Before Babylon's end

These two volumes are an introductory survey of the history of the whole ancient Near East covering Mesopotamia, Iran, Palestine, Egypt, Syria and central Turkey. They begin with a brief description of prehistoric periods before 3000 bc and end in 330 bc after Alexander conquered Babylon. The introduction describes the problems of such a huge task. A great strength of the work is its massive bibliography, which is divided up according to chapters and their subsections and presumes that it is aimed at courses for students with access to a specialist library. Notes to the main text are kept to a minimum and collected at the end of each chapter. The work is illustrated with several drawings, a few black-and-white photographs, 17 maps and 35 charts, almost all of the latter being chronological and dynastic. For the early periods of Mesopotamian history, the middle chronology is used.

This is a history which concentrates upon political and military events and the sources in which they are documented. Like its more detailed predecessor, the Cambridge Ancient History, it aims to run completely through the whole period in each country rather than narrowing its focus and selecting topics, as Scribner's recent Civilizations of the Ancient Near East has done. Unlike the CAH, the prose style is uniform and fluent.

How easy is the work to use? Bibliographical references within the text are made partly by the Harvard system, and partly by a scheme linked to numbers of chapters and their subsections. These would have been easier to use if running heads gave chapter numbers and subsections. Place names are usually indexed according to the text without reference to the maps. After one has taught for many years, it is easy to forget how perplexing the mass of place and personal names can be; references to maps and consistency in the writing of personal names would have been helpful. The uninitiated reader may be confused by two different forms, Ur-nanshe and Urnanshe, on the same page, which would conform to other names if it were written Ur-Nanshe. Sumuabum is not hyphenated, Sumu-el is. On one page the ruler of Urkish is mentioned; Urkish is then spelt Urkesh in the following quotation, omitted from the index, but present on one of the maps.

Teaching ancient Near Eastern history has become problematic during the past two decades. Old certainties have crumbled under the strength of new evidence. Key texts have been revised, a radical process with cuneiform which inevitably results from the slow pace at which decipherment is refined. Quantities of new sites, new texts, new primary, secondary and tertiary publications have created an almost insuperable mountain of information and misinformation which the conscientious teacher must try to read, assess and relay. What is the best strategy for achieving full coverage and critical instruction? One method is to accept unevenness of quality and style, and to collect chapters from different specialists, often giving an indigestible account. Another is to simplify, abbreviate and present a bland overview. A third is to select periods, or regions, or themes as paradigms. Amelie Kuhrt is aware that she has taken the middle way, and states in the preface that her treatment of Egypt is deliberately very brief.

The attractive style of writing, which includes appropriate quotations from sources in translation, helps the reader, and the book contains more scope and more detail than some of the more popular books currently used in undergraduate teaching, such as Nicholas Postgate's First Empires, Joan Oates's Babylon, or George Roux's Ancient Iraq. The danger is that it appears to cover more ground, and more reliably, than it actually does. The following examples may help to demonstrate how this book may seem to present a standard, accepted view which is not entirely correct or adequate.

The year 330 bc is the point selected for the end of ancient near-eastern history. Kuhrt in past work has helped to show that Babylonian traditions continued to flourish under Seleucid occupation. In fact, the year-round rituals of Babylon were still being celebrated in the early third century ad, according to the Babylonian Talmud, so this account cuts us off when there are still many centuries to run. Students who use this book will remain unaware of the continuity. The Greeks are, of course, foreign invaders, but so were the Amorites, the Kassites and the Achaemenid Persians. Is there a difference? Why was this choice made?

Given that this account relates primarily political and military events, it is surprising that we have no overall evaluation of written sources. Did very ancient peoples invent episodes of history from nothing, as the author suggests? The question is especially relevant to current debates about the historicity of the early monarchy in Judah. The author does not, however, get to the nub of the matter in her otherwise clear and useful description of how different schools of scholarship have used Old Testament text and archaeological evidence.

One of the advantages of wide coverage should be to link the history of the different areas in a comprehensive way, but Kuhrt has not exploited this potential. For example, she alludes briefly to the use of Mesopotamian and Elamite motifs in predynastic Egyptian art without attempting to put them into any context that might make sense of the allusion. She quotes Moorey's The Ancient Near East without having made proper use of it. Occasionally, perhaps inevitably, information is presented as more certain than is the case. For instance, Gudea is described as reigning in the interim period that preceded the third dynasty of Ur. Gudea never presented himself as king in his inscriptions or iconography, nor is he found in the Sumerian king list. Piotr Steinkeller in 1988 (not in the bibliography) showed that he was a contemporary of Ur-Nammu, who founded the dynasty. The date of c.866 bc for the bilingual statue from Fekheriye is given without mentioning that Helene Sader (given in the bibliography) has shown that a much later date is probable. Sometimes an unsupported value judgement takes the place of genuine historical inquiry, as where Kuhrt makes the astonishing statement that standard, literary Babylonian in which Assyrian kings composed their literature "would have been virtually incomprehensible to most ssyrians". She also implies that the city of Assur came to an end in 614, which is certainly untrue. It would have been useful to put into the bibliography the occasional review that corrects major errors in apparently standard works, or some form of evaluation.

The text is relatively free of typographical errors, and the chronological tables seem accurate, although the dates given for early Elamite kings give a misleading impression of certainty. The Neo-Elamite kings are nowhere listed. Within a detailed exposition answering the question "Who were the Hurrians?" the god Lubadaga is twice misspelt Lugaba, and omitted from the index.

The publisher has not served the author well for the illustrations. The maps differ in quality, and were drawn by different hands. In map one, Ephesus should be on the coast, and Nineveh on the Tigris. Carchemish is on the wrong side of the river. In map two, read Akshak for Akehak; Mediterranean is misspelt, and various wadis and small rivers (but not the Sajur or the Tharthar, both omitted) are sketched with the same dotted line as represents the ancient coastline. Harran and Aleppo should be on this map. A very few, haphazardly selected photographs are not always placed with the relevant page of text, and some bad drawings by David Saxon omit or misunderstand details. Overall these two volumes represent a valiant attempt to survey an enormous field. The extensive bibliography makes them a useful work for university teachers and their students.

Stephanie Dalley is fellow in Assyriology, University of Oxford.