A History of the Animal World in the Ancient near East by Billie Jean CollinsReview by: Joshua T. KatzJournal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 123, No. 4 (Oct. - Dec., 2003), pp. 887-888Published by: American Oriental SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3589989 .

Accessed: 13/06/2014 19:50

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

American Oriental Society is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal ofthe American Oriental Society.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 185.2.32.109 on Fri, 13 Jun 2014 19:50:32 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Reviews of Books Reviews of Books

likely that the PS word developed along normal lines, yielding the forms in the various daughter lan-

guages, including Hebrew 'olam (with the expected correspondence of *a = o). The other hypotheses of derived *ralam "world" from the Gecez root w'l < 'alat "day" or from *'awlam with an infixed w

(p. 290) appear far-fetched to me, even though the author could have mentioned support obtained from Arabic 'awlamatun "globalization," a recent coinage.

Finally, there are some inconsistencies in the citation of data; e.g., why is the Akkadian word for "blood" cited in the nominative with mimation-damum, paralleling the citation of the Ugaritic damu,

yet Arabic is cited in its pausal form-dam-rather than with the matching damun in the nominative indefinite?

There are a few typographical and other errors: the name J. Payne Smith should not be hyphenated (pp. xvii and 316);from is correct forfroim, p. 45; there is almost a full extra line in p. 57 n. 2; Joshua Blau is referred to as that as well as J. Blau and Yehoshua Blau (p. 300); Aharon B. Dolgopolsky is also referred to as Aron Dolgopolsky (p. 304); the (1983) Leslau Festschrift entitled Ethiopian Studies Dedicated to Wolf Leslau on the Occasion of his Seventy-Fifth Birthday November 14th, 1981, by Friends and Colleagues, was only one volume, and thus referring to vol. I results from a confusion with the two-volume Leslau Festschrift of 1991.

ALAN S. KAYE CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, FULLERTON

A History of the Animal World in the Ancient Near East. Edited by BILLIE JEAN COLLINS. Handbook of Oriental Studies, vol. I, 64. Leiden: BRILL, 2002. Pp. xxii + 620, illus. $164.

There is something obviously special about animals. People love, fear, keep, and eat them; they depict them in art, compose stories about them, and invent fantastic new creatures; they endow them with human characteristics and dress up as beasts themselves. No one will dispute the importance of trees and rocks, houses and boats, or cabbages and kings, but fauna are different, providing a mirror of the human in culture after culture, from mundane activities to the most ceremonial ones. This large "handbook" provides a useful introduction to ancient Near Eastern zoology, concentrating on the de-

piction and use of animals in the art, literature, and broader cultural (especially religious) practices of

Anatolia, Egypt, Iran, Mesopotamia, and the Syro-Palestine area. Though not a volume that many will choose to read straight through (and one that few individuals will be able to afford), the book deserves to be widely known. Ably edited by the Hittitologist Billie Jean Collins and supported by a fine index, it will be one of the first places to which scholars will turn when they want to find something out

quickly about the Egyptian cult of the Apis bull, the evidence for porcine bones in the Levant, or the status of the ostrich in the Hebrew Bible.

The book is divided into five parts, with a total of seventeen chapters by fourteen authors: I, "The Native Fauna" (which consists of a single paper, Allan S. Gilbert's extraordinarily learned "Native Fauna of the Ancient Near East"); II, "Animals in Art" (five papers); III, "Animals in Literature" (four); IV, "Animals in Religion" (five); and V, "Studies in the Cultural Use of Animals" (two). There is also a short introduction, as well as Gilbert's very useful, sparely annotated "Appendix: Bibliography of Near Eastern Zoology," which overlaps to some extent with the lengthy list of references cited in the volume as a whole. Although there is some cross-referencing, both across topics (note that three of the four authors of papers on literature have papers on religion in the next section) and across lan-

guages, each contribution stands alone, perhaps a bit more than is ideal. It is not obvious to me that it was a wise choice to solicit separate chapters on art, literature, and religion and then arrange them into discrete sections: it would be unfortunate if anyone thought that one could get a proper picture of fal-

conry and the role of the eagle in Anatolia (to choose a topic in which I have a certain interest) with- out considering all the cultural spheres in which raptors appear, as well as their natural habits and

likely that the PS word developed along normal lines, yielding the forms in the various daughter lan-

guages, including Hebrew 'olam (with the expected correspondence of *a = o). The other hypotheses of derived *ralam "world" from the Gecez root w'l < 'alat "day" or from *'awlam with an infixed w

