This new course in Babylonian (the Akkadian dialect spoken in Babylon) is quite an ambitious work. True, it doesn't really tackle the cuneiform script (this is introduced towards the end of the book) but it does cover an awful lot of Babylonian. The author presents both Old Babylonian (OB), the earliest form of the dialect, and Standard Babylonian (SB), the later literary dialect largely modelled on OB, and does so by means of exercises each of which involves normalizing a cuneiform text (in transcription) and then translating it. The course will give the reader the real ability to approach a Babylonian text and translating it, at least from the published transcriptions. Learning to read cuneiform should be reasonably straightforward as the learner will understand the writing system reasonably well (though he will still have to learn to deal with the additional task of learning to choose between the graphically indistinguishable phonetic alternatives within the writing system).
Small gripes: the author takes a current rather trendy way of teaching entirely from 'authentic materials', so no English-Babylonian exercises. He makes the suggestion that the reader can if he wishes use the key to translate from English to Babylonian, but the key includes the English translation accompanied by the normalized Babylonian text that the student is trying to translate to. (No English-Babylonian vocabulary either, no doubt because of the lack of exercises, something that would have been a help.) So it will appeal less to 'hobby linguists' who like to produce ancient languages, and to those of us who believe that composition in a language is the best tool for deepening ones knowledge of a language.
No chapter vocabularies: the author says that the reader 'can choose which words he wants to learn'. Great; but the reader doesn't know which are the most common, and it is here that some help might have been useful. It's a bit frustrating, too, that one can never do an exercise and expect to be able to read it: almost every exercise involves new vocab.
The web-site isn't running yet. When it is, I do hope that the author or Routledge will post the Babylonian-English glossary (and the list of Sumerograms) that he suggests we photocopy from the book as PDFs on the website as it would be easier (and clearer) for most people to print rather than to photocopy. And, perhaps, the English answers in a format we can use for Babylonian composition exercises.
Finally, while the author has tried to explain technical vocabulary, he still slips in unexplained technical terms that will challenge many readers. A technical glossary might have been a help.
I look forward to finishing the book in due course. It's been fun so far!
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