Religions of the Ancient World: A Guide by Sarah Iles JohnstonReview by: Frances FlanneryJournal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 126, No. 1 (Jan. - Mar., 2006), pp. 125-127Published by: American Oriental SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20064466 .

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Reviews of Books 125

A small flaw in this book is in the numeration of the texts. Abraham explains the reasons for using this system (p. 3), but one would have preferred the texts to be quoted according to her own number

system (nos. 1-144). We also miss a reference to the copy number in the text editions. Abraham has her

reasons for not adopting British Museum texts already copied by Bertin. Even if an edition of Bertin's

copies is currently in preparation, it would have been better to have new copies in this volume, if not

of the whole tablet, at least of the difficult signs or lines (as in no. 12).

The author publishes two newly joined texts: nos. 55 (BM 31667+BM 31641) and 56 (BM 31690 +BM 30658), but it should be pointed out that both tablets were joined by M. Weszeli in September 1995 (C. B. F. Walker, personal communication). No. 125 is a join of a previously published text

(Dar 453) with a new fragment (BM 31726); a copy of the joined text, or at least of the fragment, should have been included in part four. Unpublished duplicates of previously edited texts should have

been offered in autograph copies, for even if the variations are of no importance (as is the case

with no. 75 according to Abraham; see p. 340), they might have shed new light on matters such as

paleography. No. 65, a duplicate of Dar 472, is not offered in copy either.

Despite these small practical problems, the book under consideration is probably the most reader

friendly study on Neo-Babylonian private documentation that the reviewer has ever had in her hands.

The preface itself, which occupies barely six pages, is a very useful guide for non-specialists to the

sometimes confusing methodology used by scholars working on Neo-Babylonian texts.

Abraham has produced an outstanding book on a difficult group of tablets. Not only has she edited

144 texts, some of them hitherto unpublished, but she has also used them to illuminate both the career

of the parvenu MNA as well as the social and economic situation of Babylonia at the end of the sixth

century and the first decades of the fifth century B.c. We must thank and congratulate the author for her

most important contribution.

R. Da Riva

University of Barcelona

Religions of the Ancient World: A Guide. Edited by Sarah Iles Johnston. Cambridge, Mass.:

Harvard University Press, 2004. Pp. xix + 697, illus. $49.95.

Every once in a long while, a reference work comes along that is certain from the outset to become

a well-used standard. Religions of the Ancient World: A Guide is such a work, which is unsurprising

given that approximately one hundred forty top scholars contributed to the articles inside. Not quite an

encyclopedia, not quite a collection of essays, this unique volume is the first comprehensive and com

parative reference guide to a wide array of topics in ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern religions. The overall premise of the Guide is that, despite the well-touted and justified dangers of studying

a religion ethically through the lens of another, each ancient religion should be approached as a per meable entity in conversation with the others in the volume. The general editor, Sarah lies Johnston, notes in her preface that "No ancient culture was left untouched by its neighbors" (p. x), and the format

of the work attempts to promote awareness of cultural and religious hybridity as well as of the unique ness of particular religions.

The bulk of the work, part III, "Key Topics" (pp. 243-656), consists of over four hundred pages in ten-point font treating twenty separate themes by means of side-by-side discussions on religions from ten areas or cultures: Egypt, Mesopotamia, Syria-Canaan, Israel, Anatolia, Iran, Greece, Etruria,

Rome, and Christianity. The twenty themes are fascinating and sweeping, covering issues of cosmology

("Sacred Times and Spaces"), cult and ritual ("Religious Personnel," "Religious Organizations and

Bodies," "Sacrifice, Offerings, and Votives," "Sin, Pollution, and Purity," "Illnesses and Other Crises,"

"Prayers, Hymns, Incantations, and Curses," "Rites of Passage"), ethics ("Ethics and Law Codes"),

politics ("Religion and Politics," "Controlling Religion"), myth ("Myth and Sacred Narratives"),

