?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.
Epub (Kobo), Epub (Adobe)
Publication Date: 09/12/2022
- ISBN:
- 9780197634684
- 9780197634684
- Category:
- General & world history
- Format:
- Epub (Kobo), Epub (Adobe)
- Publication Date:
- 09-12-2022
- Language:
- English
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
This item is delivered digitally
Great!
Click on Save to My Library / Lists
Click on Save to My Library / Lists
Select the List you'd like to categorise as, or add your own
Here you can mark if you have read this book, reading it or want to read
Awesome! You added your first item into your Library
Great! The fun begins.
Click on My Library / My Lists and I will take you there
Click on My Library / My Lists and I will take you there
Reviews
Be the first to review Before and after Babel.
Share This eBook: