Book Review

Methods/Theory

Since his early work on the craft texts from Isin, Marc Van de Mieroop has gradually moved away from the primary publication of cuneiform tablets to a far more reflective form of scholarship, as exemplified in his treatise on The Ancient Mesopotamian City (1997). In this book, he aims to "point out some of the current approaches" to "various areas of historical research," "and indicate what ways of investigation seem promising . . . in yielding historical insight" (p. 4). After a brief introduction to the main literary genres represented in the cuneiform sources, Van de Mieroop tackles "history from above," where he concerns himself with political history, as told mainly from annalistic accounts. The redaction of those accounts—"Narratives of campaigns were . . . constantly rewritten," he reminds us (p. 47)—was anything but straightforward, and contradictions between different editions abound. Van de Mieroop skillfully shows how the traditions associated with the third millennium ruler Sargon of Agade "were . . . manipulated in the first millennium to reflect contemporary events" (p. 74), and how more than one modern scholar has been led to ascribe a certain veracity to these late traditions simply because of the narrative form in which they appear. Since Western scholars, in particlar, often express a predilection for narrative history, Van de Mieroop argues (p. 78), the late traditions about Sargon's birth and life are not considered suspect, even though annalistic accounts—terse statements reporting an event in a given year of a king's reign—are far more common in ancient Mesopotamian sources and far less susceptible to literary embellishment than narrative ones.

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