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The Invention of Cuneiform: Writing in Sumer. By JEAN-JACQUES GLASSNER; tr. Zainab Bahrani and Marc Van De Mieroop. Baltimore: JOHNS HOPKINS UNIV. PRESS, 2003. Pp. xvii + 266, illus. $42.
Johns Hopkins University Press has published what for all appearances is a well-bound English translation of J.-J. Glassner's Ecrire à Sumer: I 'invention du cunéiforme (Paris: Seuil, 2000). Quite competent translators were found for the task, and dutiful words of praise included on the book's well-designed jacket (W. Rosenberger).
A few technical remarks can preface a statement about the book's intellectual merits. First, a book so heavily dedicated to the graphic development of an ancient writing system does not serve the interests of its readers with the quality of illustrations offered here, low in terms of both technical and conceptual design. Second, the use of end- instead of footnotes should be banned from academic, or academically inclined books; must the reader constantly harvest some number of notes lost somewhere at the back of a book-in some cases now at the end of individual chapters-before returning to the text? The translation itself, and the editing of this book seem to have been very professional, with but few causes for complaint.
The content of the book is, from most vantage points, a severe disappointment. Take for instance the author's philological analysis of the earliest stages of writing in Babylonia. A cardinal rule of proto-cuneiform sign analysis must be the contextual description of signs, the linguistic interpretation of any of which is being considered. If, for instance, the decipherer will claim that the sign GA^sub 2^+AN is to be read in Sumerian /ama/ ("mother"), with an inscribed phonetic indicator am^sub 6^, then he should provide the reader with at least two instances in the proto-cuneiform text corpus that could plausibly be interpreted to represent "mother." In fact, no single example of mulitvalence proposed in this book is with even a passing remark supported by contextual evidence from the proto-cuneiform corpus itself.
While criticizing others who, unable to cite evidence from pertinent texts, have resorted to use of graphic sign similarities to claim relationships of various colors among them, the author employs the same discredited techniques throughout the book. At one point, he proffers a bizarre illustration of the...