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In recent years, single volume dictionaries of ancient Near Eastern languages, ostensibly for the use of beginner students unable or unwilling to invest in a copy of CAD or AHw, have been all the rage. The Concise Dictionary of Akkadian (CDA) and Halloran's Sumerian Lexicon, for instance, both attempt to present in a single inexpensive volume the wealth of lexical material that has been assembled by Assyriologists over the past century and a half (see the important review of Halloran's Lexicon by Balke, Orientalistische Literaturzeitung 104, 2009, 634-43). Parpola and Whiting's Assyrian-English-Assyrian Dictionary seems at first to fall into the same general category, but there are important differences, notably the focus on a single dialect (Neo-Assyrian) as well as the provision of an English-Akkadian section (see also Jonathan Taylor's short notice in Journal of Semitic Studies 55/2, 621, January 2010).
Parpola and Whiting take the lexical materials assembled by the State Archives of Assyria project as their basis and then attempt to reprocess and reformat those materials into a coherent lexical compendium. One suspects that the editors originally hoped to include compact references to attestations in the SAA volumes themselves, but at least in the review copy made available to me, no such references exist and the only ways to locate actual attestations are either: (i) to use the multivolume dictionaries; (ii) to look through the individual indexes at the end of each SAA...





