The Journal of the American Oriental Society articles from July 1996

The Journal of the American Oriental Society archives from July 1996

The number-syllabary texts.
July 1, 1996... There exists a small group of texts, previously identified and dubbed "number-syllabaries," in which Syllabary A (henceforth, [S.sup.a]) signs are paired with numerical equivalents. In this article, they are referred to by the sigla, A-E.(1) ...

Das Aleppiner Kalifat: Vom Ende des Kalifates in Baghdad uber Aleppo zu den Restautionen in Kairo.
July 1, 1996... In early A.D. 1258, the Mongols under Hulegu took and plundered Baghdad and slaughtered its population. The Mongol khan had the Abbasid caliph al-Musta sim put to death, and so - at least thus it seemed then - put an end to the caliphate as it...

Semitic Words in Egyptian Texts of the New Kingdom and Third Intermediate Period.
July 1, 1996... I open this review with the plain statement that James E. Hoch's work is a masterpiece; it deserves to be on the bookshelf of everyone laboring in the related fields of Egyptian and Semitic. But because many Semitists lack even basic training in...

Qumram Cave 4, V: Miqsat Ma ase ha-Torah.
July 1, 1996... Editors of fragmentary ancient writings may by their methodologies be classified into two categories: those who limit their published text to what is actually readable in the manuscripts, adding only restorations which are virtually certain; and...

Drehem.
July 1, 1996... Le livre dont on rend compte iciest aussi foisonnant que la documentation meme qu'il entreprend d'etudier et de mettre en ordre pour la premiere fois: celle constituee par ces milliers de petites pieces comptables (concernant principalement du...

Cahiers de la ceramique egyptienne, vol. 2.
July 1, 1996... The field of ancient Egyptian ceramics is only just now coming into its own, with specialists whose primary research goals involve the study of the pottery remains from the ancient Nile Valley in and of themselves rather than as common components...

Ancient Nubia: Egypt's Rival in Africa.
July 1, 1996... Only two African civilizations have so far yielded significant archaeological or written records from before about 1000 C.E., Egypt and Nubia, and their histories are to a considerable extent intertwined. Nubia, a name of unknown etymology,...

Sarge der dritten Zwischenzeit I.
July 1, 1996... The polychrome, anthropoid coffins of the Third Intermediate Period, especially those of Dynasty XXI - the subject of the present publication - undeniably belong to the most intricate funerary artifacts ever made by the ancient Egyptians. They...

Bildatlas zum Sport im alten Agypten: Corpus der bildlichen Quellen zu Leibesubungen, Spiel, Jagd, Tanz und verwandten Themen, 2 vols.
July 1, 1996... This massive tome and its accompanying volume of plates are an encyclopedic study in text and image of scenes of sports and athletic activities from ancient Egypt. Decker has long been the leading researcher on ancient Egyptian sport, and much of...

Spiele und Spielzeug im antiken Palastina.
July 1, 1996... It is a pleasure to read a book that delivers far more than its title suggests. "Ancient Palestine" provides a chronological and geographical focus that stems from the author's culture-historical work elsewhere on childhood and adolescence in...

Studien zu stempelsiegeln aus Palastina/Israel, vol. 4.
July 1, 1996... This is the fourth and final volume in a very productive series of essays on the subject of scarabs and related objects.(1) Professor Keel and his colleagues have done ground-breaking research on a wide range of problems concerning the scarabs...

Judahite Burial Practices and Beliefs about the dead.
July 1, 1996... This volume will be the standard work on Iron Age burial practices in Judah and its environs for coming generations of biblical scholars and Syro-Palestinian archaeologists. Bloch-Smith has compiled an impressive amount of data on burial-types,...

Burial Patterns and Cultural Diversity in Late Bronze Age Canaan.
July 1, 1996... In this volume, Rivkah Gonen focuses upon burial patterns to argue for cultural regionalism: the coastal plain and inland valleys, on the one hand; the hill county, on the other. In this, she is successful. In her brief introductory chapter...