(p. 290) appear far-fetched to me, even though the author could have mentioned support obtained from Arabic 'awlamatun "globalization," a recent coinage.

Finally, there are some inconsistencies in the citation of data; e.g., why is the Akkadian word for "blood" cited in the nominative with mimation-damum, paralleling the citation of the Ugaritic damu,

yet Arabic is cited in its pausal form-dam-rather than with the matching damun in the nominative indefinite?

There are a few typographical and other errors: the name J. Payne Smith should not be hyphenated (pp. xvii and 316);from is correct forfroim, p. 45; there is almost a full extra line in p. 57 n. 2; Joshua Blau is referred to as that as well as J. Blau and Yehoshua Blau (p. 300); Aharon B. Dolgopolsky is also referred to as Aron Dolgopolsky (p. 304); the (1983) Leslau Festschrift entitled Ethiopian Studies Dedicated to Wolf Leslau on the Occasion of his Seventy-Fifth Birthday November 14th, 1981, by Friends and Colleagues, was only one volume, and thus referring to vol. I results from a confusion with the two-volume Leslau Festschrift of 1991.

ALAN S. KAYE CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, FULLERTON

A History of the Animal World in the Ancient Near East. Edited by BILLIE JEAN COLLINS. Handbook of Oriental Studies, vol. I, 64. Leiden: BRILL, 2002. Pp. xxii + 620, illus. $164.

There is something obviously special about animals. People love, fear, keep, and eat them; they depict them in art, compose stories about them, and invent fantastic new creatures; they endow them with human characteristics and dress up as beasts themselves. No one will dispute the importance of trees and rocks, houses and boats, or cabbages and kings, but fauna are different, providing a mirror of the human in culture after culture, from mundane activities to the most ceremonial ones. This large "handbook" provides a useful introduction to ancient Near Eastern zoology, concentrating on the de-

piction and use of animals in the art, literature, and broader cultural (especially religious) practices of

Anatolia, Egypt, Iran, Mesopotamia, and the Syro-Palestine area. Though not a volume that many will choose to read straight through (and one that few individuals will be able to afford), the book deserves to be widely known. Ably edited by the Hittitologist Billie Jean Collins and supported by a fine index, it will be one of the first places to which scholars will turn when they want to find something out

quickly about the Egyptian cult of the Apis bull, the evidence for porcine bones in the Levant, or the status of the ostrich in the Hebrew Bible.

The book is divided into five parts, with a total of seventeen chapters by fourteen authors: I, "The Native Fauna" (which consists of a single paper, Allan S. Gilbert's extraordinarily learned "Native Fauna of the Ancient Near East"); II, "Animals in Art" (five papers); III, "Animals in Literature" (four); IV, "Animals in Religion" (five); and V, "Studies in the Cultural Use of Animals" (two). There is also a short introduction, as well as Gilbert's very useful, sparely annotated "Appendix: Bibliography of Near Eastern Zoology," which overlaps to some extent with the lengthy list of references cited in the volume as a whole. Although there is some cross-referencing, both across topics (note that three of the four authors of papers on literature have papers on religion in the next section) and across lan-

guages, each contribution stands alone, perhaps a bit more than is ideal. It is not obvious to me that it was a wise choice to solicit separate chapters on art, literature, and religion and then arrange them into discrete sections: it would be unfortunate if anyone thought that one could get a proper picture of fal-

conry and the role of the eagle in Anatolia (to choose a topic in which I have a certain interest) with- out considering all the cultural spheres in which raptors appear, as well as their natural habits and

