Marc van de mieroop biography templates

Preview

 

Marc Van De Mieroop has come into his own as a historian of writing. Several of his previous books can be seen as steps in this direction, including Cuneiform Texts and the Writing of History, which discusses the kinds of information that can be extracted from written sources, and Philosophy Before the Greeks, which argues that the epistemology of Babylonian scholars was shaped by the written word.

But with his latest book, Before and After Babel, Van De Mieroop homes in on the history of writing, and the result is arguably his most impressive book to date.

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