Masada IV: The Yigael Yadin Excavations 1963-1965, Final Reports: Lamps; Textiles, Basketry, Cordage and Related artifacts; Wood Remains; Ballista Balls; Addendum: Human Skeletal Remains.
July 1, 1996... This is the fourth in a six-volume series of final excavation reports of the late Yigael Yadin's excavations at the renowned site of Masada on the shores of the Dead Sea. They are being issued by a coterie of Yadin's devoted colleagues, to whom...

Ancient Synagogues: Historical Analysis and Archaeological Discovery, vol. 1.
July 1, 1996... This is the first of two volumes containing a collection of original, translated, and reprinted articles on ancient synagogues, focusing on the period from the destruction of the Second Jewish Temple to the rise of Islam. The eighteen articles in...

King and Cultus in Chronicles: Worship and the Reinterpretation of History.
July 1, 1996... This work is a revision of the author's dissertation, written in 1990 under Joseph Agius at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas in Rome. Like many recent scholars, Riley views Chronicles as a fundamentally different work from that of...

Twice-Told Proverbs and the Composition of the Book of Proverbs.
July 1, 1996... Why do the same and similar proverbial sayings appear in more than one collection within the book of Proverbs? To what extent does this repetition occur and what produced it? These questions underlie Daniel Snell's investigation of twice-told...

The Composition of the Book of Proverbs.
July 1, 1996... The variety of style, form, and topics within the book of Proverbs has stimulated scholarly debate concerning the unity of its authorship and the date of its composition. Beyond the study of philological and text-critical issues, special...

The Book of Judges: The Art of Editing.
July 1, 1996... The present volume is a revised dissertation written under the supervision of Meir Sternberg. The author has learned well from her mentor. As does her teacher, Amit works in biblical studies and poetics, demonstrating a fine command of the...

An Introduction to the History of Israel and Judah.
July 1, 1996... Professor Soggin writes "acceptable" history. As a textbook this volume is intended for students and for lecturers who teach the history of Israel or "biblical history." The new edition has taken account of various discussions on important points...

Monarchy and Religious Institution in Israel Under Jeroboam I.
July 1, 1996... Jeroboam I ranks among the arch-villains of the Bible. The Deuteronomic History (hereafter DtrH) portrays him as a divisive, rebellious idolater, blamed for the downfall and eventual destruction of the Kingdom of Israel over which he was divinely...

The Dead Sea Scrolls on Microfiche: A Comprehensive Facsimile Edition of the Texts from the Judean Desert, 3 vols.
July 1, 1996... The events of the early 1990s surrounding the then still unpublished materials of the Dead Sea Scrolls collections resulted in a flourish of public interest, the jump-start of several academic careers, and a detour - if not a premature end - for...

The Dead Sea Scrolls Catalogue: Documents, Photographs, and Museum Inventory Numbers.
July 1, 1996... The events of the early 1990s surrounding the then still unpublished materials of the Dead Sea Scrolls collections resulted in a flourish of public interest, the jump-start of several academic careers, and a detour - if not a premature end - for...

The Alternative Story of the Division of the Kingdom: 3 Kingdoms 12:14a-z.
July 1, 1996... The author had dealt with the Greek story of 3 Kingdoms 12:24a-z in three earlier essays, and in the volume under review makes a full statement of her position on the origin, structure, and background of the "Alternative Story." This reminds one...

The Lucianic Manuscripts of 1 Reigns, 2 vols.
July 1, 1996... The first volume of this two-volume monograph contains a text edition of what the author names "the Lucianic manuscripts" of the first book of Reigns (1 Samuel) of the LXX, and as such it provides an important service to scholarship. The reader...

Scribes and Translators: Septaugint and Old Latin in the Books of Kings.
July 1, 1996... This slim volume contains the Grinfield Lectures of 1991 and 1992 delivered by the author at the University of Oxford. Dr. Fernandez Marcos is well known and widely respected in the field of Septuagint studies, not least for his work on the books...

