Marc Van De Mieroop, Before and after Babel: writing as resistance in ancient Near Eastern empires. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. 360. ISBN 9780197634660Second, William Brown reviews the book at his Biblical Review Blog:Review by
Sophus Helle, Freie Universität Berlin. email@sophushelle.com... The historical narrative of Before and After Babel is propelled by a simple claim: that the nature of writing in the ancient Near East changed radically during the “Dark Age” that separates the late second and the early first millennium BCE, yielding two epochs in the pre-Classical history of writing that are treated separately in each of the book’s two parts. The straightforwardness of this claim lends the book a clarity of structure and argument, but it is also balanced in each chapter by a wealth of details and nuance that prevent the claim from falling into oversimplicity. ...
Review: “Before and after Babel: Writing as Resistance in Ancient Near Eastern Empires” by Marc Van De MieroopNOTE: This book is not to be confused with the somewhat similarly-titled recent book by Steven Fraade: Multilingualism and Translation in Ancient Judaism. Before and After Babel.... Overall, Van De Mieroop synthesizes and compiles a range of topics, regions, and fields of study into a single, accessible monograph. In doing so, he has constructed a history of writing, scripts, vernaculars, and cosmopolitan languages in the ancient Near East. Undoubtedly, this volume can be a helpful starting point for a general audience and students. And, indeed, Assyriologists and biblical scholars may find small nuggets throughout his work. Even so, the monograph offer no particularly striking or ground-breaking analysis that will significantly impact Assyriology, biblical scholarship, or other adjacent fields. In fact, many will find themselves disagreeing with Van De Mieroop as they read this monograph. ...
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