| Abstract |
""The Lord confused the language of all the earth," so says the Tower of Babel story in the Hebrew Bible to explain why people communicate in countless languages while previously they spoke only one. This book argues that something like the biblical confusion really happened in the ancient Near East, not in speech but in writing. It examines the millennia-long history of writing there, and shows a radical change from the third and second millennia to the first millennium BC. While 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 people 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 empires that controlled their world, oftentimes as acts of resistance, aware of cosmopolitan ideas and motifs but subverting them. As a way to frame the rich intellectual history of this region in the ancient past, the book describes and analyzes the cosmopolitan and vernacular systems, how they interacted in multiple and intricate ways, and what the consequences were"-- Provided by publisher. |
