Papers by Benjamin R. Foster
JAOS 142: 482-483, 2022
Frederick A. Pottle, long-time editor of the Boswell Papers, once wrote a monograph to demonstrat... more Frederick A. Pottle, long-time editor of the Boswell Papers, once wrote a monograph to demonstrate the infinite horizons of commentary, proceeding from the passing mention of a woman in a letter to a book-long narrative of her astonishing adventures and determination, worthy of a blockbuster film today (Boswell and the Girl from Botany Bay [New York: Viking, 1937]). So too, this remarkable study in well over 450 pages, proceeding from a ten-line passage of Babylonian, takes the reader far and wide through cuneiform, Classical, and modern literature, Mesopotamian civilization ranging from consumption of fish to urban self-government, and Assyriological scholarship from its heroic age until the present, in many of the languages of Europe (I missed only Turkish, M. Ramazanoğlu's frequently reprinted Gılgamış destanı [1942-2002], and Albanian, A. Berisha's several times reprinted Epi i Gilgameshit [1984-2008], neither of which I checked for this passage), probing highways and byways of the republic of philology with awe-inspiring learning conveyed in a lucid, modest style. Worthington's point of departure is "bitextuality," meaning a passage in which the words can be fairly understood in two different ways. An example of this phenomenon, well known in the Arabicspeaking world, with slight variants among informants, goes, freely rendered:
JAOS 142: 484-487, 2022
This splendid combined Festschrift for two of the dies superiores of third-millennium studies off... more 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 period, which seems to record disposition of property, in some cases by oath, on the occasion of a marriage. A considerable amount of land is involved, which might serve to explain the choice of a stone monument. Westenholz gives a skeptical survey of Steinkeller's conversion of Gelb's "Kish Civilization" into a major political entity centered at Kish in Early Dynastic II, repeatedly reminding the reader how scant the evidence actually is for any broad reconstruction of the political and ethnic situation in Mesopotamia at such an early date. Cavigneaux gives exquisite copies of two Fara sale contracts, as well as an edition; it is remarkable how many of these found their way onto the antiquities market, as opposed to other Fara text types, so one has the impression that illegal diggers happened on the "register of deeds" of that town. Bauer contributes a treatment of a large fragment of a beautifully written sale document, clearly the handiwork of a master scribe. Bramanti and Notizia edit more Presargonic records from the Umma region, amply demonstrating the extensive progress that has been made with the understanding of these documents since the late 1970s, in which Bramanti has been particularly active. For Ebla, Archi explores, in a rewarding essay, the status of Išhara as the patron goddess of the dynasty, in some ways comparable to that of Ishtar for the Akkadian kings, and allows, among other points in passing, Tonietti's suggestion that A-bar-sal might be an earlier spelling of Apišal (p. 28)this would indeed bring several historical problems into closer focus-and that mekum was the local pronunciation of malkum. If the city gods disappeared with the conquest of Ebla, and the new dynasty preferred Ishtar to Išhara, the latter lived on, especially, it seems, as a patron of ecstatics and of the honeymoon period of marriage. Biga reconstructs a small elite or fraternity of men called ratibu at Ebla, based on their allegiance to a deity.
JAOS 142: 235-237, 2022
Selena Wisnom's path-breaking study takes up three classics of Akkadian literature, arguing that ... more Selena Wisnom's path-breaking study takes up three classics of Akkadian literature, arguing that each successive author was not only aware of the preceding masterpieces, but sought to outdo or "compete" with them, as well with Atrahasis and the Sumerian poem Lugal-e, by making their characters and their deeds, as well as the poems about them, superior to those of their predecessors. This is shown in specific accomplishments, heroic ideals, cosmic significance, and poetics. The alleged competition was carried forward through a dense network of literary allusion, reuse of incidents, reworking of character, shift in time, and specific figurative language, as well as subversion of well-known incidents, and even segmentation of characters, all of which the audience was expected to recognize. Nor was this a case of the latest building on the preceding alone; she argues that the latest was well aware of the first and of the comparable strategies of his predecessors with each one preceding, so the latest engaged with all, and not merely with the most recent. She can thereby bypass the anxiety of dealing with the author's intent by an empirical approach to what the author actually wrote. By analogy, if Virgil could expect his audience to be thoroughly familiar with Homer, so too Kabtiilani-Marduk could expect his audience to be familiar with the Epic of Creation, Atrahasis, Anzû, Lugal-e, and other works of cuneiform literature and scholarship, and to appreciate his manipulation and incorporation of them into his great poem. Although there have been prior observations on intertex
Isimu 25: 143-147, 2022
literary study of standard insceription
Encyclopaedia of Islam 3, 2023
overview of the study of Near Eastern languages in Western Europe and the United States
D. Stein, S. Costello, K. Foster, ed., Ecstatic Experience in the Ancient World (London: Routledge), 430-440, 2022
Memoirs of the Connecticut Academy of Arts & Sciences 20 (1982)
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Papers by Benjamin R. Foster