The Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale is the annual meeting of Assyriologists and Mesopotamian archaeologists, first held in Paris in 1950. Every meeting has a theme, and the theme of the fifty-first meeting began with lexicography – appropriately, for the venue was the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, home since 1921 of the great Assyrian Dictionary Project that was one of the most extraordinary successes of twentieth-century research in the humanities. The meeting coincided with the dispatch to the printer, more than eighty years on, of the last of the dictionary's twenty-one volumes.
To make room for contributions on archaeology and art history, the idea of lexicography was stretched to a more accommodating, but wordier, “Classifications of knowledge in the ancient Near East: lexicography, iconography, stratigraphy”. The publication is divided likewise into three: “Lexicography, philology, textual studies”, “Iconography and art history” and “Archaeology and stratigraphy”, and the forty-one articles are ordered alphabetically, by contributor's name.
Among the Assyriological papers this reviewer's eye was caught especially by Uri Gabbay's paper on the kalû (pp. 49–56 “The kalû (gala) once again”). He suggests a clever new etymology for kalû, cognate with kuluʾu (possibly kulluʾu) and deriving from the root √klʾ “both, hybrid”, thus meaning “one who is both (sexes)”, i.e. an hermaphrodite.
In the art-historical section Stephen W. Holloway discusses some bricks brought back from Mesopotamia by a merchant-captain in 1817 (pp. 287–98 “Austin's Asiatic antiquities: the first cuneiform inscriptions published in America”). These discoveries provoked national pride in Americans' prominence in pursuing ancient Near Eastern studies and were at once put to use as educational illustrations in successive editions of a family bible. The nineteenth century was an age when enlightened people understood that, compared with the written legacy of the rest of the ancient world, “the Bible is a very incomplete record of an obscure people”, as John Steinbeck had one of his characters say in The Pastures of Heaven (1932). It is pleasing to learn of the impact of Capt. Austin's bricks nearly two centuries later, in a time when governments seem to care little for the archaeology of origins and the new fundamentalists repudiate comparative knowledge out of hand.
The archaeology of Sumerian and Babylonian sites has figured prominently in the research of the Oriental Institute. A paper by the veteran excavator of Nippur, McGuire Gibson (pp. 383–8 “The Oriental Institute and its role in Mesopotamian archaeology”), will correct any false impression that the institution's sole glory is its matchless reputation as a centre for Assyriology and cuneiform lexicography. His contribution is also a record of the terrible decline of archaeology in Iraq, from the Institute's exemplary excavations in the Diyala basin in the 1930s to the two decades of destructive looting initiated by the Kuwait war and subsequent Shia uprising in 1991.
