Acknowledgements
These volumes had their origin in my 2012 dissertation on the Diagnostic Handbook Sa-gig and its cuneiform commentaries, but evolved significantly after years spent thinking over and endeavoring to inhabit the logical processes and language choices of the ancient authors. Over these years, many helped shape my intellectual growth as a historian of ancient science and medicine, to whom I remain deeply grateful. Here, I voice my acknowledgements particularly of those who contributed in more direct ways to the creation of these volumes.
Among my teachers at Yale, first thanks goes to my Doktorvater Eckart Frahm, of whose profound knowledge, nuanced scholarship, and gentle friendship I am recipient, and whose wise counsel and encouragement continue to help me navigate the waters of academia. Benjamin Foster made sure class times were always happy times, and inspired me to think big ideas, to turn a fresh eye to old problems, and to love my calling as a lifelong student of the humanities. To Kathryn Slanski, I owe the illumination of countless lines of Akkadian text, a model for teaching with carefulness and clarity, and a warm interest in my personal and academic life.
Frahm’s book on Origins of Interpretation (2011) provided a preliminary list of Sa-gig commentaries that laid the foundation for my work. Hermann Hunger displayed a remarkably intuitive grasp of commentarial logic already in his editio princeps of the Uruk commentaries, and Andrew George his rich insight into the layers of intertextuality for commentaries on Sa-gig Tablet 1. Any improvements in understanding these texts, on my part, represent heights achieved only on the shoulders of giants like these. Marten Stol combed through my dissertation and returned fourteen priceless pages filled with observations, amendments, and pure musings. Characteristic of his generosity in our interactions over a decade, Markham Geller shared results from his own unpublished research, and showed an admirable openness in seriously deliberating even viewpoints and interpretations that differed from his own. Uri Gabbay carefully read my early commentary editions and notes and sent me his insights and articles. While visiting the British Museum in early summer of 2013, Christopher Walker liberally provided me with a list of Sa-gig and other commentaries gathered from his own studies, giving me a head start in mulling over these manuscripts, including several that would be announced only years later through Yale’s Cuneiform Commentaries Project (CCP).
From Stefan Maul I received hospitality and memorable lessons in cuneiform epigraphy during my yearlong stay at Heidelberg (2008–2009), as well as permission to consult the Geers copy (notebook N 39) of Tablet DT 87 (§II.1.18). Ulrike Steinert offered valuable help by collating readings in the difficult tablet STT 403 (§II.1.5) from Istanbul, while Geller allowed me to look at his transcription and hand copy of the joints BM 43854+43938 (§II.1.7). Christopher Woods shared with me tablet photos and his own readings of the lexical composition Igituh, which he prepared for the Materialien zum sumerischen Lexikon series. I am grateful to Hunger and Margarete van Ess for permission to use tablet photos from the Uruk excavations, to Ulla Kasten and Elizabeth Payne for those from the Yale Babylonian Collection (§II.1.19), and to Joseph Shemtov for those from the John Frederick Lewis Collection of the Free Library of Philadelphia (§II.1.23). While most commentary tablets from the British Museum were photographed by me, I thank Jonathan Taylor for later sending me photos of tablets that were unavailable when I visited—all by courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum.
At Yale, I benefitted from Samuel K. Bushnell (2010–2011) and Teaching (2007–2012) Fellowships, and a Landesstiftung Baden-Württemberg Scholarship (2008–2009) that funded my stay at Heidelberg. Later, I was fortunate to receive support for my work from a Provost’s Career Enhancement Postdoctoral Scholarship (2012–2014) at the University of Chicago, and subsequently, from research funds provided by the university’s Oriental Institute and College. Above all, the astonishing diversity of expertise in the Oriental Institute compelled me to broaden my perspective on ancient studies and the kinds of questions to ask of my work, so as to situate it within larger agenda in the humanities and social sciences. I thank Christopher Woods, Theo van den Hout, and Robert Biggs—the best of mentors during my early days at the Oriental Institute—as well as Rebecca Hasselbach-Andee and Matthew Stolper, whose lively conversations illumined various topics in these volumes. From Biggs and Van den Hout, I received also gifts of many weighty tomes on Mesopotamian medicine, astronomy, and scholarship, which line my office shelves as monuments of their generosity.
I thank the editors of the Cuneiform Monographs series for their oversight of this project and their prompt responses to my concerns and queries, as well as the staff at Brill Academic Publishers for their meticulous efforts in seeing these volumes to print. Special acknowledgement is due to Katelyn Chin, who was my liaison at Brill from the very beginning in 2012, and who showed unfailing optimism and patience that these manuscripts would one day come to fruition.
On a personal note, I am grateful to my dear mother, Chiam Siew Beng, for her years of love and friendship, and who has been a refreshing fount of strength in support of my academic interests and life choices. To my mother and my fondly remembered late father, Wee Titt Hock, I dedicate these volumes.
John Z. Wee
8 April 2019