An encouraging symptom of the development made within the approach to Assyriological courses is to be present in the paintings performed prior to now years via such males as Knudtzon, Tallqvist, King, and Zimmern in accumulating jointly the cuneiform drugs belonging to a unmarried sequence or category and in featuring the gang in this sort of shape as to let students to adopt a scientific examine of the continues to be of Babylonian literature. Now that Bezold’s nice catalogue of the Kuyunjik number of the British Museum is whole, there is not any longer any excuse for what may be termed “promiscuous” courses. Such guides are continually of uncertain worth and especially so within the area of Assyriology.
Mr. King’s e-book is a version of what a scientific e-book needs to be. He has selected because the foundation of his paintings a bunch of pills good outlined by way of the formulation, “The Lifting up of the Hand,” present in the colophon. to those he has further, as an appendix, a couple of capsules that illustrate the crowd in query. He starts off through an advent during which he rigorously and succinctly units forth the nature of the gang, its distinguishing positive aspects, the divisions, the tactic of composition, the lines of modifying that they exhibit, and their contents. In 5 sections, the drugs of the crowd chosen, are provided to the reader in exact transliterations and admirable translations, including motives and reviews, complex the place wanted, short the place attainable. The 6th part comprises “Prayers opposed to the evils attending an eclipse of the moon” released within the comparable entire model. a whole vocabulary is further and appendixes containing a listing of right names, a listing of numerals, parts of phrases, and ideographs of doubtful readings. the 1st a part of the complete paintings is dropped at an in depth via numerous pages of additives and corrections and indexes, one to drugs and duplicates and the opposite to the registration numbers of the drugs released. the second one a part of the paintings involves copies of the cuneiform texts, fantastically transcribed. a look at those copies is sulficient to encourage self belief, and masses dealing with of the copies in simple terms raises and justifies this self belief. In recognize to completeness, King’s book compares such a lot favorably with Knudtzon’s and Tallqvist’s fresh works, whereas it really is more desirable, e. g., to Zimmern’s “Surpu” sequence, whose observation is totally too scanty, and whose booklet lacks an creation within which the result of his research of the sequence released through him are summed up. detailed significance is to be connected to this final characteristic. it isn't an excessive amount of to claim that Knudtzon, Tallquist, and King have doubled the worth in their monographs by way of the frilly introductions which they've got furnished.
It stands to cause that if a pupil devotes himself particularly to a couple department of the good spiritual literature of the Babylonians and Assyrians, he's (or must be) in a greater place than an individual else to appreciate the bearings, the import, and the nature of the part that he has labored up….
– The American magazine of Semitic Languages and Literatures, Vol. thirteen