History, Texts and Art in Early Babylonia: Three Essays (Studies in Ancient Near Eastern Records

by Piotr Steinkeller

The book studies the history of early Babylonian kingship, as it evolved from prehistoric times down to the end of the third millennium BCE, and its reflections in the contemporaneous and later historical sources, literary texts and art. Among the chief issues it considers are the intersection between history writing and the scholarly tradition in early Babylonia, and the modern approaches toward the study of ancient ""historical"" sources.

269 pages, Hardcover

Published June 12, 2017

Reviews

[Jack Naylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Steinkeller really is one of the best Sumerologists alive, and it shows. The three essays in this volume are some of the best pieces I've read on Sumerian history, and they're pretty smooth reading considering the subject. I found the first one on the priest king of the late 4th/early 3rd millennium to be the most enjoyable - dare I say exciting? His thinking about why our historical documentation about specific kings from this early period is so poor coheres quite nicely with all the data I have seen, and it feels good to have someone acknowledge the situation as anomalous (rather than a function of not having enough data - we have plenty of data). The related discussion about the role of royal cultic officials (abgal) and their development into the apkallu tradition of later times was new to me, and quite fascinating.

As a final note, I should say that though I'm a little more sanguine than Steinkeller about the value of early "historical" texts, I much appreciate his efforts to fit the evidence we have into coherent emic frameworks. Instead of expecting the data to fill out a picture that matches what we expect from coherent thought-worlds, he nobly attempts to find a coherent picture with just what we have.