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126 Journal of the American Oriental Society 126.1 (2006)

material culture ("Visual Representations"), theological beliefs ("Divination and Prophecy," "Deities

and Demons," "Death, the Afterlife, and Other Last Things," "Theology, Theodicy, Philosophy"), and writing ("Sacred Texts and Canonicity"). The essays are cogent and thorough but not exhaustive,

given their necessary brevity. Each reader will have her favorites. Most contain general introductions

and a few conclude with short dictionary-type listings that make the essays even more helpful as ref

erence tools, such as a list constituting a "Dictionary of Deities and Demons" (pp. 417-22) that could

function as a surprising handout in an Introduction to the Hebrew Bible or New Testament class.

Part III is clearly the strongest and by far the most useful part of the endeavor, especially since the

format allows individual essays (or, somewhat against the overall goal of the volume, portions of in

dividual essays on particular religions) to be used in a variety of ways for reference and in the class

room. These concise syntheses, presented without footnotes but with short bibliographies, are

accessible to good undergraduate students, yet are still apt as introductions to new material for graduate students or even for advanced scholars lacking such breadth. My guess is that it would be the rare

scholar who, while perusing this volume, would not run into new and interesting material on a topic or region outside of his area of expertise. In particular, the format overcomes departmental divisions

between scholars of the ancient Near East and Classics, an artificial division at best.

Part II, "Histories" (pp. 155-242) consists of eleven short but dense historical/cultural treatments

(Minoa and Mycenae are discussed separately from Greece). Each of these well written essays (5-10

pages each) will also prove valuable as reference material in and out of the classroom. Taken along with

the thematic essays in part III, these essays could easily act as a catalyst for new course ideas in the

study of ancient religion, whether on a comparative basis or not. Their brevity and lack of footnotes

belies the fact that several of the "histories" are cogent analyses of the major socio-cultural factors

and characteristics of a given religion. Part I, "Encountering Ancient Religions" (pp. 3-154) stands for me as a confusing spot in the

organization and design of the Guide. Here are eleven essays on a variety of topics covering ancient

Mediterranean religions (as is made clear from the opening essay by Fritz Graf, "What is Ancient

Mediterranean Religion?" pp. 3-16). Indeed, according to Johnston's preface, "The authors of these

essays were charged with stepping back from the particular cultures on which their own scholarship

usually focuses and taking a broader look at the given phenomena as they were found throughout the

Mediterranean' (p. xi). Why begin a volume attempting a revolutionary, comparative analysis of re

ligions of the ancient Mediterranean and Near East with a series of essays that mostly treats the

former? I do not know, particularly given how narrow some of the foci are, such as John Scheid's

"Religions in Contact" (pp. 112-26), a very good essay on the history of Roman syncretism, or indeed

Johnston's "Mysteries" (pp. 98-111), which is a wonderful but ill-placed synthesis of Greco-Roman

mystery religions and their influence on Christianity. Some of the essays in part I do make sense as introductions at the head of the volume, especially

Mary Beard's "Writing and Religion" (pp. 127-38), which contextualizes writing as ritual and lends

sensitivity to the interpretation of both oral and written cultures treated in the volume as a whole.

Indeed, her essay would be welcome on its own in a variety of courses on antiquity. Similarly, John

J. Collins' "Cosmology: Time and History" (pp. 59-70) and Jan Bremmer's "Ritual" (pp. 32-44)

also work well as introductions to the volume's overall approach, since they range over religions of both

the ancient Near East and Mediterranean worlds. Both of these well-crafted essays are successful, in

my opinion, in that they relate case studies of comparative themes, such as creation stories (Collins) or

the scapegoat ritual (Bremmer). However, this begs the question as to whether they would be better

placed somewhere in the volume under "Key Topics." To me, at least, the organizational logic of the

essays that initiate the volume is elusive in relation to the rest of the volume, which has a splendid

simplicity.

