I wrote a post a bit ago about some aspects of the Finnish education system that a contributor to the Wall Street Journal highlighted. The Finnish approach has been studied fairly extensively since high school students perennially perform well in international testing, however, so do Dutch students. Open Education has a four-part series of posts that are worth checking out concerning education in the Netherlands:

Education in the Netherlands: Another High Performing Country

Education in the Netherlands: Testing, Tracking and Results

Dutch Secondary School Options: A Model for the US?

The Netherlands: A Proper Emphasis on Vocational Education

Last week Alan Lenzi posted some of the books that he plans to read this summer, so I thought I’d post some of the books on my list as well.

I’m reviewing three books:

I’ll be up to my ears in Ur III stuff but here are some books for fun reading:

Pam Green took issue with one of my posts and started a blog.  It has the no-so-boring title, “Academic Hate Crimes.”

For the record, many of the scholars that she refers to in her first post are one and two generations removed from the present.  I agree with some of her concerns, but I also think that the field has changed since Kramer and Jacobsen were in their primes.  Furthermore, I think there are other reasons why these scholars did not produce critical first editions before they published translations for the general public.  One must remember that the field of cuneiform studies is still relatively young and we are still concerned with the task of deciphering many texts and have only just recently scratched the surface of literary criticism, etc.

Rick Bayless, owner of a couple high-end Mexican restaurants in Chicago (he has also been a judge on Top Chef), was in Cincinnati today as part of Macy’s Culinary Council and I went to meet him.  He prepared a really good shrimp with Mexican “chimichurri” sauce.  The sauce is green and pesto-like made from garlic, chilies, cilantro, parley, olive oil, salt, and water.  Then, Matt Madison who owns Madisono’s Gelato served a really outstanding Mexican-inspired gelato.

Now back to forming a prosopography of sheep fatteners and administrators in my Ur III Drehem and Umma tablets…

 The Israel Academy of Sciences has announced a second printing of Hayim Tadmor’s The Inscriptions of Tiglath-pilesar III King of Assyria which is a critical edition of these texts.  Tadmor was an amazing scholar and this volume is certainly a testament to his scholarly acumen.  Here is a flier announcing the second printing:

Announcement of the second printing of Tadmor’s critical edition of these inscriptions

Lorenzo Verderame provides an electronic version of the bibliography that he compiled for his 2004 dissertation The Role of the “Scholar” (ummânu) in the Neo-Assyrian Period, defended at the University of Rome “La Sapienza”.  

I noticed that my link to Bill Schniedewind’s Northwest Semitics class syllabus (which included tons of pdf versions of the articles and texts that he includes for the class–a real treasure trove) was dead.  I tried to find a live link but couldn’t.  However, Schniedewind does have many of the articles that he has authored available as free downloads here.

Gentry receives research grant for third time
April 28, 2008
By David Roach

For the third time, Peter Gentry, professor of Old Testament interpretation at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, has received a Lilly Theological Research Grant.

The grant, administered by the Association of Theological Schools (ATS) and funded by the Lilly Foundation, is awarded after a team of scholars evaluates applicants’ research proposals. ATS is the main accrediting agency for theological schools in North America.

Gentry plans to use the $12,000 award to fund research in Germany during a sabbatical from January through June 2009. The research will allow Gentry to finish a critical edition of the Greek text of Ecclesiastes for the Goettingen Septuagint Series…

Click here for the entire article.

All available volumes of CAD are now up for download.
http://oi.uchicago.edu/research/pubs/catalog/cad/
Several fascicles of CHD are also available.
http://oi.uchicago.edu/research/pubs/catalog/chd/

Others beat me to the punch, such as Pete Bekins and Jay Crisostomo, however, I thought I’d add the links as well. Furthermore, I’d like to thank the Oriental Institute for their electronic initiatives–not only is it a wonderful thing to have these great resources for free it is also very practical to have them in electronic form. Just today I used the electronic version of the L volume of the CAD with my Hebrew class to discuss an Akkadian cognate of a Hebrew word we encountered in the book of Ruth. It’s very impractical for me to lug around all the volumes of the print copy of the CAD but carrying a hard drive around isn’t too bad.

One last note–don’t forget about von Soden’s AHw. Duane Smith has a nice note about this that you should read. While CAD is certainly a monumental achievement and an invaluable resource, it is also well worth the time to check AHw for another opinion.

Want to a vacation a little more exciting than usual?  Well, Expedia is offering several vacation packages that Indiana Jones would enjoy.  The itineraries include a trip to Jordan in which you tour Petra and the Dead Sea as well as to Egypt which includes Aswan,  Abu Simbel, and Luxor.  The prices, however, are not as “Indiana Jones-ish”–no sneaking aboard a plane or temporarily borrowing a car without the owner’s permission–the Jordan trip starts at around $1,730 and Egypt $2,300 (prices do not include airfare from your home to the host country).