The Royal Inscriptions of Tiglath-pileser III (744-727 BC) and Shalmaneser V (726-722 BC), Kings of Assyria.

AuthorPorter, Barbara N.
PositionBook review

The Royal Inscriptions of Tiglath-pileser III (744-727 BC) and Shalmaneser V (726-722 BC), Kings of Assyria. By Hayim Tadmor and SHIGEO Yamada. The Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period, vol. 1. Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2011. Pp. xxiii + 211. $59.50.

This volume is a complete edition of the notoriously difficult royal inscriptions of Tiglath-pileser III, joined by the few, brief royal inscriptions surviving from the short reign of his successor, Shalmaneser V. It is the product of a collaboration between the late Hayim Tadmor and his student, and then colleague, Shigeo Yamada, pooling their skills and incorporating the suggestions of other scholars to improve on Tadmor's already impressive earlier edition and study of Tiglath-pileser's inscriptions (The Inscriptions of Tiglath-pileser III, King of Assyria: Critical Edition, with Introductions, Translations and Commentary [Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1994]).

As the second volume to appear in the new RINAP series, created in 2007 by Grant Frame to publish new editions of Neo-Assyrian royal inscriptions begun under the now defunct RIM project, it maintains the RIM series' high standards. Following the introduction to each text is a composite transliteration based on all exemplars of that text; facing the transliteration is a clear, line-by-line English translation. Brief but detailed footnotes discuss translations, reconstructions, and any restorations of missing text. Transliterations of each individual exemplar of a text are given in score form in a CD accompanying the volume. As a generous bonus, the volume (like all RINAP editions) is available free online and fully searchable at the website of the Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus Project (http://oracc.org).

In addition to the inscriptions of both kings, the volume includes inscriptions whose attribution to one of the kings is likely but remains uncertain, inscriptions of their royal women, and some inscriptions of high officials that help to establish the form of the royal name and titles. (The important inscription of the official Bel-Harran-belu-usur is excluded because it was published earlier in the RIM series.) The volume also includes a full index of proper names (including gates and palaces), concordances of museum and excavation numbers, and a few welcome photographs of the objects on which certain texts were inscribed or the bas reliefs that accompanied them, providing a visual...

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