L'Orient ancien et nous; l'écriture, la raison, les dieux

by Jean Bottéro, Clarisse Herrenschmidt, Jean-Pierre Vernant

L'invention de l'écriture et de la raison De Sumer et d'Akkad vient l'écriture qui, au IVe millénaire avant notre ère, sur le sol de l'Irak actuel, donne naissance à la raison déductive, ouvre de nouveaux horizons économiques et rend possible une religion universelle. Elamites, Achéménides, Juifs et Grecs tissent des liens inédits entre l'ici-bas et le monde invisible à travers l'alphabet et le langage. Les Grecs, inspirés en partie par Babylone, inventent l'univers du politique et de la religion civique. Ainsi, les cultures araméenne, juive, persane et grecque n'ont cessé de se croiser au fil des siècles, y compris en Islam. L'enquête que mènent dans ce livre les trois auteurs fait apparaître l'héritage commun des multiples courants issus des civilisations du Tigre et de l'Euphrate. Paru en première édition chez Albin Michel en 1996 (en Pluriel depuis 1998).

Genres: History, Ancient History

256 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1996

About the author

Jean Bottéro (30 August 1914 – 15 December 2007) was a French historian born in Vallauris. He was a major Assyriologist and a renowned expert on the Ancient Near East.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Bot...
http://www.lemonde.fr/disparitions/ar...

Reviews

[Marc Lamot · Rating 3 out of 5]

This booklet contains three essays written by eminent French specialists of ancient history. Jean Bottéro lyrically highlights the unique contribution that the Sumerians have made to Western culture in particular and humanity in general. Clarice Herrenschmidt offers a very thorough and rather abstract study of language and script forms among the ancient Persians, Hebrews and Greeks. And Jean-Pierre Vernant underlines the unique value of Greek civilization, both philosophically and politically. So, clearly a rather hybrid offer, of which the title (Ancestor of the West) clearly does not cover the load, because only a very limited amount of attention is paid to what the ancient civilizations have given Western society. Hybrid also because both Bottéro and Vernant are readable introductions, but Herrenschmidt’s one, deeply diving into linguistics, is almost impossible to follow. The book certainly has its merits, but seems to me slightly outdated in tone. More on this in my History-account on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show....

[Sense of History]

I read the original 1996 French edition, which apparently harks back to the specialized works each of the 3 authors previously provided. Therefore, this booklet is inevitably slightly dated. This is also evident from the tone the articles are set in. Jean Bottéro, for example, glorifies the invention of writing in overly lyrical terms as a fundamental step of humanity. Ditto with Jean-Pierre Vernant with a very classical exaltation of the Greek genius, and a focus on the legacy passed on to the modern West. Both are things that would no longer be posited with so much acclaim today. Clarice Herrenschmidt’s tone is much more businesslike in this regard, with the disadvantage that her very detailed study of language and writing forms is really for specialists. Also the original, French title of this book: “L'Orient Ancient et nous” does not quite cover the load, certainly not since there is quite a bit of attention for the ancient Greeks; in this respect the English edition is much more correct. And a final point of criticism: the Egyptian civilization is completely left out of the picture and that is remarkable to say the least.

But that does not mean that I didn’t really enjoy reading this book. Bottéro and Vernant in particular show with their graceful style the ecstatic insights to which a careful study of the past can lead. They also indicate in a very nuanced manner how religious ideas permeated all sectors of life in the ancient Mesopotamian cultures, and how at the same time they gave an impetus to the search for order in the chaos, as a first step to rational thinking. In the words of Bottéro: “this system, intelligent in itself, since based on an objective vision and without illusions of the world, supplemented with mythological explanations, all calculated for their plausibility and their likelihood, at the limit of what one could then aspire to research truth, this system was accompanied, in the minds of the ancient Mesopotamians, not by what we would call 'resignation', since it implies a kind of regret for what one does not have, but of an acceptance that must be qualified as reasonable”. It was an impulse that was subsequently taken a whole step further by the Greeks, as Vernant shows. With all the caveats I indicated in the beginning of this review, this sure is a little book worth reading, if you have specialist interest in this period of history.

[Yann · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cet ouvrage est la collation de trois articles, chacun assez longs, de trois auteurs spécialiste de l'orient antique. Le thème principal de ces trois texte, c'est l'écriture, dont on suit le développement successivement en Mésopotamie, en Iran, puis en Grèce. Comme il est impossible de traiter un sujet aussi vaste en si peu de place, et sans se familiariser soi-même avec ces langues, ces alphabets et ces textes qui nous sont parvenus en les examinant en détail, les auteurs ont pris le parti de faire sentir au lecteur de quoi il s'agit en multipliant les exemples, étymologies, afin que de donner un minimum de tangible au sujet.

