Before and after Babel

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.

La enseñanza de la escritura en Ugarit. Continuidad y variaciones del currículum escolar mesopotámico en la Siria del Bronce Final

“…Además, podemos considerar que una vez terminada esta formación, se pasaría a una tercera fase en la que el estudiante adquiriría una formación práctica en el ejercicio de estas tareas bajo la tutela de un profesional 132 , en este caso, en la Cella de las Tablillas junto al especialista encargado de estos rituales 133 , lo cual se corresponde con la presencia de ejercicios escolares encontrados también aquí. Por otro lado, esta superior formación en la tradición intelectual babilónica dio como resultado la creación de obras autónomas inspiradas en dicha tradición 134 , como hemos podido comprobar en las ediciones ugaríticas del šumma izbu. No obstante, las cartas destinadas a las más altas personalidades del estado y las menciones al rey en varios textos rituales vinculan igualmente esta casa al poder político 135 , especialmente en su vertiente más religiosa.…”

Scribal Revelations in Ancient Judaism

“…Aramaic, which used alphabetic writing, had several advantages over the cuneiform used in Mesopotamia, which took several years to learn. Although it was possible to use cuneiform at a lower level in everyday life (contracts of merchants, civil documents), scientific and literary texts were taught at higher school levels (Van De Mieroop 2023). Alphabetic scripts such as Aramaic were easier to learn, and the flexibility of the writing made it suitable for use in different types of text and languages.…”