The Third Millennium: Studies in Early Mesopotamia and Syria in Honor of Walter Sommerfeld and Manfred Krebernik.

• Author: Foster, Benjamin R.

The Third Millennium: Studies in Early Mesopotamia and Syria in Honor of Walter Sommerfeld and Manfred Krebernik. Edited by ILYA ARKHIPOV, LEONID KOGAN, and NATALIA KOSLOVA. Cuneiform Monographs, vol. 50. Leiden: BRILL, 2020. Pp. xxiii + 829, illus. $234.

This splendid combined Festschrift for two of the dies superiores of third-millennium studies offers thirty-seven essays by forty-two authors, mostly spanning the Uruk IV to the Old Babylonian periods. Glassner and Keetman take up archaic writing, Glassner suggesting that in devising the earliest signs, the inventers of writing went further than the usual explanation of choosing images of objects of daily life, animals, body parts, or purely abstract designs, by making recourse to mythological thinking, his primary instance being the E-KID-LIL group (so also Keetman, pp. 361-62; if Keetman is right that the sign represents a reed mat, is it perhaps a punka, and this would be the connection with air?).

Keetman seeks to demonstrate the definite presence of Sumerian language in Uruk writing, and does so convincingly, even without invoking the parallel argument of consistency of metrology over time, so one hopes that Englund's contrary view, despite his great authority, can be finally set aside, even if the problem of onomastics remains. It seems somehow unthinkable that an imagined and presumably literate pre-Sumerian population has simply disappeared with scarcely a trace.

On the micro-level, Monaco takes up one sign, NUN, offering a pleasing explanation for its use in connection with livestock to mean "aged," with the overtone of "honorable." This picturesque usage seems to disappear not long thereafter, in favor of just plain "old."

Oelsner surveys painstakingly the scattered remains of third-millennium text groups from the Uruk excavations, noting that none of them was evidently found in their original context, being, rather, discards and fill.

Moving into the Early Dynastic period, Lecompte undertakes collation of the Figure aux plumes and the Prisoner Plaque, the former remaining as baffling as ever, but the idea that it records the buildup of arable land resources by Ningirsu is attractive and would help to explain what seems like the literary character of this extraordinary monument.

Wilcke takes up, also with scrupulous study of the original, another, far less known and no less obscure monument, perhaps dating to the Fara period, which seems to record disposition of property, in some cases by oath, on the occasion of a marriage. A considerable amount of land is involved, which might serve to explain the choice of a stone monument.

Westenholz gives a skeptical survey of Steinkeller's conversion of Gelb's "Kish Civilization" into a major political entity centered at Kish in Early Dynastic II, repeatedly reminding the reader how scant the evidence actually is for any broad reconstruction of the political and ethnic situation in Mesopotamia at such an early date.

Cavigneaux gives exquisite copies of two Fara sale contracts, as well as an edition; it is remarkable how many of these found their way onto the antiquities market, as opposed to other Fara text types, so one has the impression that illegal diggers happened on the "register of deeds" of that town.

Bauer contributes a treatment of a large fragment of a beautifully written sale document, clearly the handiwork of a master scribe.

Bramanti and Notizia edit more Presargonic records from the Umma region, amply demonstrating the extensive progress that has been made with the understanding of these documents since the late 1970s, in which Bramanti has been particularly active.

For Ebla, Archi explores, in a rewarding essay, the status of Ishara as...