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Intellectual Traditions in Islam , edited by Farhad Daftary. 252 pages, bibliography, index. New York, NY: I. B. Tauris, 2000. $45.00 (Cloth) ISBN 1-86064-435-X

The traditional opposition between philology and archaeology must be abandoned for an approach that considers text as one of several possible ways of understanding the past. In order to read texts effectively we must understand the underlying cultural code, informed by archaeology. Yet, the relationship is mutual: archaeology alone cannot tell the whole story. Cracking the cultural code, however, is a difficult task when the society has been dead for thousands of years. In the final section, Parkinson notes that the cultural code of ancient Egyptian is ultimately un-crackable, for "humanity is itself a complex hieroglyph that cannot be completely deciphered" (p. 178). Finally, the book concludes with a summary of ancient Egyptian's relationship to other writing systems and codes yet to be cracked. Ancient Egyptian is by no means the most important ancient writing system, simply the most famous. While Parkinson successfully highlights the problems of reading ancient texts, his discussion of the social aspects of writing in ancient Egypt is somewhat limited in comparison to his treatment of philology and the function and types of texts. Questions of the magnitude of literacy and scribal education are only quickly touched upon. Of course, this reflects the paucity of evidence for social analysis, and the consequent traditional emphasis on philology, art history, and political history in Egyptology. Overall, Cracking Codes is a useful introduction to the issues of ancient writing systems. Writing does not exist in a vacuum, a model that can be applied to all cultures in all periods.