The Ur III Temple of Inanna at Nippur: The Operation and Organization of Urban Religious Institutions in Mesopotamia in the Late Third Millennium B.C.

• Author: Postgate, J.N.

Publishing a major Near Eastern excavation is a long and complex task, and as all too often happens, this book is, in part, an interim report on work undertaken in the 1950s in which the author, for chronological reasons, was not available to take part. It is primarily, though, a study of the temple as an institution, which does indeed rely on the excavated evidence but is not strictly part of "the" excavation report. This of course reflects the origin of the work as a doctoral thesis, for which a mere presentation of results would be unsuited, and in this it much resembles E. C. Stone's Nippur Neighborhoods (Chicago: The Oriental Institute of the Univ. of Chicago, 1987). Indeed the resemblances do not stop there, since each author brings together textual and archaeological evidence for a single part of the site; each exploits it to reconstruct a component of the urban society of Nippur; and each is an archaeologist/anthropologist who had the courage (stiffened by expert assistance from Miguel Civil) to use the texts.

Zettler describes his book as representing "a case study on the extent to which and/or the archaeological conditions under which it is possible to integrate culture remains and written documentation" (p. 3), and on his final page he makes it clear that he believes such integration is necessary but not attempted sufficiently. He certainly practices what he preaches. His two bodies of material are (1) the excavated record of the Inanna Temple, specifically Level IV; and (2) the Ur III tablets found in the area (some stratified in the Ur III layers, most displaced, but reasonably treated as a coherent archive of some 1,150 texts). For both classes of evidence he draws on the expedition's unpublished records and on the artifacts and tablets themselves. (We thus have now a third major study of a Nippur archive which is not accompanied by a comprehensive edition of the texts themselves [Stone's Nippur Neighborhoods, and Rene Marcel Sigrist's Les sattukku dans l'Esumesa (Malibu: Undena, 1984)]. While readily acknowledging the competence of each author/editor, as well as their hard work and insight, one must urge that, especially with a coherent archive, nothing short of total publication is enough.) Happily, in this case, tucked away on p. 241, we find the comment, "interested readers will have to wait for the publication of the tablets and inscribed finds, a volume I hope to complete soon" (see also p. 92). To be fair, Zettler has...