The Text of the Targum of Job: An Introduction and Critical Edition.
July 1, 1996... Critical texts of the Aramaic versions of the Hagiographa were not included in A. Sperber's The Bible in Aramaic Based on Old Manuscripts and Printed Texts (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1959-73). Considerable interest in the targums has emerged in the...

Studies in the Targum to the Twelve Prophets: From Nahum to Malachi.
July 1, 1996... The ancient Jewish Aramaic Bible version of the Prophets known as Targum Jonathan (TJ) has in the past half decade not been given the attention given the various targums to the Pentateuch. The number of scholarly studies devoted to this subject...

Jerome, Greek Scholarship, and the Hebrew Bible: A Study of the Quaestiones Hebraicae in Genesim.
July 1, 1996... The Oxford Classical Monographs is a series intended to "publish outstanding revised theses" on classical themes, "examined by the faculty board of Litterae Humaniores" (p. ii). Kamasar's study of Jerome's Quaestiones richly deserves inclusion in...

Rewriting the Bible: Land and Covenant in Post-Biblical Jewish Literature.
July 1, 1996... During the period of the Second Temple, the most common way to interpret Scripture was to retell its story. Halpern-Amaru's monograph explores four examples of the phenomenon, with a focus on their treatment of the Pentateuchal themes of land and...

The Rhetoric of the Babylonia Talmud: Its Social Meaning and Context.
July 1, 1996... Jack Lightstone's book is evidence of a healthy trend in the modern study of ancient rabbinic literature. More and more scholars are incorporating aspects of the methodologies of Jacob Neusner and David Halivni, rather than retreating behind...

Synopse zum Talmud Yerushalmi: Ordnung Zera im, vol. I. 1-2: Berakhot und Pe a; vol. I. 6-11: Terumot, Ma aserot, Ma aser Sheni Halla, Orla und Bikturin.
July 1, 1996... The Talmud Yerushalmi (also called the "Jerusalem" or "Palestinian" Talmud, or the "Talmud of the Land of Israel"), edited in the fourth and fifth centuries C.E. in the areas around Tiberias and Caesaria, is the briefer and somewhat older...

The Teachings of Sylvanus (Nag Hammadi Codex VII, 4): Text, Translation, Commentary.
July 1, 1996... This edition of a text known both within the present work and to readers of The Nag Hammadi Library in English as "Silvanus" (hereafter Silv) presents the text and a translation. Commentary on the text makes up the bulk of the book wherein the...

Concordance des textes de Nag Hammadi: Le Codex VII.
July 1, 1996... The first in a new series of concordances for the Laval Coptic Library of Nag Hammadi, this volume is timely and useful, particularly in light of the paucity of concordances and indices to the entire corpus. The volume has three parts: the...

The Apocryphon of Jannes and Jambres the Magicians: P. Chester Beatty XVI.
July 1, 1996... Jannes and Jambres, the legendary Egyptian magicians who opposed Moses and Aaron (Exod. 7:11-22) and attracted considerable attention in late antiquity, have until recently been all but forgotten. Their names occur only once in the Bible (2 Tim....

Haradum, I: Une Ville nouvelle sur le Moyen-Euphrate.
July 1, 1996... The city of Haradum was a remarkable place during the eighteenth and seventeenth centuries B.C. It was not large, just a handful of city blocks in extent. It was not powerful; as far as we know it made no great impression on the literature or...

Recherche en Haute Mesopotamie: Tell Mohammed Diyab, campagnes 1990 et 1991 sous la direction de Jean-Marie Durand.
July 1, 1996... This is the second volume of reports of the French Archaeological Mission to the Habur under the direction of J.-M. Durand. It contains reports on the work done at Mohammed Diyab in 1990 and 1991 (pp. 9-97), the preliminary survey done by the...

Das Tempelgrab Nr. 36 in Palmyra: Studien zur palmyrischen Grabarchitektur un ihrer Ausstattung, 2 vols.
July 1, 1996... This is a study of Palmyrene funerary temple no. 36 (hereafter TG 36), a tomb located in the west necropolis at Palmyra. The funerary temple (sometimes also referred to as house-tomb in scholarly literature, but this last appellation properly...

