Content area
Full text
Kanaanäische und aramäische Inschriften, vol. 1. Fifth expanded and revised ed. By HERBERT DONNER and WOLFGANG RÖLLIG. Wiesbaden: HARRASSOWITZ VERLAG, 2002. Pp. xviii + 79. euro24.80 (paper).
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Mark Lidzbarski's Handbuch der nordsemitischen Epigraphik (Weimar, 1898) and G. A. Cooke's A Text-Book of North-Semitic Inscriptions (Oxford, 1903) were the most useful and authoritative handbooks of Northwest Semitic inscriptions, with fine selections of texts and accompanying philological and historical comments. These volumes were broad in nature, and treated Aramaic (including Nabataean and Palmyrene), Phoenician and Punic, Hebrew, and Moabite. During subsequent decades, a number of handbooks were published, but normally these reflected narrower foci. For example, epigraphic Hebrew was the predominant focus of both David Diringer's handbook entitled Le Inscrizioni Antico-Ebraiche Palestinesi (Florence, 1934) and Sabatino Moscati's L'Epigrafia Ebraica Antica: 1935-1950 (Rome, 1951).
For this reason, during the middle of the twentieth century, there was a distinct need for a new handbook of Northwest Semitic. Herbert Donner and Wolfgang Röllig's first edition...