New ISAW Library Titles, December 2015
A list of books added to the ISAW Library in December 2015 is now available online both on the ISAW Library Website and in a Zotero library. The titles are sorted in the website version according to thematic topics (e.g., "East Asia" and "Ancient Near East & Asia Minor"); and within each topic, the titles are organized according to Library of Congress classification. The authors and titles of works in non-Roman languages are given in their original script.
In addition to a number of recent Russian-language titles on the archaeology of Central Asia and several core texts in Chinese history, the 89 titles added in December include a historically important volume from the collection of Prof. Robert D. Biggs of the Oriental Institute of Chicago. The fourth volume of the Mémoires de la Délégation en Perse (the second series of Vincent Scheil's Textes élamites-sémitiques), published in 1902, is notable for containing the editio princeps of the Code of Hammurabi.
The basalt stele containing the full text of Hammurabi's law code was discovered at Susa in December 1901 or January 1902, and is now part of the collection of the Musée du Louvre. Scheil's publication, which contains photographic illustrations of the stele's text as well as a transliteration and French translation, appeared mere months later. Response to this publication was fast: Hugo Winckler translated Scheil’s French rendering into German in Der Alte Orient later in 1902, and early scholars to work on the text include Fr. Marie-Joseph Lagrange (in the Revue Biblique), Joseph Halévy (in the Revue Semitique), and the Rev. C.H.W. Johns (in the American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures), who all published work on the code in 1903. The American popular press took notice as well: in December 1902 the New York Independent ran a series of increasingly-detailed news pieces on Hammurabi’s laws, followed by a serialized English translation (based on Winckler's German text) throughout January 1903. These publications served as the primary popular source of information on the Code of Hammurabi, with many brief notices appearing in newspapers and magazines in late 1902 and throughout 1903, most based to some degree on material from the Independent. The primary interest these newspaper pieces took in Hammurabi’s laws was in the light they cast on the Bible. A reporter for the Logan, Utah Republican commented: "One effect of these discoveries seems to remove the time of the flood to a period more remote than that assigned to it in Bible chronology… It is not improbable, though, that as the work progresses, discoveries may be made that will clean up questions pertaining to the flood, to the tower of Bable [sic], to the confusion of tongues, and the deviding [sic] of the earth, that have long been subject to discussion." An anonymous writer for the American Ecclesiastical Review found in the text of the stele "proof for the superiority of the Mosaic laws over those of Babylon from a humanitarian and moral point of view."
In addition to representing a landmark moment in Babylonian legal scholarship, Scheil's first edition of the code is a fine example of early 20th-century printing. The folio volume contains high-quality photogravure illustrations of the cuneiform texts, including the Hammurabi stele. The volume contains the first publications of several other texts as well, including a royal inscription of the Elamite ruler Kutik-Inshushinak (whose name is deciphered here as "Karibu Ša Šušinak") and a collection of Elamite contracts. The volume represents a watershed moment in the study of the Ancient Near East, and is a fine addition to the ISAW Library's Antiquarian Collection.
