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The Assyrian Sacred Tree: A History of Interpretations. By Mariana Giovino. Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis, vol. 230. Freiburg: Academic Press, 2007. Pp. viii + 242, illus. FS 98.
While the art of the ancient Near East is well known, one could argue that its visual culture remains poorly understood. Central to such an argument might be the strange tree-like motif that appears in the Syro-Mesopotamian area in the second millennium B. C. E. and reaches its high point of use in the Late Assyrian period. Researchers have yet to fully explain this clearly important artistic element. Mariana Giovino has undertaken the task of tracing the various interpretations of this "Assyrian Sacred Tree" since its discovery over 150 years ago, highlighting both well-known and obscure scholarly works that still influence analysis today.
The resulting book is divided into four main parts. The first deals with nineteenth-century ideas about the Tree (as I refer to Giovino's "Assyrian Sacred Tree" henceforth). As Giovino shows, the main lines of interpretation, all biblically based to some extent, appear in this period: the Tree as representing a "tree of life"; the Tree as a straightforward, iconic depiction of a cultic object; and what became the dominant idea, the Tree as a stylized rendering of a tree, often a date palm, and sometimes "fertilized" or "purified" by attendant génies. The second part follows these proposals and others, which ascribe a wider range of symbolic meanings to the Tree, through the twentieth and into the twenty first centuries. The third and...