This impressive and well-researched volume uses textual, archaeological, art-historical, ornithological and geographical data to discuss the human utilization of birds (wild and domesticated) in the ancient Near East. The area is roughly defined as that now occupied by the modern states of Syria, Lebanon and Iraq (p. 3). The chronological range runs from the first evidence of bird hunting in the earliest prehistory of the area, to the end of the first millennium bce.

The introduction discusses, among other things, the various types of primary evidence on which the study is based: archaeological finds of bird bones, texts documenting delivery or feeding of birds, visual (pictorial) evidence, and the evidence from neighbouring cultures (primarily Egypt). The author shows great awareness of the limitations of each of these data types. Bird bones (pp. 11–14) are easily overlooked in excavations and even when found they are not always easy to identify. Bones found in a domestic setting may still come from a wild bird that happened to die there, or other (non-human) processes may have moved the bones to that particular spot. Each type of evidence thus has its own restrictions and limitations. The author makes a sharp distinction between domesticated birds and (wild) birds in captivity (pp. 20–22), allowing the term domesticated only for species that are genetically isolated from their wild counterparts. At the same time she concedes that the evidence available often does not allow a clear distinction between these two categories.

Part A discusses the evidence for bird hunting (pp. 29–187) and bird keeping (pp. 188–225). Data for hunting come from archaeology, images and texts. The textual evidence includes references to fowlers as well as the terminology for bird traps and other necessities of the trade. The hunting chapter includes a large section devoted to birds of prey, because of suggestions in the literature that numerous finds of remains of such birds from the early Neolithic period may document their role in hunting. The author questions the significance of this possibility and points out a wide range of other possible uses for these birds. The section on bird keeping relies primarily on texts, in particular from the Ur III and Neo-Babylonian periods.

Part B (pp. 227–444) is a discussion of the economically most important bird species, divided into four groups: geese and ducks; cranes; doves; and chickens and poultry. Each of these chapters contains detailed information about the species and varieties available in the area, their potential for domestication, archaeological data, and their appearances in (primarily archival) texts. Each chapter includes a discussion of the Sumerian and Akkadian words for the birds in question, with a number of new proposals.

After a brief summary (pp. 445–59), the book continues with three very extensive appendixes cataloguing the archaeo-zoological data (birds of prey; and geese and ducks) and the depictions of chicken-like birds on first millennium seals, respectively. Bibliography (very extensive: more than sixty dense pages), list of illustrations, and several very useful indexes close the book.

Throughout, the study is illustrated with line drawings of birds, birding equipment, archaeological finds, seal impressions, etc. that significantly increase the legibility and understandability of the argument.

The length of the period treated here and the author's engagement with many different specialized disciplines (as evidenced in the bibliography) are absolutely astounding and path breaking. On the flip side, the book does not add up to a coherent argument. As the author repeatedly remarks, birds never played a major role in the human diet. We are thus looking at fragments of economic structures that are not further contextualized, only united in their reference to birds.

Part B includes an important number of discussions of bird names in Sumerian and Akkadian. The author's conclusions are in some cases different from traditional identifications (summarized on p. 456). The word kur-gi^mušen (Akkadian kurkû) is usually translated “goose”, after a proposal by Landsberger. The author provides good arguments for returning to the etymologically supported rendering “crane”, which had been proposed as early as 1888. This new (or old) identification has consequences for other bird names (as always, pulling at one string of the lexical cloth causes problems elsewhere), since we do need a word for goose. The author's solution is to take uz^(mušen) as the general word for goose (primarily attested in the third millennium) and uz-tur^mušen as the specific word for domestic goose. This is a possible solution. Its main implication is that cranes were much more important economically (and in temple offerings) than hitherto acknowledged. The problem that the author has to deal with is that uz-tur^mušen seems to mean “small uz bird” even though domestic birds tend to be larger, not smaller, than their wild counterparts. Here the argument (pp. 247 f.) becomes tenuous at best – tur (small), according to the author, does not refer to the size of the bird, but rather indicates the difference between wild and domestic, referring to “die Tatsache, dass sie schon als kleine Tiere gehalten wurden”. Footnote 931, claiming that the lexeme “amar” means “calf” or “foal” and that its use for the young of uz-tur^mušen is exceptional is an unfortunate (and uncharacteristic) error. All bird chicks are called amar, a word used for a variety of young animals. The identification of tu^mušen (summatu) as the domestic dove (p. 300) depends in part on an omen text that describes the appearance of a white summatu. Since white coloration is a typical feature of domestication, the author concludes that summatu must be a domesticated bird. This argument ignores the tendency of omens to describe rare, or even impossible events. These criticisms are not necessarily sufficient to reject the author's conclusions – they demonstrate that identifications of natural species are often messy and tentative and rarely yield results that are beyond doubt.

To conclude, Elisabeth von der Osten-Sacken has assembled a truly astonishing dataset, presented in a legible, well-organized and efficient format that will yield something to think about for researchers of many different backgrounds.