NINO-EOL Spring Lecture: Before Babel and After. Scriptures and Languages ​​in the Ancient Near East

The numerous texts of the Ancient Near East give us a wide palette of scripts and languages, which make the history of the region one of the most interesting in Antiquity. This lecture is based on the book Before and After Babel. Writing as Resistance in Ancient Near Eastern Empires , forthcoming with Oxford University Press. She outlines how the use of languages ​​and scripts changed radically between the second and the first millennium BC. – before Babel and afterwards – and explains how we can interpret the explosion of new writing systems in relation to the growing threat of the infamous empires of Mesopotamia.

Marc Van de Mieroop is professor of Ancient Near Eastern History at Columbia University, New York.

This is a hybrid reading. Come to the National Museum of Antiquities (Leemanszaal) and have a drink with us afterwards. Or follow the lecture online via Zoom: register here for the Zoom link.

No recording is made; it is not possible to review the lecture later.