This revised and expanded PhD dissertation, submitted to the University of Trieste in 2010, is the first comprehensive work to tackle the difficult problem of the transmission of Sumerian texts in Late Bronze Age Syria and Anatolia. The book is centred around successive, catalogic presentations of the texts attested in individual areas during the period. Each section includes a summary of individual tablets; a discussion of its position in the recensional history of the work; remarks on orthographic and grammatical peculiarities; and occasional transcriptions of select lines. The presentation focuses on literary texts, including narratives, hymns, liturgies, wisdom texts, and incantations, but excluding lexical texts and monumental inscriptions.

Despite the limits set by the title, the first two chapters provide a comprehensive overview of the Sumerian tradition in Babylonia (pp. 33–86) and Assyria (pp. 87–129). Differences between the two are interpreted as evidence for “different stages in the transmission process of Sumerian literature” (p. 125). Together, these chapters provide the background to the discussion of Sumerian literary and magical texts in Ḫattusa (pp. 229–83), Emar (pp. 285–323), and Ugarit (pp. 325–36), preceded by a lengthy chapter on orthography (pp. 141–228). While the first two chapters are structured by genre, the following also divide the texts paleographically: Babylonian, Assyro-Mittanian, and Hittite ductus at Ḫattusa; Syrian and Syro-Hittite at Emar; Babylonian, Hittite, and Ugaritic at Ugarit. Since duplicates are attested at several sites, the purely geographic division quickly breaks down: the discussions of The Message of Lu-diĝira to His Mother (CTH 315; pp. 256–65) in Ḫattusa and of the Ballad of Early Rulers (pp. 298–310) in Emar anticipate the relevant tablets from Ugarit.

The summaries on Ḫattusa (pp. 337–59) and Emar and Ugarit (pp. 361–79) highlight the break at Ḫattusa with the curricular tradition at Nippur, the absence of epics such as Lugal-e and Angim, and the heavy focus on “practical” texts such as incantations, “likely related to the presence of foreign experts” at the Hittite court (p. 339). The Akkadian–Hurrian bilingual recension of the Instructions of Šuruppak and the “vanity theme” of numerous compositions suggest that “most of the Sumerian literary texts from Emar and Ugarit were connected with the education of scribes in the Old Babylonian period”, though bilingual transmission points to the “post-Old Babylonian stage of Sumerian literature” (p. 364) and the link to Nippur is often indirect. A final chapter (“Towards a history of Sumerian literature in the late bronze age”, pp. 381–386) establishes the following chronology: phonetically written incantations (CTH 800) at Ḫattusa (16th–15th centuries); Sumerian forerunners to the Hittite prayers to the Sun-God (KBo 19, 98) (15th–14th centuries); Assyro-Mittanian incantations, the hymn to Iškur/Adad, and Saĝ-geg VI to Ḫattusa as well as the incantations and prayers in Emar and Ugarit (14th–13th centuries); the Message of Lu-diĝira to his Mother to Ḫattusa and Ugarit as well as select incantations to all three cities (13th century); and, finally, Enlil and Namzitarra, the Ballad of Early Rulers, the hymn to Enki, and again incantations (late 13th–12th centuries).

While many details are open to debate, one major criticism can be raised: the scope of the subject often precludes detailed discussion of individual problems. Viano's identification of particular lines of transmission depends on the distinction of the Nippur corpus, the “Northern Babylonian tradition” (p. 30), and the “common Mesopotamian body of knowledge” (p. 346). The latter two remain poorly defined throughout. Northern tradition is essentially tied to “… phonetic orthography” as “a convention particularly adopted in Northern Babylonia” (p. 345). There are, however, numerous difficulties inherent in the opposition between Early Old Babylonian Nippur and Late Old Babylonian Sippar, including both the span of time separating the two and the nature of the tablet collections (mostly curricular and liturgical, respectively). There is no need, for example, to define the liturgical tradition as particularly “northern” even though many of the relevant tablets derive from Sippar and Kiš (see Delnero in Texts and Contexts, ed. P. Delnero and J. Lauinger (SANER 9; Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 96). Conversely, the syllabic writings in liturgical texts from Sippar can plausibly be interpreted as performative, and not exclusively regional. As Viano himself notes (pp. 30, 141), unorthographic writings are a recurrent feature of the Sumerian tradition: they certainly do not suggest an exclusively syllabic transmission as a separate, regional and recensional branch. However, the unorthographic writings provide the repeated basis for defining the monolingual incantations CTH 800 as “the earliest wave and the oldest tradition” of Sumerian at Ḫattusa, thus overturning the association with the Hittite imperial period offered by Klinger in Prechel (ed.), Motivationen und Mechanismen des Kulturkontakts (Eothen 13; Florence: LoGisma editore, 2005), 107 and Schwemer in Cancik-Kirschbaum et al. (eds), Diversity and Standardization (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2013), 153. The further suggestion that they “would have been brought to Ḫattuša as booty, probably together with āšipū priests” (p. 235) during the raids of Muršili I in Babylonia, is wholly specious. Additional attempts to support the northern tradition, including the association of ki-^dUtu-texts and “compositions on Utu” with Sippar “because the Ebabbar at Sippar was the main temple of the Sun-god” (p. 82), are similarly unfounded – see in particular Sallaberger, Der kultische Kalender der Ur III-Zeit (UAVA 7/1; Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1993), 215 f. on ki-^dUtu-rites attested in the Ur III-period at Puzriš-Dagān, Umma, and Nippur. The identification of the “earliest wave” in CTH 800 thus remains highly problematic.

Despite these reservations, the catalogue of available material stands as a welcome invitation to follow many of the threads opened in individual chapters. The resulting picture is one of remarkable heterogeneity and complexity and serves to reinforce cautious admonitions on the traditions of the Late Bronze Age: the mechanics and mechanisms of transfer established for a particular text are not necessarily valid for others, even of the same genre, and certainly not for other text types, languages, and forms (paraphrasing Klinger, p. 105). Viano's work thus provides a valuable contribution to a complex and much-neglected topic.