Egyptian Paleography

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230 The American Journal of Semitic Languages

beautiful plates we first find the delicate sculptures of the tomb-chapel of
"Pa-aten-m-heb," who was a royal craftsman, a fact which probably accounts
for the high character of the reliefs which fill his chapel walls. No museum
in Europe possesses a tomb-chapel of the Empire which compares with this
Leyden treasure in beauty. On Plate VII Dr. Boeser gives us the remarkable
figure of the harper singing the banquet song with its burden of "Eat, drink
and be merry for tomorrow we die." The noble head of the harper in its
powerful individuality is one of the finest things surviving from ancient
art. The excellence of this plate is such that this hitherto almost unnoticed
chef-d'oeuvre of oriental art can now be studied by everyone, almost as well as
from the original itself. In general art value the fragments from the walls
of Haremhab's tomb (Plates XXI-XXV) deserve as a whole even a higher
place. Dr. Boeser has wisely secured also a cast of the Vienna fragment and
inserted it among the Leyden fragments in its proper place which I assigned
to it thirteen years ago.

It would be impossible to discuss the wealth of sculpture from the best
period of Egyptian art, which these thirty-eight plates, the first instalment
of the Empire, offer. The editorial apparatus furnished by Dr. Boeser
maintains the high level of excellence displayed in the earlier sections of
this monumental work, which places all students of art, archaeology, and
history under a great debt.

James Henry Breasted

EGYPTIAN PALEOGRAPHY 1

This third volume of Moeller's admirable work covers the period of
declining Egyptian civilization from the middle of the tenth century B.C.
to the third century a.d., roughly a thousand years, at the end of which both
hieratic and demotic began to be slowly displaced by Coptic. It thus con-
cludes the presentation of the materials for a paleographical survey of some
three thousand three hundred years. Moeller demonstrates the gradual
crystallization of the old "book-hand" after the beginning of this last
millennium of the development, until it became a purely artificial hand as
dead as hieroglyphic itself. The correlative development, viz., the growth
of a still more rapid cursive to become after the eighth century b.c. the
familiar demotic of the Hellenistic and Roman age, does not fall within the
scope of Moeller's work as a study of hieratic paleography. We congratulate
Dr. Moeller on the accuracy and care which these seventy-two laborious
plates exhibit, as well as on the successful completion of this monumental
enterprise, for which Egyptology owes him a great debt of gratitude. In a
fourth volume Dr. Moeller purposes to discuss the great survey of materials

■ Hieeatische Palaeographie. Dritter Band. Von der zweiundzwanzigsten
Dynastie bis zum dritten Jahrhundert nach Christo. Mit elf Tafeln Schriftproben.
Von Georg Moeller. Leipzig: J. O. Hinrichs'sche Buchhandlung, 1912.

Book Notices 231

presented in these three volumes. It is much to be hoped that he may also

add our only lacking chapter in the history of Egyptian cursive writing,

namely, a volume on demotic, an undertaking on which I am told he is now

engaged,

James Henry Breasted

DOCUMENTS OF MURASHU SONS OF NIPPUR

Another volume of texts 1 by Professor Clay completes the Murashu
archives dated in the reign of Darius II, with the exception of a number in
the possession of private individuals (Preface, p. 7). A cursory reading
of the texts revealed few which differ in content from those published in
Vols. IX and X. The chief value of these documents, therefore, is to be
found in the personal names which they contain, from which we are able to
trace in some small degree the movements of the Indo-European and
Hebrew-Aramean peoples in this period. Professor Clay acknowledges
in his preface the help of Professor Torrey and Dr. Louis H. Gray in the
identification of Persian names, and that of Professor Ranke, who was able
to identify several Egyptian names. A number of Aramaic indorsements
have been added to the list already published in the Harper memorial
volumes. This addition to the documents from the time of Darius II
should offer an inducement to someone to make a thorough study of the
economic and social conditions of this period of history.

TEMPLE ARCHIVES FROM THE CASSITE PERIOD

Now that the date of the First Dynasty of Babylon seems to be fixed
astronomically at 2225-1926 B.C. (see Kugler, Sternkunde, etc., II, 2, Heft 1),
the gap between the end of that dynasty and the reign of Burna-Buriash again
stretches over more than half a millennium. The documents from, or
referring to, this obscure period are so few in number that scholars are ever
on the lookout for any ray of light that may be shed upon it. It was hoped
that the publication of more of the Nippur tablets might throw some light —
indirect, to be sure, from the nature of the documents — upon the reigns pre-
ceding that of Burna-Buriash. But the new volume 2 of texts from the
Cassite period, although rich in philological material, contains little
of historical importance. Professor Clay was able to point to "several
additional minor gains for the understanding of the chronology of the Cassite

1 Business Documents of Murashu Sons of Nippur Dated in the Reign of
Darius II. By Albert T. Clay. Vol. II, No. 1, of "Publications of the Babylonian
Section, the Museum," University of Pennsylvania. Philadelphia, 1912. 54 pp., 123
plates.

2 Documents from the Temple Archives of Nippur Dated in the Reions of
Cassite Rulers. By Albert T. Clay. Vol. II, No. 2, of "Publications of the Baby-
lonian Section, the Museum," University of Pennsylvania. Philadelphia, 1912. Pages
numbered 63-92, 72 plates.