887 887

This content downloaded from 185.2.32.109 on Fri, 13 Jun 2014 19:50:32 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Journal of the American Oriental Society 123.4 (2003) Journal of the American Oriental Society 123.4 (2003)

habitat.' The sort of compartmentalization that this book exemplifies goes against the current ten- dency in one of the fields I know best, Classical studies, to consider art and literature together. While only very few researchers could have written sophisticated, groundbreaking chapters on every aspect of animal life in a given area of the world, the object of this tome is evidently not in the first place to be an example of original scholarship but rather to summarize what is known and provide up-to-date references to secondary literature.

It would be impossible here to do justice to any of the papers or even list them all, but a few in one way or another transcend the rather leaden stylistic conventions that I have to assume were mandated by the editor or press and that make this "history" at the same time unsystematic and curiously bland, not to say also largely unhistorical.2 Gilbert's "Native Fauna," already mentioned, is packed with in- formation and ends with two indispensable tables ("Indigenous Mammalian Fauna of the Post-Glacial Near East" and "Recorded Avian Fauna of the Post-Glacial Near East"); likewise extremely useful are the appendix ("The Range of Animal Life in Egyptian Art and Hieroglyphs") to Patrick F Houlihan's "Animals in Egyptian Art and Hieroglyphs," and the various tables at the end of Brian Hesse's and Paul Wapnish's "Archaeozoological Perspective on the Cultural Use of Mammals in the Levant," which "provide an overview, at the largest scale, of the significance of different species in the ancient econ- omies" (p. 463). Perhaps my favorite paper is Margaret Cool Root's sophisticated and sympathetic "Animals in the Art of Ancient Iran," which makes excellent use of case studies without sounding choppy (the ones on snakes and the ibex are especially nice), takes the idea of history seriously, and comments occasionally and helpfully on how Persian representations of animals compare to those else- where in the Near East. I also very much enjoyed Emily Teeter's "Animals in Egyptian Literature" (she notes that the "boundary between the religious texts and literary texts was always flexible" [p. 252] and takes up the former in "Animals in Egyptian Religion"), Benjamin R. Foster's "Animals in Meso- potamian Literature," and JoAnn Scurlock's back-to-back papers on "Animals in Ancient Mesopota- mian Religion" and (rather unexpectedly) "Animal Sacrifice in Ancient Mesopotamian Religion."

If the history of Near Eastern animals still remains to be written, the present work is undoubtedly a valuable handbook that will be used with profit for many years to come.

JOSHUA T. KATZ INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED STUDY

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

1. Compare Joshua T. Katz, "Hittite ta-pa-ka-li-ya-<as>," in Anatolisch und Indogermanisch-Anatolico e

indoeuropeo: Akten des Kolloquiums der Indogermanischen Gesellschaft, Pavia, 22.-25. September 1998, ed. Ono- frio Carruba and Wolfgang Meid (Innsbruck: Institut fur Sprachen und Literaturen der Universitiit Innsbruck, 2001), 205-37, and Jeanny Vorys Canby, "Falconry (Hawking) in Hittite Lands," Journal of Near Eastern Studies 61 (2002): 161-201.

2. The volume would have been better titled simply The Animal World in the Ancient Near East. In view of the

problems with ancient sources, a true history of man's attitude toward animals would be very difficult to produce but extremely valuable. A model of sorts would be Keith Thomas's influential book on Early Modem England, Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility (New York: Pantheon, 1983), which makes no

apologies for the (then) unfashionable use of literary sources in composing a historical account (see, e.g., his p. 16).

Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From? By WILLIAM G. DEVER. Grand Rapids, Mich.: WILLIAM B. EERDMANS PUBLISHING Co., 2003. Pp. xi + 268, illus. $25.

