Preface

To present this Festschrift as a tribute to Michael Roaf, someone who has often ful-minated openly about the proliferation of the genre, is not something we undertake lightly. In searching for inspiration for this Preface one turns ‒ where else? ‒ to Wikipedia. There one reads: “Die Herausgabe von Festschriften ist freilich nicht unumstritten”.1 Indeed. Even worse: „a Festschrift frequently enough also serves as a convenient place in which those who are invited to contribute find a permanent re-sting place for their otherwise unpublishable or at least difficult-to-publish papers“.2 And that’s without even mentioning the “graveyards of scholarship”! We have done our best to navigate the pitfalls, knowing full well that whatever we do it will irritate the honorand but will perhaps thereby afford him some little pleasure. In any case, it is a testimony to Michael’s breadth of scholarship, and to his incisive critical per-spective, that so many friends, colleagues and students past and present were willing to risk such an exposure and to offer their contributions to this collection of essays presented on the occasion of his retirement from the Institut für Vorderasiatische Ar-chäologie of Munich University. We hope that the contents reflect in some small wa