This volume represents the seventh in the above-mentioned “Guides to the Mesopotamian Textual Record” series, a series proving to be the most informative and accessible forum for handbooks to Assyriology of our time. The present volume does not fail: Koch takes on and systematically lays out the richest and most diverse area among the learned cuneiform writings, described accordingly since, as Koch's presentation makes clear, a more limited label of genre would oversimplify considerably the complexity of the textual record. Indeed, as Koch notes, the contents of divination texts spread into other scholarly traditions, some of which, namely commentaries and medical texts, form the subject of similar volumes either published or in preparation. Though the stated concern of the volume is records from the first millennium, Koch provides historical and textual contexts going back to the origins of divination and divination literature. The presentation, clear and mostly tidy, builds on important earlier contributions. While notable omissions occur, both in general (e.g. S. Maul's Die Wahrsagekunst im Alten Orient, Munich, 2013) and specific contexts (e.g. J.-J. Glassner, “Écrire des livres à l’époque paléo-babylonienne: le traité d'extispicine”, Zeitschrift für Assyriologie und Vorderasiatische Archäologie 99, 2009, 1–81, pp. 83–4; C. Wilcke, “Das Recht: Grundlage des sozialen und politischen Diskurses im Alten Orient”, in Wilcke (ed.), Das geistige Erfassen der Welt im Alten Orient: Sprache, Religion, Kultur und Gesellschaft, 209–44 (Wiesbaden, 2007), p. 123; F. Rochberg, “Old Babylonian celestial divination”, in Fs Leichty, 341–48 and A. George, CUSAS 18, 70–84, ad p. 149), these represent minor quibbles, and Koch's command of her overall subject is indisputable.

Koch's presentation proceeds through six chapters. Three of these (1, 2 and 6) are more general, concerning, respectively, a broad statement of introduction, the nature of the sources, and their contexts. The remaining three (3, 4 and 5) turn to overviews of specific divinatory techniques. Among these, the shorter chapter 5 concerns unsolicited (“natural”) techniques of divination witnessed via prophecy and dream-based divination; but it is the first two (3 and 4), concerning the solicited (“artificial”) divinatory avenues, that dominate the volume in terms of size and scope. These Koch labels the Art of the Seer (ch. 3), and the Art of the Scholar and Art of the Exorcist (ch. 4). The Art of the Seer, Koch's designation for bārûtu (lit. “observation, seeing”), primarily concerns extispicy, the most prominent divinatory technique from Mesopotamia in earlier times, which at least by the first millennium adopted this name; but Koch includes under this designation additional divinatory avenues as well, including lecanomancy, libanomancy, necronomancy, aleuromancy, various bird-related divination practices, Akītu-based omens (from Šumma Ālu), “everyday” oracles, as well as omens concerning the behaviour of the seer and the sacrificial lamb. The Art of the Scholar and Art of the Exorcist are not fully distinguished by Koch, though her concern lies more with the former, which she equates with ummânūtu and ṭupšarrūtu (lit. “scholarship”). In this regard Koch rightly turns first to the numerous manifestations of astrology and related interests, which surpass extispicy in the first millennium in popularity and regard; but under this label she includes materials from other techniques, too, including those regarding terrestrial concerns (Šumma Ālu), teratology (Šumma Izbu), illness and health (including Sakikkû), and human physiognomy (Alamdimmû).

Naturally many questions arise from so comprehensive a presentation. For want of space these cannot be addressed in detail here, though I will consider briefly the degree to which the tripartite breakdown Koch presents reflects native Mesopotamian thinking, at both the textual and practical levels. As Koch's own presentation makes clear, the picture presented by the evidence is inconsistent.

To be sure, evidence of the overlapping of one divinatory technique with another, whether in terms of the titles of their practitioners (e.g. extispicy's bārû and libanomancy's bārû ša qutrinni), overall subject (e.g. Bārûtu and Šumma Immeru), or even the considerable intertextuality between certain series (e.g. Šumma Ālu and Alamdimmû), all ably discussed by Koch, point to an unmistakeable coalescing of spheres of divinatory knowledge. Moreover, as Koch notes, some techniques and series were grouped together by the ancients themselves, for instance libanomancy and extispicy in the well-known etiology relating Enmeduranki's reception of divination, Sakikkû and Alamdimmû in reference to these series’ common editor, the Exorcist's Manual, or “library” catalogues – or, for that matter, the basic correlation of celestial and terrestrial omens in the Diviner's Manual. And at the administrative level, too, further evidence of set distinctions among astronomers, exorcists and diviners, and other professionals (see Maul, Die Wahrsagekunst, 277–8 ad SAA VII 1) lends further credence to the basic idea behind Koch's scheme.

And yet a presentation of these Arts as virtually distinct academic faculties should still give one room for pause, especially when set against the long history of Mesopotamia's fluidity with such conceptual matters. The likelihood of an established Art of bārûtu that regularly extended beyond Bārûtu (i.e. extispicy) to encompass every divinatory technique finds no clear evidentiary backing, notwithstanding a few exceptions, noted as such by Koch herself (p. 18 n. 40). Nor is one ṭupšarru Enūma Anu Enlil diviner's boast of having read physiognomic, teratological, and terrestrial omens (see SAA X 160) tantamount to all these and other divinatory literature comprising a standardized Art of the Scholar mandated for all. To what extent, then, can the abstractions of bārûtu, ummânūtu/ṭupšarrūtu, and āšipūtu be taken as indicative of a conscious codification effort of the first millennium Mesopotamian divinatory sciences in a manner inevitably suggested by Koch's presentation? Should our sense of the contemporary divination literature follow suit? These questions, significant in and of themselves, also bear on broader issues of Mesopotamia's intellectual self-definition – and thus certainly deserve further thought. Such thinking, and much more, will certainly find a solid grounding in Koch's excellent work.