I trattati nel mondo antico: Forma, ideologia, funzione.

• Author: Hillers, Delbert R.

Under the auspices of the Seminario di Antichistica of the Istituto Gramsci, scholars interested in ancient treaties met in Rome in 1986 for a conference which bore the same title as the book under review, Treaties in the Ancient World: Form, Ideology, and Function. The volume consists, for the most part, of the collected papers delivered at that conference, mostly in Italian and English. Just two of the papers read are not included (those of D. Musti and F. Coarelli), while a related essay by M. Weinfeld, present only as a discussant, has been added.

The ambition of the organizers of the conference, according to the preface by M. Liverani, was to bring together specialists in various sub-fields within ancient studies to confront a subject of common concern and of considerable importance, and this book reflects the overall success of the enterprise. At all points the collection constitutes a useful bringing-up-to-date of a topic of perennial interest, by recognized authorities, and here and there new and valuable advances are made. Though the reader feels the lack of an attempt at synthesis, and regrets that it was apparently impossible or impractical to include the discussion and the interchange that must have taken place between the scholars present, at the same time, he is put in a position to form his own synthesis, or frame his own questions, on the basis of the broad and diverse collection of subjects expertly presented. It would have been helpful, for this purpose and others, if the editors had provided indices, of authors, of subjects, of Semitic, Greek, and Latin terms, but there are none.

The essay by H. Tadmor, "Alliance and Dependence in Ancient Mesopotamia and in Israel: Terminology and Practices," is an abridgement of his "Treaty and Oath in the Ancient Near East: A Historian's Approach," in Humanizing America's Iconic Book, ed. G. Tucker and D. Knight (Chico, Cal.: Scholars, 1982), translated into Italian by M. Liverani. A good deal of useful material from the earlier, English, essay has been omitted, for example, the review of previous studies, and there is in this reprinting little engagement with more recent work, for example, A. Lemaire's and J. M. Durand's Les Inscriptions arameennes de Sfire or S. Parpola's, and K. Watanabe's Neo-Assyrian Treaties and Loyalty Oaths. By compensation, there is a useful new table, "Terminology of the Pact in the Ancient Near East"; a detail, of some significance, mentioned in passing in...