Before and After Babel

Now let us look at the next millennium. In political terms, the Near East had changed from a multipolar world to one in which vast, Mesopotamia-centered empires dominated: Assyria, Babylonia, and Persia in succession. One could imagine that the cuneiform writing practices so rigorously preserved in the imperial core continued in use in the newly conquered regions, most of them in the west (after all, the spread of the Latin language and its alphabet was on the back of Roman imperial expansion). While indeed in some footholds of imperial administration cuneiform was in use, throughout the region in direct contact with the empires and beyond it a multitude of scripts recording various languages appeared in common use. Most of them — Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and others — were written in their own alphabetic script (each a modified version of the Phoenician alphabet), but not all. In northern Syria and southern Anatolia the Luwian language was written in its own hieroglyphic script, which had the same variety and large number of signs as cuneiform and by all appearances was more cumbersome to write out. That case by itself shows that the popularity of vernaculars and alphabets was not because they were easier. Nor were they more democratic; their use was the outcome of choices made by local courtly elites, not by the people.

Those decisions were conscious and deliberate, involving not only languages and scripts but also writing supplies. The unfortunate consequence for historians today was that the latter included much parchment and papyrus instead of clay, materials that much more easily vanished over time. Luckily, much literary creativity survived as it became part of traditions of copying and elaboration throughout later centuries. Best known, of course, are the biblical and Greek texts, but there are also Aramaic ones such as the Story of Ahiqar. These works were created in the shadow of empires, often when the threat of the latter was looming or after the authors’ people had lost independence and become imperial subjects — the Judeans in exile, for example. These authors did not just imitate models from the imperial core where the cuneiform tradition was preserved and developed, but oftentimes creatively modified these models to contest and undermine their messages. These were acts of resistance. The Tower of Babel story quoted above contains a mock Babylonian building inscription and turns the idea that Nebuchadnezzar’s rebuilding of Babylon was a creation of order into one of disorder and confusion. Likewise, in fifth-century Athens the playwright Aeschylus in The Persians turned the Mesopotamian trope of Ionians as fish escaping into the sea around by presenting the Greeks at Salamis killing off Persians like fish in the sea.