The Year-Names of the First Dynasty of Babylon.

• Author: Sigrist, Marcel
• Position: Book review

The Year-Names of the First Dynasty of Babylon, vol. 3: DATABASE, VERSION 1.0. By MALCOLM J. A. HORSNELL. Hamilton, Ontario: MCMASTER UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2004. CD-ROM. CDN $74.

Malcolm J. A. Horsnell has devoted a large part of his academic life to the study and reconstruction of the year-names of the First Dynasty of Babylon. The results can be seen in a two-volume book published by McMaster University Press in 1999. That material is now presented on a CD-ROM, readable on PCs.

The aim of all database presentations is to make available quickly and easily information dispersed in many different places of a book, connecting it by electronic means, thus reducing time-consuming searches through various pages of the book. To familiarize oneself with Horsnell's database in order to exploit all its possibilities, it is necessary to read the working instructions, which are rather complicated and might have been written in a more accessible fashion.

It is possible to access the database according to the results desired through six different "Views," or windows. These are as follows. (1) The Year Formulae View contains all the fundamental primary research data, namely the year formulae/exemplars and various information about each year formula. The information in this view is very extensive, and codes are used for different situations that are out of the regular pattern (e.g., unknown order of the year-names). There follow in other fields the year formula itself, the document type where it was found, as well as bibliographical sources and a number of other pieces of information. (2) The Year Names View...