Ancestor of the West: Writing, Reasoning, and Religion in Mesopotamia, Elam, and Greece

Abstract

Translation of: L'Orient ancien et nous. "In this introduction to the ancient world, three leading French historians explore the emergence of rationality and writing: how it developed and how it is remarkably similar to our own tradition. We learn that the supposed twin pillars of Western civilization, Greece and the Bible, were hardly freestanding: they elaborated logical and religious structures that had developed much earlier in Mesopotamia. At the same time Ancestor of the West reminds us that these cultures were precursors of our own precisely because they possessed an intelligence that we still recognize. The ancients, even in their earliest writings, thought like us."--Jacket. Foreword / Francois Zabbal -- Religion and reasoning in Mesopotamia. The birth of civilization ; The first writing ; The intelligence of the world ; The gods : a reasonable religion / Jean Bottero -- Writing between visible and invisible worlds in Iran, Israel, and Greece. Elamite civilization and writing ; Consonant alphabets, the Greek alphabet, and Old Persian cuneiform ; Old Persian cuneiform : writing as cosmological ritual and text ; Writing--and some thoughts on Hebrew and Greek / Clarisse Herrenschmidt -- Writing and civil religion in Greece. Myths and reasonings -- The polis : shared power / Jean-Pierre Vernant.