Ancient Iranian Metalwork in the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and the Freer Gallery of Art.
July 1, 1996... This volume, written jointly by Ann Gunter and Paul Jett, is a useful and comprehensive catalogue of the metalwork of the Achaemenid through Sasanian periods in the Freer and Sackler galleries in Washington, D.C. These two collections, never to...

Ritual and Sacrifice in the Ancient Near East: Proceedings of the International Conference Organized by the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven fron the 17th to the 20th of April, 1991.
July 1, 1996... This well-edited collection of articles includes several valuable surveys, as well as more specialized studies on a variety of topics. Many of the contributions are informative, illuminating, or persuasive. One is nevertheless left, perhaps not...

Trade, Contact, and the Movement of Peoples in the Eastern Mediterranean: Studies in Honour of J. Basil Hennessy.
July 1, 1996... John Basil Hennessy fut l'un des premiers etudiants d'Arthur Dale Trendall et de James Stewart quand le departement d'archeologie de l'universite de Sydney fut cree en 1948. Apres l'obtention de son B.A., il sejourna une annee complete a...

The Limits of Empire: The Roman Army in the East.
July 1, 1996... This is that rare book combining critical discussion of detail with a broad historical vision. Isaac's command of classical, Talmudic, and archaeological evidence is impressive and provides a solid base upon which he builds a carefully crafted...

Nomads of Luristan: History, Material Culture, and Pastoralism in Western Iran.
July 1, 1996... This is a large (29 x 24 x 3.5 cm, weight 2 kg), beautiful, and sad volume. The 450 photographs depict a vanished lifeway, vanished, not because the people gradually changed their culture and society over the generations, as people normally do,...

Text and Context; Studies in the American New Testament: Papers Presented to the Conference on the Armenian New Testament, May 22-28, 1992.
July 1, 1996... This slight volume, the product of a conference held in South field, Michigan, under the patronage of the Alex and Marie Manoogian Museum, contains the contributions of ten Armenologists who study the Armenian biblical tradition. The papers are...

The Origin and Early Development of the Chinese Writing System.
July 1, 1996... The two essential stages marking the "linguistic history" of the Chinese writing system govern the two parts of this book: "The Shang Formation" in which the author explains the development of the system, and "The Ch'in-Han Reformation," in...

Learning from Mount Hua: A Chinese Physician's Illustrated Travel Record and Painting Theory.
July 1, 1996... Until very recently, Chinese art history encompassed few monographic treatments of individual artists, despite the fact that such works have traditionally served as the basic unit of art-historical analysis in many other areas of the discipline....

The Treatises of Later Han: Their Author, Sources, Contents and Place in Chinese Historiography.
July 1, 1996... A study of the eight treatises in the Hou Han shu of Sima Biao, which are full of difficult language and technical passages, constitutes a most formidable task for any historian. With his remarkable erudition and rigorous scholarship, Dr....

Mughal Painters and Their Work: A Biographical Survey and Comprehensive Catalogue.
July 1, 1996... In this substantial volume, S. P. Verma presents us with a bibliographical dictionary of 327 Mughal painters and a catalogue raisonne of their works. The author feels rightly that Mughal painting as an art-historical discipline has until now...

Schattenspiel in Karnataka, Sud-Indien.
July 1, 1996... Friedrich Seltmann's Schattenspiel in Karnataka, Sud-Indien (Shadow Play in Karnataka, South India) is an authentic reference work on the folk-theater tradition in Karnataka. In its two volumes, the first containing the text and the second...

The Painted Towns of Shekhawati.
July 1, 1996... Shekhavati is an area of some 30,500 [km.sup.2] situated a few hours by car west of Delhi. The wall paintings found in that area cover mainly the mansions (havelis) of well-to-do businessmen, but also funerary pavilions (chatris), temples, and...

