Reviews VIII
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SINO-PLATONIC PAPERS Number 98 January, 2000 Reviews VIII by Peter Daniels, Daniel Boucher, and various authors Victor H. Mair, Editor Sino-Platonic Papers Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305 USA [email protected] www.sino-platonic.org SINO-PLATONIC PAPERS is an occasional series edited by Victor H. Mair. The purpose of the series is to make available to specialists and the interested public the results of research that, because of its unconventional or controversial nature, might otherwise go unpublished. The editor actively encourages younger, not yet well established, scholars and independent authors to submit manuscripts for consideration. Contributions in any of the major scholarly languages of the world, including Romanized Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM) and Japanese, are acceptable. In special circumstances, papers written in one of the Sinitic topolects (fangyan) may be considered for publication. 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Issues from no. 1 to no. 170, however, will continue to be sold as paper copies until our stock runs out, after which they too will be made available on the Web at www.sino-platonic.org. _______________________________________________ Table of Contents William Ryan and Walter Pitman. hbh3 Flood: 23k Scie~~#~$cDDisc~~ies about the Event thai Changed History. Victor H. Mair, ed. 711e Bro~zzeAge arm' Early iron Age Peoples of Eastern Central Asia. Marc-Alain Ouaknin. Mysteries of the Alphabet. Leonard SMaiR. Ek Afpk&r verss &e GdAss: Tke €m$kt betweerr Word rmd Image. Jok~kke~. At@kk&LaBd: The Letters in Hi-v and lrnagtagtwtio~z. Andrew Robinson. The Story of Writing: Alphabets, Hieroglyphs and Pictograms. Geergeskan. Writing: ?k5b-y ct/Apb&ts and Scripts. The above 7 books are reviewed by Peter T. Daniels. JI Xianlin, Werner Winter, and Georges-Jean Pinault. Fragments of the Tocharian A Maitreyasamiti-NZjaka t# the Xhj- Mztsmm, China. Gang Yue. The Mouth That Begs: Hunger, Cannibalism, and the Politics of Eating in Modem China. CHEN Gang, SONG Xiaocai, and ZHANG Xiwhen. XihiBeijz~zg bqm czdimz [A Dzctimlcay of Modrn Spoken Pekmgeese]. ZHOU Yimin. Beijzng kap~yqb: c$a juan [A Grammar of Spaken Pehgese: Morphology]. Mark Edward Lewis. Writing and At&wi~ FH~&Ckina. Keith Quincy. Hmong: History of a People. Yang YE. Yignettesfrom the Late Miffg: A H4ia+p7 iRA&oL'o~y. M. Holt Ruffin and Daniel C. Waugh, eds. Civil Society in Central Asia. The above 8 books are reviewed by the editor. Mette Halskov Hansen. Lessoils in Being Chinese: Mi~orityEducation and Ethnic Identity in Southwest China. Reviewed by Sara Davis. Harold D. Roth. Original Tao: lmvard Training and the Foundations of Taoist Mysticism. Reviewed by Paul Rakita Goldin. Reviews VIII, Sino-Platonic Papers, 98 (January, 2000) William RYANand Walter PITMAN.Noah's Flood: Tlze New Scierztific Discoveries about the Event that Changed History. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998. Pp. 319. $25.00. ISBN 0-684-8 1052-2. - \ Reviewed by Peter T. Daniels. New York City This may be the worst title a generally worthy book has ever received. The authors are marine geologists- senior scientists at the Larnont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, and they are largely responsible for discovering that the Black Sea as presently known was created just about 5600 B.C.E. when a natural dam at the Bosporus, which held back the sea at a level some 400 feet higher than where the Black Sea was at the time, burst. Ryan, moreover, had previously discovered that the Mediterranean, too, had been dry in the not too distant past as well-maybe six million years ago. The bulk of the book (part 2,51-16 1) is a narrative of how those two discoveries were made, fully endnoted with references to the technical literature (263-302). It is definitely not a case of "Just the facts, ma'am," but a highly personal history of events at most of which the authors + were present; thankfully, the narrative is well written even though no journalist or novelist co- author is credited. It reads quickly, and it seems to be a clear and authoritative presentation of the evidence and its interpretation-an interpretation, we are given to believe, that has never been in the slightest controversial. About the only hint of conflict involved some KGB surveillance of oceanographic surveying in the Black Sea by a joint Soviet-American team! Unfortunately-and perhaps it was at the publisher's insistence-the hydrogeological part is preceded (part 1,2147) by a conflated account of the decipherment of cuneiform (which manages to completely miss out Georg Friedrich Grotefend, Edward Hincks, and everyone else 5 involved except H. C. Rawlinson) and George Smith's discovery and initial interpretation of the Flood tablet from the Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh. Well, I suppose it's adequate history for a pair of marine geologists, but it certainly isn't close to an accurate representation of the events. Reviews VIII. Sino-Platonic Papers, 98 (January. 2000) The last part of the book relates the Black Sea flood event to the human population of the area (part 3, 165-225). Knowing nothing of Near Eastern archeology, and less of European archeology, I must accept the authors' claims that the epoch of the flood coincides with the appearance all across Europe of new cultures: vinza, Linearbartdkeramik, Danilo-Hvar. Harnangians. To the south, they also connect "the UbaidsW-this and other transmogrifications of terms for archeological sites into names for peoples like "the Halafs" and "the Kurgans" suggest even to this tyro that the authors have scarcely more than slummed the relevant literature and did not have this portion read by appropriate commentators. I have never heard anyone who knew her refer to Dame Kathleen Kenyon as "Kay"; having that be the only name she is granted seems inappropriately cheeky, to say the least. I am on much surer ground (as it were) in the chapter concerning the spread of languages. It is possible that the flood relates to the dispersal of Indo-European; connecting it with the Tocharian manuscripts of nearly 7000 years later, or with the possibly proto-Tocharian mummies from several millennia earlier than that, seems a stretch. Deriving Semitic-speakers from a population on the southern shore of the Black Sea that fled across the Taurus into Mesopotamia in two branches (Akkadian- and West Semitic-speaking, presumably) strikes me as much less defensible, especially since on the map (p. 194)-but nowhere in the text-"pre-dynastic Egyptians" are said to come from the far northwestern coast of Anatolia. (In this connection we note an acknowledgment to Colin Renftew, in whose Scientzjic American article about a decade ago [Oct. 19891 there is no evidence of awareness that Egyptian and Semitic are part of the Afroasiatic phylum, most of whose languages are firmly established in Africa.) The brief discussion of language history and comparison (208ff.) is hopelessly muddled, and repeated mentions of "Kartvalian" further erode confidence (the Georgian language belongs to the Kartvelian family). Just about the only sources cited in this area are the well-known books by the archeologists Renfrew and J. P. Mallory (identified as a respected linguist!) and a Scientific American article by T.V. Gamkrelidze and V. V. Ivanov (March 1990). The finding by Don Reviews VIII, Sino-Platorzic Papers, 98 (January, 2000) Ringe et al.'s computer analysis that Anatolian was the first family to branch off from lndo- European is presented as if it were a surprise (212). The next chapter describes Parry and Lord's discovery of the bardic tradition, in hopes of explaining how tales of a catastrophic flood could have survived several thousand years to appear in various mythologies. Finally, there is a telling of the Babylonian flood story pieced together from many published translations (part 4,229-59).