The new issue of the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research arrived today. It contains a review by Jacob Lauinger of the revised edition of Cuneiform in Canaan. Lauinger calls the book "an indispensable resoure for scholars interested in the topic" which is high praise. Nevertheless, he complains that several collations that reviewers made in their reviews of the first edition are not incorporated, or only partially incorporated without comment, in the second edition. And he provides further corrections from his own collations based on the photographs or hand copies provided. This is, of course, standard practice in scholarship. If this were American history, however, I am sure that the editors would have been scandalized that he would dare do such a thing. After all, when the historians have spoken the thinking has been done.
Showing posts with label Collation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Collation. Show all posts
Saturday, December 21, 2019
Monday, December 16, 2019
Collation News
To check a transcription against the original is called collation. Collation is standard practice in most disciplines that deal with manuscripts. According to some people, American history is not one of those disciplines.
I would like to illustrate the important role that collation plays in a review published this year in the Journal of Cuneiform Studies. Pascal Attinger reviews a volume but the late William W. Hallo, who taught me both Old Assyrian and Sumerian at Yale. The volume came out posthumously after Hallo had been working on it for more than half a century. Attinger's review is 17 pages long (Pascal Attinger, "Critical Review," Journal of Cuneiform Studies 71 [2019]: 191-207). It consists of a one page introduction, and ends with a three page bibliography. In between are fourteen pages of detailed corrections, mostly collations of the texts. Of the seventy-one texts in the volume, only four are missing collations. The reviewer thought ninety-four percent of the texts could benefit from correction through collating them again.
This need not reflect maliciousness on the reviewer's part. Hallo himself had published important advances in understanding through collating previous work again. I remember that in some cases where I had the publication of the text we were reading, and he had brought in the actual tablet that he let me collate it during class. Pas d'histoire.
I would like to illustrate the important role that collation plays in a review published this year in the Journal of Cuneiform Studies. Pascal Attinger reviews a volume but the late William W. Hallo, who taught me both Old Assyrian and Sumerian at Yale. The volume came out posthumously after Hallo had been working on it for more than half a century. Attinger's review is 17 pages long (Pascal Attinger, "Critical Review," Journal of Cuneiform Studies 71 [2019]: 191-207). It consists of a one page introduction, and ends with a three page bibliography. In between are fourteen pages of detailed corrections, mostly collations of the texts. Of the seventy-one texts in the volume, only four are missing collations. The reviewer thought ninety-four percent of the texts could benefit from correction through collating them again.
This need not reflect maliciousness on the reviewer's part. Hallo himself had published important advances in understanding through collating previous work again. I remember that in some cases where I had the publication of the text we were reading, and he had brought in the actual tablet that he let me collate it during class. Pas d'histoire.
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