72 REVIEWS OF BOOKS translating (passim) forms of baltu with sab?tu in accounts of the outcome of battles by phrases of the type "we took no prisoners", when "we took none alive" would have been equally idomatic English and would have more precisely indicated the underlying Akkadian. An evaluation of the new material provides certain problems. There is firstly the impossibility of checking the cuneiform (already touched upon), and there is also the difficulty of understanding the Babylonian version in complete detail without reference to the other versions, of which new editions are planned but not yet available. The few comments offered below, mainly concerned with minor slips or infelicities of transliteration or rendering, are based exclusively on the Babylonian version. p. 11, line 1, AD-?a: read AD ??. p. 11, line 3, LUGAL.MES-&/-/W: the reading of King and Thompson, taking ??-nu as an independent pronoun, not a pronominal suffix, with the meaning "are (or have been) kings", conforms better to syntactical usage and gives at least as good sense. p. 12, line 4, a-ga-ni-t?: despite CAD, I, Al, 143b-144a, there is no justification for transliterating such a fern. pi. other than as a-ga-ne-t? (and correspondingly in similar forms, passim). p. 13, line 12, ?? NUMUN-w: wrongly translated (p. 54) "of our line", which follows the restoration by King and Thompson (f? z?r-u-ni), which the present reading claims to supersede. p. 16, lines 21-22, mam-ma ul i-?al-lim-ma ina UGU mgu-ma-a-t? a-ga-l?u-u ma-gu-?? ul mam-ma i-qab-bi a-di UGU ?? ana-ku al-li-ku: rendered (p. 55) "No one would fare well in the matter of that Gaumata, the Magush, and no one would speak until I came". An alternative rendering which might be considered is: "No one was safe, but no one would speak against that Gaum?ta the Magush, until I came". p. 31, line 70, ina lib-bi-su-nu: omitted in translation (p. 58, OP paragraph 38). p. 45, line 106, la tu-ub-ba-tu-M-nu-tw. omitted in translation (p. 61, OP paragraph 65). H. W. F. SAGGS A MEDITERRANEAN SOCIETY: THE JEWISH COMMUNITIES OF THE ARAB WORLD AS PORTRAYED IN THE DOCUMENTS OF THE CAIRO GENIZA. VOL. Ill: THE FAMILY. By S. D. GOITEIN. pp. xxi, 552, map [on endpapers]. Berkeley, etc.: University of California Press, 1978. ?15. There can be few scholars who are unacquainted with the remarkable and massive hoard of manuscripts originating in the Ben Ezra Synagogue of Fust?t which has come to be known as the "Cairo Geniza", and even fewer students of the Near and Middle East who are unaware of its importance for Jewish, Islamic, and general medieval history. What is not so widely appreciated, however, is that the initial scholarly productivity engendered by its late 19th-century discovery was not followed by systematic and comprehensive examination of all the material, and that renewed preoccupation with the Geniza over the last quarter of a century, especially in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, New York, and, latterly Cambridge, owes much to the efforts of Professor Goitein (in recent years at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton) to exploit the source with determination and enthusiasm and to encourage others, a whole school in fact, to do likewise. (See his "Involvement in Geniza research" in Religion in a religious age, edited by him, Cambridge, Mass, 1974.) The intellectual and pedagogical forces which have propelled Professor Goitein's scholarly industry for over half a century (see R. Attal's A bibliography of the writings of Prof. Shelomo Dov Goitein, Jerusalem, 1975) happily show no signs of abating and he is now not only concerned with the completion of the work here being noticed but hopes, among his future plans, soon to produce the long-awaited and oft-promised India book covering the links forged with that subcontinent by the medieval Jewish merchants of Egypt. The present book is the third part of a work which had originally been planned as tripartite, but will now extend to four volumes, and the remaining sections of which deal with working people, commerce and finance, travel and seafaring (Vol. I, 1968, reviewed in