Umberto Bongianino: The Manuscript Tradition of the Islamic West: Maghribi Round Scripts and the Andalusi Identity (Edinburgh Studies in Islamic Art.) 528 pp. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022. £110. ISBN 9781474499583.

Abstract

from Nineveh and of a document from Assur dated to 646 BC (StAT 2 167) in order to reiterate the well-known facts that African, or specifically Egyptian, communities lived within Nineveh and Assur and that some of their members bore names that did not signal their African origins. The brief section “African–Mesopotamian relations: the Neo-Assyrian experience” (pp. 217–9) seeks to place the study into “a historical context, examining the periods before, during, and after Assyrian rule”, using the Amarna period and the Neo-Babylonian Empire as comparisons, and ends in speculation about the fate of the “exiled Africans” after the fall of the Assyrian Empire, without mentioning the fact that Egypt’s Saite Dynasty joined Assyria’s fight against Babylonians and Medes. After the bibliography (pp. 220–28) and the figures (pp. 229–37), there are appendices offering tables combining the material detailed in the chapter on “the individual level and the biographic perspective” (pp. 238–47) with the categories used in the subsequent chapter for gender/sex, age, class and temporal and spatial distribution, followed by tables of more detailed “demographic statistics” for Karlsson’s groups of identified, likely and anonymous Africans (pp. 247–9) and a table of “Egyptian names and words in cuneiform” (pp. 249–54). The volume concludes with indices of deities, people, places, texts, and Egyptian words (pp. 254–82). The volume’s main merit is that Mattias Karlsson enables anyone with an interest in the Egyptian, Libyan and Kushite (Nubian) language materials hidden among the masses of onomastic evidence from the Neo-Assyrian textual sources to easily access this data and locate references to the most recent text editions and studies, most of which are available and fully searchable online as part of the Archival Texts of the Assyrian Empire corpus (http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/atae/). Moreover, his table of Egyptian names and words as rendered in cuneiform will be useful for the identification of further Egyptian name material in newly discovered sources. By focusing on the people of African origin living in the Assyrian Empire, the book once again highlights this state’s multi-ethnic nature, especially in the seventh century BC.