Vasubandhus Interpretation des Pratityasamutpada: Eine kritische Bearbeitung der Pratityasamutpadavyakhya.
July 1, 1996... This book is based, with only slight changes, on a dissertation completed at the University of Hamburg under the direction of Lambert Schmithausen in 1992. It contains a study of a commentary (vyakhya) attributed to Vasubandhu on a Buddhist sutra...

The Winds of Change: Buddhism and the Maritime Links of Early South Asia.
July 1, 1996... Himanshu P. Ray has published widely in scholarly journals and is especially well known for her studies on early maritime trade in South Asia and the Indian ocean. The present monograph is a fresh and critical survey of this subject, taking a...

The Construction of Religious Boundaries: Culture, Indentity, and Diversity in Sikh Tradition.
July 1, 1996... Like the double-edged sword of the tenth Sikh guru, Gobind Singh - symbolically crucial for the Khalsa community he founded - Harjot Oberoi's finely crafted work cuts powerfully in opposite directions. Sharp with scholarly acuity on one side, it...

Israel in Kanaan: Zum Problem der Entsehung Israels.
July 1, 1996... This thin volume (fewer than ninety pages of text) consists of eleven short chapters and two excursus which combine to support Rosel's view of Israel's origins, which he summarizes in a concluding chapter. Essentially ancient Israel emerged from...

Biblical Israel: State and People.
July 1, 1996... The late Benjamin Mazar was a major figure in the study of the history and archaeology of biblical times for almost a half century. His approach was interdisciplinary, and he presented many of his best ideas in short papers scattered among a...

War in the Hebrew Bible: A Study in the Ethics of Violence.
July 1, 1996... The Bible is a book shot through with narratives and discourses about war and is often dominated by images and metaphors drawn from the vocabularies of battles and other military stratagems. The deity YHWH is represented as "a man of war" and...

AN Introduction to Biblical Archaeology.
July 1, 1996... Volkmar Fritz, a former professor of biblical studies at the University of Giessen, now director of the German Protestant Institute of Archaeology in Jerusalem, is also an archaeologist with thirty years of experience in Israel. This volume is a...

The Life of Moses: The Yahwist as Historian in Exodus-Numbers.
July 1, 1996... A book by John Van Seters is always a treat, whether the reader approves of disapproves of its main theses. In this case, I can endorse most of the author's arguments, which, by the way, are a continuation of his former work, Prologue to History:...

From Her Cradle to Her Grave: The Role of Religion in the Life of the Israelite and the Babylonian Woman.
July 1, 1996... This translation of the author's Van haar Wieg tot haar Graf (Baarn: Ten Have, 1987) includes a text which has been revised "only when I deemed it absolutely necessary" (p. 7) and bibliographical references which have been "eclectically updated"...

The Old Kingdom Cemetery at Hamra Don.
July 1, 1996... The late Old Kingdom in Egypt witnessed a gradual breakdown of the central government headquartered at Memphis and a concomitant increase in the power of provincial leaders. One reflection of this transfer of power is the large rock-cut tombs...

New Kingdom Pharaonic Sites: The Finds and the Sites.
July 1, 1996... The appearance of this book and its companion volume of lists and plates brings to completion the publication of the results of the Scandinavian Joint Expedition (SJE) to Sudanese Nubia. It is indeed fitting that the last report published in the...

New Kingdom Remains from Cemeteries R, V, and W at Qustul and Cemetery K at Adindan.
July 1, 1996... The appearance of this report on the New Kingdom cemeteries at Qustul and Adindan in Egyptian Nubia marks the completion of the publication of the Oriental Institute's expedition to Egyptian Nubia. This herculean task was successfully carried out...

Der Ubergang ins Jenseits in den thebanischen Beamtengrabern der Ramessidenzeit.
July 1, 1996... This is an ambitious attempt to define the nature of certain funerary scenes in tombs from the Ramesside period found at Thebes. I am forced to preface my remarks with a caveat. The author's repeated attempts to describe Egyptian two-dimensional...