That being said, one essay in part I deserves mention for a piece of organizational insight. Graf's

"Myth" (pp. 45-58) begins with a two-page history of the scholarly treatment of the topic. Such a his

tory of scholarship is mentioned only in passing regarding the other topics, but Graf's brief analysis shows how easily such a helpful addition can be accomplished with respect to the history of the

scholarly treatment of "ritual," "material culture," and so forth. This seems a sensible contextualization

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Reviews of Books 127

of the vast amounts of material presented in this volume and could prove most helpful to scholars by

clarifying the methodological contours of each topic, "Theology, Theodicy, Philosophy" implying a

vastly different history of discussion than "Visual Representations." Perhaps a later edition might

include a different part I (or a part IV), "Approaches to the Study of Ancient Religions," with brief

essays (2-3 pages each) on the history of scholarship affecting the topics treated in part III of the vol

ume, including reviews or approaches such as the History of Religions School, (French) Sociology

and Religion, Archaeology and Religion, or Postmodern Challenges to the Study of Antiquity. How

ever, I can only suggest such reorganization based on my prediction of a long life for this work and

a future second edition, a hunch that seems secure given the obvious value of this excellent collection

of material in a ground-breaking, comparative format.

Frances Flannery

James Madison University

Grammatical Variation in Neo-Assyrian. By Mikko Luukko. State Archives of Assyria Studies,

vol. 16. Helsinki: The Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project, 2004. Pp. xiv + 276. $60 (paper).

Assyrian, alongside Babylonian, is considered to be a dialectal group within Akkadian. Neo

Assyrian is the youngest Assyrian dialect, existing between approximately 1000 and 612 B.c. It was

used throughout the territory of the vast Assyrian empire, together with the Babylonian and Aramaic

languages.

The appearance of Mikko Luukko's book will certainly please scholars working with Neo-Assyrian texts as well as those interested in Akkadian linguistics. The variations in the writing of Akkadian can

provide us with valuable information about changes in phonology, morphology, syntax, and writing conventions. Lamentably, very few works dedicated to variation in different periods of the Akkadian

language have appeared so far. Furthermore, none of the extant works, such as A. Goetze, in RA 52

(1958), and J. Guy, Phon?tique compar?e des dialects moyen-babyloniens du nord et de l'ouest

(Leuven, 1966), matches Luukko's book in clarity and accuracy of presentation and explanation. The book under review examines synchronie linguistic variation in Neo-Assyrian texts. The main

purpose of this study is to collect and describe the available evidence. The Neo-Assyrian variations

investigated in this book are only those that have been transmitted to us in Neo-Assyrian sources

proper. The transliterations of Neo-Assyrian words and loanwords from and into other languages have

not been taken into consideration. The author tries to analyze the evidence synchronically, without com

paring the divergent variants with older or contemporary forms of other dialects of Akkadian, even

though occasionally he has to resort to historical comparison, especially with Middle Assyrian (pp. 93,

144). Proper treatment of historical changes that are reflected in the Neo-Assyrian variations would

make the book even more useful. In any case, all future research on historical linguistics of Akkadian

dialects, including Neo-Assyrian, will be greatly aided by Luukko's work.

The reader of this book should also keep in mind that even though its title is "Grammatical Variation

in Neo-Assyrian," the actual textual corpus under investigation does not include all Neo-Assyrian texts.

In addition to all available Neo-Assyrian letters, the author has taken into consideration the treaties and

loyalty oaths of the kings published in SAA II, as well as selected legal documents. None of the royal

inscriptions, literary texts, administrative and economic texts, trade documents, astrological reports, or oracle queries has been included. It is also important to note that the term "Grammatical Variation"

does not precisely define all of the discussed cases.

Luukko divides variations discussed in his book into several types that belong either to the category

"grammatical," such as phonological, morphological or syntactic, or the category "external," which

includes geographical, orthographic, prosodie, stylistic, chronological, semantic, graphemic, and free

variations, plus idiolects, idiosyncrasies, and scribal slips. The four main chapters of the book are

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