Zeit in den Kulturen des Altertums: Antike Chronologie im Spiegel der Quellen.

• Author: Spalinger, Anthony

Zeit in den Kulturen des Altertums: Antike Chronologie im Spiegel der Quellen. Edited by ROLAND FARBER and RITA GAUTSCHY. Vienna: BOHLAU VERLAG. Pp. 688, illus. [euro]80.

Methodologically, it is very difficult to decide how to present a review of a multi-authored work. Either one lists each study and writes brief summaries or else one makes assessments of selected chapters, usually those in the commentator's own area of research. Here, instead, I wish to point out the orientation of this large work and make allowance for the various authors' perceptions, for it is self-evident that different writers have diverse perceptions of what recorded time was.

To be more exact, each chapter offers an up-to-date overview of various historical objects directly relating to time reckoning--texts, perceptions, and summaries in four areas of the ancient world: Egypt, Western Asia (ancient Near East and Judaism), Greece, and Rome. "Zeit," for the editors of this volume, means not a philosophical discourse but instead a natural-scientific outlook on the universe.

For example, coverage of Egypt begins with the Palermo Stone. Then are offered--and this is the correct word here--one of the Middle Kingdom decanal star "charts," the "Urhmacher" Amenemhet, the famous ceiling of Senenmut, and so forth. In this section certain scholars seem to be well represented, others not. M. Nuzzolo (BSFE 202 [Oct 2019-Feb 2020]: 5-82) is omitted from the discussion of the Palermo Stone, and so one must await his major study which will appear in the near future. Sociohistorical data are often given a welcome "aside" in this compilation. Here I am thinking of the literatus Senenmut: See A. Stauder, "L'emulation du passe a l'ere du thoutmoside: La dimension linguistique," in Vergangenheit und Zukunft: Studien zum historischen Bewu[beta]tsein in der Thutmosidenzeit, ed. S. Bickel (2013), 97; A. Spalinger, Or 79 (2010): 425-79; and idem, The Great Dedicatory Inscription of Ramesses II: A Solar-Osirian Tractate at Abydos (2009), 117-18. Happily for some, there is historical equality by which evidence from the post-Empire period, mainly contributed by V. Altmann-Wendling, effectively balances the sections of Gautschy et al. on the earlier phases of pharaonic Egypt.

This first part lays down the structure of the entire work, this collection differing from all other compendia on this subject in that analysis is presented through one exemplar which is used as a paradigm or, better, a...