Kleine Einfuhrung ins Hieroglyphen-Luwische.
July 1, 1996... Within the field of Hittitology Rudolf Werner's name is associated with his edition of legal depositions (German Gerichtsprotokollen), published in 1967 (Hethitische Gerichtsprotokolle, Studien zu den Bogazkoy-Texten, vol. 4 [Wiesbaden: Otto...

Achaemenid Imperial Administration in Syria-Palestine and the Missions of Ezra and Nehemiah.
July 1, 1996... The complicated issue of the Achaemenid administration of Syria-Palestine (538-332 B.C.E.) deserves a fresh examination, which is what the author tries to do in this monograph. The decision to devote forty percent of the text of the monograph...

Palmyra and its Empire: Zenobia's Revolt Against Rome.
July 1, 1996... The author, who is a senior editor at the British publishing house of Routledge, states that his book is intended to provide the general public with "a good serious book about Zenobia" (p. 1). Such an attempt at popular reconstruction of the...

Theaters in Roman Palestine and Provincia Arabia.
July 1, 1996... Segal's book provides a convenient catalogue of theaters in Roman Palestine and Provincia Arabia. The catalogue of the thirty theaters follows a short historical overview and an architectural analysis. Herod the Great and the Nabateans built the...

Die Karthager, 2d ed.
July 1, 1996... When in 1985 Werner Huss published for the first time his History of the Carthaginians in the long-established Handbuch der Altertumswissenschaft, it was immediately acclaimed for its competent scholarly judgment and for its abundant...

Karthago: Studien zu Militar, Staat und Gesellschaft.
July 1, 1996... The history and archaeology of ancient Carthage as a subject for investigation has become quite "a la mode" recently. In fact, since Werner Huss wrote his Geschichte der Karthager for the renowned Handbuch der Altertumswissenschaft (Munich: C. H....

Paths to the Middle East: Ten Scholars Look Back.
July 1, 1996... While the development of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies in Europe has been extensively treated, the history of scholarship dealing with the Islamic Middle East in the United States has largely been unstudied. This book substantially meets...

The Druzes: A New Study of their History, Faith and Society.
July 1, 1996... The Druzes, an offshoot of the Isma ilis/Fatimids, like their parent body, were studied and judged almost entirely in the light of sources written by their adversaries; hence many misconceptions about them persist to this day. The most important...

Christian Arabic of Baghdad.
July 1, 1996... The ongoing turmoil in the Middle East, including ethnic and religious conflicts, external aggression, and internal oppression, has led to the displacement and dispersal of various minorities which had - over the centuries - formed stable...

Breakthrough Arabic.
July 1, 1996... This course in the spoken Arabic of Jordan is a welcome change from teaching materials familiar in American universities. Breakthrough Arabic may be the first truly user-friendly Arabic textbook. It is compact and attractive, professionally...

Diritto ereditario islamico delle scuole giuridiche ismailita e imamita.
July 1, 1996... A by-product of many years of research in the field of inheritance law, this work presents an extensive collection of individual inheritance cases culled from the works Da a im al-islam, Kitab al-iqtisar, and Minhaj al-fara id by the famous Isma...

L'Egypte vue par des armeniens (XIe-XIIe).
July 1, 1996... This work comprises the accounts of two very different Armenian visits to Egypt, the earlier one by Catholicos Grigor II Vkayaser (Martyrophile) in the second half of the eleventh century, the later by the manuscript copyist Symeon Lehac i in...

India's Agony over Religion.
July 1, 1996... The five crises that Larson signals at the start - with the Sikhs in the Punjab, in Jammu and Kashmir, between Hindus and Muslims over the Shah Bano case, the implementation of the Mandal Commission Report, and the Babri Masjid/Ramjanmabhumi...

Desire, Death and Goodness: The Conflict of Ultimate Values in Theravada Buddhism.
July 1, 1996... It is generally admitted that the Nikayas of the Theravada Buddhist Pali canon consist of a number of strata, some of them earlier and some later. Text critical studies have made clear that the verses of the Suttanipata, especially the...