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The Third Millennium: Studies in Early Mesopotamia and Syria in Honor of Walter Sommerfeld and Manfred Krebernik. Edited by Ilya Arkhipov, Leonid Kogan, and Natalia Koslova. Cuneiform Monographs, vol. 50. Leiden: Brill, 2020. Pp. xxiii + 829, illus. $234.
This splendid combined Festschrift for two of the dies superiores of third-millennium studies offers thirty-seven essays by forty-two authors, mostly spanning the Uruk IV to the Old Babylonian periods. Glassner and Keetman take up archaic writing, Glassner suggesting that in devising the earliest signs, the inventers of writing went further than the usual explanation of choosing images of objects of daily life, animals, body parts, or purely abstract designs, by making recourse to mythological thinking, his primary instance being the É-KID-LÍL group (so also Keetman, pp. 361-62; if Keetman is right that the sign represents a reed mat, is it perhaps a punka, and this would be the connection with air?).
Keetman seeks to demonstrate the definite presence of Sumerian language in Uruk writing, and does so convincingly, even without invoking the parallel argument of consistency of metrology over time, so one hopes that Englund's contrary view, despite his great authority, can be finally set aside, even if the problem of onomastics remains. It seems somehow unthinkable that an imagined and presumably literate pre-Sumerian population has simply disappeared with scarcely a trace.
On the micro-level, Monaco takes up one sign, NUN, offering a pleasing explanation for its use in connection with livestock to mean "aged," with the overtone of "honorable." This picturesque usage seems to disappear not long thereafter, in favor of just plain "old."
Oelsner surveys painstakingly the scattered remains of third-millennium text groups from the Uruk excavations, noting that none of them was evidently found in their original context, being, rather, discards and fill.
Moving into the Early Dynastic period, Lecompte undertakes collation of the Figure aux plumes and the Prisoner Plaque, the former remaining as baffling as ever, but the idea that it records the buildup of arable land resources by Ningirsu is attractive and would help to explain what seems like the literary character of this extraordinary monument.
Wilcke takes up, also with scrupulous study of the original, another, far less known and no less obscure monument, perhaps dating to the Fara...