Epigraphy has long been a subject of tremendous fascination and prodigious investigation within Islamic studies, and has inspired a number of ambitious scholarly undertakings, such as the Materiaux pour un Corpus Inscriptionum Arabicarum (11 vols., 1894-1985) , the Repertoire chronologique d’epigraphie arabe (21 vols., 1931-91) and the Corpus Inscriptionum Iranicarum (30 vols., 1955-90). As their titles suggest, the genesis of these multivolume, multidecade compendia was largely archaeological and taxonomic. The thrill was in collecting and ordering (whether by region, language, chronology or media) as many inscriptions as possible, with the aim of using the material thus amassed to explicate aspects (historical, religious, economic, social, cultural, etc.) of Islamic civilization. In point of fact, the tremendous effort expended in the compilation and classification of countless inscriptions seems to have left researchers with little time or energy to fulfill any higher objective, and, with the exception of shorter studies (focused, for instance, on individual monuments or objects and generally published in article form), the resulting publications essentially begin and end as reference tools. Islamic Inscriptions picks up where MCIA, RCEA, CII and all the rest leave off, and finally starts to fulfill the potential of these venerable precursors. Its author, Sheila S....