantly undergoing a process of redefinition and expansion" (p. 175).

Welcome is the survey of the scholarly discussion given at the beginning of every chapter, and the author's special attention to the distribution of style according to the different literary genres in his conclusions of each single chapter.

Unavoidable in research of such an extent, some of his examples require discussion. In the first chapter about hendiadys (pp. 5-28) Wasserman distinguishes between nominal and verbal hendiadys. A little confusing, to my mind, is the use of the term hendiadys in the case of verbal expressions using words like redum, bitrum, kanum, sanum, tarum, hiasum, gamarum, wasabum, magarum and le'um, Wasserman's database for verbal hendiadys (pp. 19-22). Are these examples really the same as nominal hendiadys? Or are these intransitive verbs with a meaning like "do a second time, repeat," "endure," etc., not only a mere possibility in Akkadian for the verbal expression of repetition, duration, willingness and so on, without being hendiadys, and is the hendiadys inherent only to our translation? Buccellati's "coordinative adjunctivation" (p. 17) is preferable in my mind for this kind of construction, since it separates the matter clearly from nominal hendiadys.

It should be stated that Wasserman chose his examples with...