As a follow-up of his recent work, What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It? What Archaeology Can Tell Us about the Reality of Ancient Israel (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2001), Professor Dever has now added his synthesis about the origins

habitat.' The sort of compartmentalization that this book exemplifies goes against the current ten- dency in one of the fields I know best, Classical studies, to consider art and literature together. While only very few researchers could have written sophisticated, groundbreaking chapters on every aspect of animal life in a given area of the world, the object of this tome is evidently not in the first place to be an example of original scholarship but rather to summarize what is known and provide up-to-date references to secondary literature.

It would be impossible here to do justice to any of the papers or even list them all, but a few in one way or another transcend the rather leaden stylistic conventions that I have to assume were mandated by the editor or press and that make this "history" at the same time unsystematic and curiously bland, not to say also largely unhistorical.2 Gilbert's "Native Fauna," already mentioned, is packed with in- formation and ends with two indispensable tables ("Indigenous Mammalian Fauna of the Post-Glacial Near East" and "Recorded Avian Fauna of the Post-Glacial Near East"); likewise extremely useful are the appendix ("The Range of Animal Life in Egyptian Art and Hieroglyphs") to Patrick F Houlihan's "Animals in Egyptian Art and Hieroglyphs," and the various tables at the end of Brian Hesse's and Paul Wapnish's "Archaeozoological Perspective on the Cultural Use of Mammals in the Levant," which "provide an overview, at the largest scale, of the significance of different species in the ancient econ- omies" (p. 463). Perhaps my favorite paper is Margaret Cool Root's sophisticated and sympathetic "Animals in the Art of Ancient Iran," which makes excellent use of case studies without sounding choppy (the ones on snakes and the ibex are especially nice), takes the idea of history seriously, and comments occasionally and helpfully on how Persian representations of animals compare to those else- where in the Near East. I also very much enjoyed Emily Teeter's "Animals in Egyptian Literature" (she notes that the "boundary between the religious texts and literary texts was always flexible" [p. 252] and takes up the former in "Animals in Egyptian Religion"), Benjamin R. Foster's "Animals in Meso- potamian Literature," and JoAnn Scurlock's back-to-back papers on "Animals in Ancient Mesopota- mian Religion" and (rather unexpectedly) "Animal Sacrifice in Ancient Mesopotamian Religion."

If the history of Near Eastern animals still remains to be written, the present work is undoubtedly a valuable handbook that will be used with profit for many years to come.

JOSHUA T. KATZ INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED STUDY

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

1. Compare Joshua T. Katz, "Hittite ta-pa-ka-li-ya-<as>," in Anatolisch und Indogermanisch-Anatolico e

indoeuropeo: Akten des Kolloquiums der Indogermanischen Gesellschaft, Pavia, 22.-25. September 1998, ed. Ono- frio Carruba and Wolfgang Meid (Innsbruck: Institut fur Sprachen und Literaturen der Universitiit Innsbruck, 2001), 205-37, and Jeanny Vorys Canby, "Falconry (Hawking) in Hittite Lands," Journal of Near Eastern Studies 61 (2002): 161-201.

2. The volume would have been better titled simply The Animal World in the Ancient Near East. In view of the

problems with ancient sources, a true history of man's attitude toward animals would be very difficult to produce but extremely valuable. A model of sorts would be Keith Thomas's influential book on Early Modem England, Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility (New York: Pantheon, 1983), which makes no

apologies for the (then) unfashionable use of literary sources in composing a historical account (see, e.g., his p. 16).

Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From? By WILLIAM G. DEVER. Grand Rapids, Mich.: WILLIAM B. EERDMANS PUBLISHING Co., 2003. Pp. xi + 268, illus. $25.

As a follow-up of his recent work, What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It? What Archaeology Can Tell Us about the Reality of Ancient Israel (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2001), Professor Dever has now added his synthesis about the origins

888 888

This content downloaded from 185.2.32.109 on Fri, 13 Jun 2014 19:50:32 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions