This book is an outstanding contribution to Neo-Assyrian studies. Since the last quarter of the twentieth century there has been a renewed interest in the Assyrian empire and a great deal of attention has been given to understanding the compositional nature of Assyrian royal inscriptions. Initially, scholars aimed to understand the political history of the era, and in more recent decades the interest has shifted towards examining Assyrian royal texts and art as sources for the royal ideologies and structures of power, rather than straightforward history. Bach's study follows this trajectory and takes it in a new direction: an examination of the nature and development of the systems of transtextuality in Assyrian “royal narrative texts” in the second and first millennia bce, which includes both annalistic styled “royal inscriptions” and Assyrian royal epics. The result is an engaging methodology that recognizes how the ancient scribes employed in the service of the Assyrian rulers alluded to or cited imagery, motifs, and phrases of well-known literary texts when composing narratives in celebration of the kings. While there have been some notable studies of intertextual scribal practice in Assyrian royal inscriptions over the last twenty years, what is striking about this study is Bach's ability to balance the ideas of modern literary theorists with the ancient historical contexts beyond the realm of basic genre theory, semiotics, and structuralism that has been a feature of studies over recent decades. Further, this book was researched and written at the same time as another significant study along similar lines, of intertextuality in Babylonian myths and epics (S. Wisnom, Weapons of Words: Intertextual Competition in Babylonian Poetry (Leiden: Brill, 2019), reviewed by A.-C. Rendu Loisel in BSOAS 83/3, 2020, 512–5). Such timing indicates that the field of Assyriology is moving towards a new phase of hermeneutics.

“Transtextuality” is an analytical model Bach adopted primarily from the literary theorist Gérard Genette and adapted to suit his assessment of literary texts and motifs in Assyrian royal narratives. In the first part of the book, Bach defends his use of transtextual theory and over the course of four chapters outlines the five-step process of his analysis, which distinguishes extraordinary quotations of literary texts (intertextuality) and transformative allusions (hypertextuality) from regular generic features of a given text (architextuality), and thereby enables the scholar to build a network of transtextaulity and identify the cultural poetic milieu. The success of this model is its method of distinguishing generic commonness between texts from genuine intertextual endeavours, which can be employed further with compositions and corpora beyond those examined in this study.

In the fifth chapter, Bach turns from theory to application by using transtextuality to examine the development of the Assyrian royal narrative during the second millennium from basic royal labels and building texts into recognizable architextuality of forms and modes, which are summarized and presented in a 51-page appendix. The initial period of inter- and hypertextuality occurred during the reigns of Adad-nīrārī I and Tukulti-Ninurta I, which saw the advent of royal epics in the corpus of royal expression. From this point on the royal inscriptions elevated the royal figure by directly drawing on the mytho-poetic tradition of the war god, Ninurta and the literary text Lugal-e, in particular. A further theme incorporated in the royal narrative during the Middle Assyrian period (from Adad-nīrārī I to Tiglath-pileser I) is the king being associated with motifs of agriculture and livestock. This theme had previously been present in the royal expression of southern Mesopotamia, but it is, of course, also a connection with Ninurta's other key aspect of a god of earth. Bach's research shows that, except for a short-lived flourishing in the ninth century in the reigns of Ashurnasirpal II and Shalmaneser III, there was little further intertextual development until the time of the Sargonid dynasty in the sixth century.

The second part of the book shifts to the Sargonid era, and Bach applies his methodology to two major case studies: Sargon's Eighth Campaign and Esarhaddon's succession narrative. The former is a stand-alone text preserved on a single, large clay tablet, while the latter is a narrative unit excerpted from a longer text inscribed on hexagonal clay prisms that records the annals of Esarhaddon's reign. Both texts are examined, not only for the predominant hypertextualies, but also for their transtextual networks. Striking is the level of hypertextuality with the Epic of Gilgamesh, so often presenting the Assyrian rulers in the image of the mythical king of Uruk. Both texts also make direct allusions to a range of well-known mytho-epic texts, and Bach shows that Esarhaddon's succession narrative is a part of a wider field of texts including proverbs, the ritual text Maqlû, and the Series of the Fox. In this way, Bach establishes not only the high literary nature of these texts, but the exact methods the Assyrian scribes employed. One is left with a picture of a highly sophisticated scribal culture at the Assyrian courts.

Bach concludes his book with the words “Es bleibt noch viel zu tun. Hier fängt die Geschichte an”. One hopes that this is just the beginning of a new era of a literary-critical understanding of the nature of the Assyrian royal narratives. Further studies of this nature will continue to reap handsome rewards.