Opening the Tablet Box: Near Eastern Studies in Honor of Benjamin R. Foster.

• Author: Farber, Walter
• Position: Book review

Opening the Tablet Box: Near Eastern Studies in Honor of Benjamin R. Foster. Edited by SARAH C. MELVILLE and ALICE L. SLOTSKY. Culture and History of the Ancient Near East, vol. 42. Leiden: BRILL, 2010. Pp. xviii + 489, illus. $230.

A scholar with a broad range of interests deserves a Festschrift with a broad range of topics, and this is indeed what his former students and now colleagues S. C. Melville and A. L. Slotsky have assembled in celebration of the sixty-fifth birthday of their friend and former mentor, Benjamin R. Foster. Ben has been one of the few Assyriologists of his generation who successfully withstood the common trend toward over-specialization without compromising the quality of his own scholarship, as is amply documented by his extensive bibliography (pp. 5-13 of the volume under review). His writings and expertise span three millennia of Mesopotamian antiquity in a range of different aspects, as well as the more recent topics of early Assyriology in America, and current issues of politics and heritage in the countries covering the ancient Near East. Even though his Festschrift is devoted only to articles dealing with antiquity, the selection of contributors reflects the breadth of Ben Foster's research very well, and their individual gratulatory offerings show their esteem for him as a scholar and human being. Not having had the privilege of contributing. I herewith offer my review of the book as a small token of my friendship to the honoree.

The technical editing and production of the book are exemplary, although this is unfortunately also reflected in the much less exemplary price of $230. One way of making a publication like this more affordable might have been to avoid the use of the extra-heavy glazed paper that is also much harder to read than non-glaring stock.

The contributions are arranged alphabetically by author, and thus a brief topical overview may be useful. Since many of them, in the spirit of Ben Foster's scholarship, straddle the lines of genres and periods, my attempts to attribute the articles to certain categories is, however, often very subjective. To save space, only the names of the authors are quoted here. "Philology" in this book starts right around the time of the invention of writing, in G. Schwartz's analysis of four unusual clay objects from the third millennium, which bear non-cuneiform signs resembling script. Early texts from Ebla are treated by A. Archi, while the contributions by S...