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The correspondence of the kings of Ur : an epistolary history of an ancient Mesopotamian kingdom
The Correspondence of the Kings of Ur is a collection of literary letters between the Ur III monarchs and their high officials at the end of the third millennium B.C. The letters cover topics of royal authority and proper governance, defense of frontier regions, and the ultimate disintegration of the empire and represent the largest corpus of Sumerian prose literature we possess. This long-awaited edition, based on extensive collation of almost all extant manuscripts, numbering more than a hundred, includes detailed historical and literary analyses, and copious philological commentary. It entirely supersedes the Michalowski's oft-cited unpublished Yale dissertation of 1976.
The edition is accompanied by an extensive analysis of the place of the letters in early second-millennium schooling, treating the letters as literature, followed by chapters that contextualize the epistolary material within historical and historiographic contexts, utilizing many Sumerian archival, literary, and historical sources. The main objective here is to try to navigate the complex issues of authenticity, authority, and fiction that arise from the study of these literary artifacts. In addition, Michalowski offers new hypotheses about many aspects of late third-millennium history, including essays on military history and strategy, on frontiers, on the nature and putative character of nomadism at the time, as well as a long chapter on the role of a people designated as Amorites.
The included DVD includes various photographs at high resolution of most of the tablets included in the study.
eBook
TWO NEW UR III LETTERS IN THE LOUVRE MUSEUM
This article provides the publication of two new Ur III letters kept at Louvre Museum. The content of these letters is concise as the majority of the Ur III administrative letters. The first one asks for the return of persons before an inspection and the second letter asks for the release of one barge carrying sesame.
Journal Article
Writing and Reading: A Reply to Wolf and Kennedy
Responds to a critique of an earlier article on alphabetic writing that made claims about the origins of written language as the basis for advocating a particular method of teaching reading, suggesting that the critique actually supports the original article's position, and nothing in the critique justifies its conclusion that children need \"explicit instruction that clarifies the relationships between written and spoken language.\" (SM)
Journal Article
Babylonian Diplomacy in the Amarna Letters
Modern commentators view the pattern of negotiations in the Amarna Letters as reflecting an imbalance between Egypt and the Asiatic great powers. The Asiatic kings try unsuccessfully to wrest gold and status from the Pharaoh, and in doing so are often forced into humiliating concessions. The Babylonian dispatches are regarded as a prime example of this imbalance. Babylonian kings look, at best, self-abasing and, at worst, ridiculous, especially when describing their own actions and reactions in previous diplomatic incidents. A close analysis of Babylonian arguments, however, reveals a cunning and devious train of logic designed to gain the moral advantage over the Egyptian interlocutor. The Babylonian rulers used the cultural conventions of the day to send hidden messages, the meaning of which would nonetheless be unmistakable to the recipient.
Journal Article