Egyptology News

Bryn Mawr Classical Review ( Reviewed by Danijela Stefanovic)

Scott Noegel, Nocturnal Ciphers: The Allusive Language of Dreams in the Ancient Near East, American Oriental Series, 89. New Haven: American Oriental Society, 2007

Noegel's study deals with the very important phenomena of enigmatic dreams, their interpretation, word-play and punning within the cultural context of the Ancient Near East (i.e., Mesopotamia, Egypt, Canaan and Israel), Greece, and Rabbinic traditions. His basic idea is to demonstrate how dream interpretation was predicated by word-play and punning of dream interpreters. The research, as stated by the author (Introduction, pp. 1-3), has several intersecting goals: to understand the cultural context and function of word-play in the dream interpretation of Mesopotamia; to explain the presence of punning in Akkadian written sources; to analyze Egyptian oneirocritic punning as evidence for intellectual interconnections between Egypt and Western Asia; to show that enigmatic dreams attested in the literary tradition of the Eastern Mediterranean (for example, Canaan, Ugarit, and Israel, i.e., the Old Testament) also display mantic knowledge; and finally, to "trace the movement of the punning oneirocritic strategy and its changing contexts into later times and texts, including early Greek and Talmudic literature".