Before and after Babel: Writing as Resistance in Ancient Near Eastern Empires

“The Lord confused the language of all the earth,” so the Tower of Babel story in the Hebrew Bible's book of Genesis tells us to explain why the world's people communicate in countless languages while previously they all spoke only one. This book argues that the biblical confusion really happened in the ancient Near East, not in speech, however, but in writing. It examines the millennia-long history of writing in the region and shows a radical change from the third and second millennia to the first millennium BC. Before “Babel” any intellectual who wrote did so as a participant in a cosmopolitan tradition with its roots in Babylonia, its language, and its cuneiform script. After “Babel” scribes from all over the eastern Mediterranean, including Greece, used a profusion of vernacular languages and scripts to express themselves. Yet they did so in dialogue with the Babylonian cuneiform tradition still maintained by the successive Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian empires that controlled their world, oftentimes as acts of resistance, aware of cosmopolitan ideas and motifs but subverting them. In order to frame the rich intellectual history of this region in the ancient past Before and after Babel describes and analyzes the Babylonian cosmopolitan system, how ancient Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, and other vernacular systems interacted with it in multiple and intricate ways, and their consequences.

Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations Introduction Part I: The Babylonian Cosmopolis The cuneiform sign Chapter 1: Reading Gilgamesh in the Zagros Mountains: the eighteenth century BC Chapter 2: In the spell of Babylonian writing Chapter 3: Mystery Guardians of an ancient tradition Chapter 4: The height of cosmopolitanism: Reading Gilgamesh in Hattusas Coda Part II: The Vernacular Millennium The Tower of Babel Chapter 5: Scrupulous continuity Chapter 6: Luwian: The Ephemeral Success of a Non-Cosmopolitan Tradition Chapter 7: Vernaculars that changed the world: Phoenician and Aramaic Chapter 8: From minority languages to world literatures: the Hebrew case Chapter 9: From minority languages to world literatures: the Greek case Chapter 10: The vernacular and its consequences Epilogue: Clash of cosmopoleis? Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Marc Van De Mieroop is Professor of History at Columbia University. His previous books include The Ancient Mesopotamian City, Philosophy before the Greeks, and, as coauthor, World in the Making: A Global History.

Review :
With his latest book, Before and After Babel, Van De Mieroop homes in on the history of writing, and the result is arguably his most impressive book to date...Van De Mieroop's prose is crisp and easy to follow; his argument is clearly stated and always grounded in concrete case studies. Whether as an intervention in the history of writing-both cuneiform and alphabetic-or as a mine of fascinating case studies, Before and After Babel is sure to reach a wide audience. Marc Van De Mieroop has written a great book on the culture of the written word in the early Middle East. The subject is a fascinating one in its own right, and only gains in interest through the masterful presentation it receives in this monograph.