In this important new book, Eleanor Robson offers a rich and fascinating sketch of cuneiform intellectual culture in Assyria and Babylonia from the late thirteenth century through the second half of the first millennium BC. The terms “social” and “geography” in her title point to the work's distinctive contribution—namely, demonstrating how cuneiform culture can be understood by historicizing texts and examining them alongside the people who created and used them under various circumstances across space and time. The book will be of interest not only to specialists in ancient Near Eastern studies but also to ancient historians and archaeologists studying other world areas and eras in which ancient writing systems developed.

After a brief introduction focused on the mismatch between modern terminology and ancient realities, Chapter 2 sees Robson deftly deconstruct two concepts that have long shaped the study of cuneiform texts: the Library of Ashurbanipal, a variously sourced collection of cuneiform tablets amassed by the British Museum starting in the nineteenth century that is purported to represent the holdings of an Assyrian king in ancient Nineveh (near modern Mosul, Iraq), and the Stream of Tradition, a phrase coined in the 1960s by American Assyriologist Leo Oppenheim to describe a long-lived body of ancient writings maintained by successive generations of scribes. Both concepts have imposed a top-down, homogenizing approach that encourages us to think of Assyrian and Babylonian intellectual life as primarily static and centered on the imperial court, treating nonconforming pieces of evidence as anomalous outliers. Robson counters this approach by embracing the variants as witnesses to divergent streams that will, when taken together, ultimately enable us to reimagine a network of cuneiform culture that stretches far beyond a palace library, out across space and time.

In Chapter 3, Robson zooms out from the period traditionally associated with Ashurbanipal's so-called Library (ca. 680–650 BC) and looks more expansively at cuneiform scholarship from the Middle Assyrian period to the end of the empire in 610 BC. Despite the desperately fragmentary state of the evidence, Robson finds more than enough to argue convincingly for both continuities and significant variation in cuneiform culture across a half millennium largely due to recognizing distinctions between royal prerogatives and local preferences on the one hand and geopolitical and religious imperatives on the other.

Boasting a comparative wealth of extant evidence, the seventh century BC provides an opportunity for Robson to focus on the geographic scope of intellectual activity in Chapter 4. Here, she examines the mobility of texts and scholars throughout the empire. Nodes in the scholarly network map largely onto the loci of royal power, but norms of textual and intellectual transmission vary widely. Whereas access to the royal collection at Nineveh seems to have been heavily restricted and incoming texts were stripped of any record of their origins, Assur (a city some 105 km south of Nineveh along the Tigris) boasted a thriving urban network of scholars sharing and copying texts under the aegis of temples rather than the palace.

Chapter 5 examines the figures of the king, the god Nabu, and the scholar along with the shifting nexus of associations between them in both Babylonian and Assyrian culture. Here, Robson shows the dangers of assuming that the relationships between these three are static and consequently warns against assuming that evidence for Nabu cult, for instance, has the same implications for scholarly activity in all times and places throughout the ancient Near East. This serves as an important caveat for those seeking to use such relationships to establish proxies in an attempt to fill in lacunae in the evidentiary record.

Robson charts the collapse of cuneiform culture during the Achaemenid and Macedonian periods in Chapter 6 and demonstrates how, yet again, familiar elements of the scholarly networks mapped out in this book persisted long after the clay tablets themselves had been abandoned. The book closes with a concluding chapter that synthesizes the powerful evidence for the history of Assyrian and Babylonian scholarship as a story of continuity and change. In this way, Robson adds crucial new dimensions to Oppenheim's influential Stream of Tradition narrative.

This book is the fruit of tremendous labor over a long period, and Robson is quick to acknowledge that her project builds on the work of others. Fittingly, given the ancient networks of knowledge it traces and the contemporary ones that gave rise to it, Ancient Knowledge Networks is conceived of as a “first approximation” (p. 43) that invites future refinement and revision. To that end, the book is available freely in open-source format, and it boasts an impressive companion website (http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/cams/akno) with a wealth of supplementary materials, including the corpus of cuneiform texts referenced in the book, a glossary of terms, prosopographical appendixes of known Assyrian and Babylonian scholars that can be updated as new information becomes available, and a library of relevant links to online resources referenced in the book. Given that the website is envisioned to be expandable, it would be most desirable if the book's many figures and tables might also be made available online. The beautiful maps, in particular, would become an even greater resource if they could be examined in their proper orientation alongside the text rather than embedded within it.