Malheureusement, j'ai des sentiments un peu partagés avec ce livre, car si le sujet me passionne au plus haut point, j'ai trouvé le traitement un peu trop superficiel, et la plupart des éléments exposés m'étaient déjà connus. Également, au lieu de se contenter de faire une exposition déjà passionnante en soi, les auteurs s'aventurent parfois dans un terrain un instable de l'interprétation, et peinent parfois à être convaincants tant les liens qu'ils font entre une chose et une autre semblent insuffisamment fondés: le lecteur en est réduit à les croire sur parole. Mais en dépit de ces quelques faibles réserves, le livre se dévore, pour peu qu'on ait un peu d'amour pour le sujet.

[Mary · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book includes 3 essays originally written in French and translated into English. I found Bottero's essay on Mesopotamia very accessible to someone who has read a bit of Mesopotamian history and Vernant's essay on Greece fairly accessible to someone who has read a bit about early Greek history.

Herrenschmidt's essay on Elamite, Persian, Greek and Hebrew writing and thinking, however, includes a bit more linguistic detail and what I assume is valid linguistic theory (but might just be a lot of academic hooey...) than I was able to enjoy. If sentences like this make sense to you, perhaps you'll get more out of the essay than I did: "This separation of language and the signs used to write it, this independence between the sign and the syllabic unit, brought about an irreversible movement toward the appropriation of language by people." (p. 85) "Consonant alphabets mean significant progress in humans' appropriation of language, but they did not inscribe the sounds in the body of the speaker, but halfway between his body and his speech." (p. 96)

[Liam Malone · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think this is an important book. One I wish I was aware of many years ago while a grad student. It certainly explains well how writing came into being through Sumer, Babylon, Elam, and later the Levantine States and finally Greece (with some comparisons to India, China, and Rome). It is very learned, but also accessible and each essay makes good sense to me.

[William Bies · Rating 5 out of 5]

Among this recensionist’s pleasanter childhood memories was poring over the colorful topographical maps in his mother’s old historical atlas from her college days at Saint Mary’s by Edward Whiting Fox (Oxford University Press, 1957). For the boy and his mother, the origin of civilization was a fascinating topic, only enlivened the more by exotic place names such as the Tigris-Euphrates river valley and peoples such as the Mesopotamians. This all would blossom into a serious interest, when an undergraduate, in archaeology and the ancient history of the classical and late antique worlds. Consequently, he could not but be favorably inclined when coming across the present little volume by Bottero, Herrenschmidt and Vernant.

The three authors review the contribution of the Mesopotamians and their successors from the point of view of the rise of writing, religion and mythology, paying attention to the—perhaps surprising—implications these early developments should have for us today. Bottero starts off with an admirable account the birth of civilization and writing in ancient Assyria and Babylonia. His observations on the connection between the physical environment and the spiritual temper of these peoples—initially, Sumerians and Akkadians (who were Semites)—are masterful, and recall Herder’s sympathetic treatment of the Egyptians, Phoenicians, Greeks and Romans in his ‘This too a philosophy of the formation of humanity’ of 1774. Of particular interest is Bottero’s reconstruction of the Mesopotamians’ religious milieu from the extant cuneiform tablets of oracles and the Atrahasis myth. They were—he contends—more empirical and rational observers of their world than one might at first suppose, and one can well wonder whether modern men and women in our day have advanced very far from superstition after all—pace the Enlightenment!—or, indeed, whether there may possibly be a rational core to superstition (as, in another context, it ought to be pointed out against silly thinkers like Carl Sagan that it is quite possible to be an intellectually sophisticated Hindu and still to believe in some sort of astrology, as indeed many do even today). Bottero’s most controversial point is that by accustoming people to the idea of logical consequence of an observed event (or sign), the oracles presaged the formulation of the syllogism at the hands of the Greeks and thus the scientific tenor of Western civilization taken as a whole. From his archaeologist’s point of view, it is not satisfactory to trace European culture back to its twin sources of the Greeks and the Jews, but one ought to go all the way back to the Mesopotamians.

Herrenschmidt’s contribution raises very profound reflections on the spiritual implications of a culture’s writing system, whether a syllabary as for the Mesopotamians and Elamites, or consonantal for the Hebrews and Phoenicians or fully alphabetical as for the Greeks (and, in their sequel, for us). She also portrays a fascinating picture of Zoroastrian religion and its successors in Persia and Iran.

Lastly, Vernant, in his chapter on myth and reasoning, sketches the arc of Greek culture from Mycenaean to archaic and classical times and raises some interesting points for reflection. For instance, what does it mean that the early pre-Socratics composed their philosophies in verse? Is this not, partially at least, in conflict with their supposed scientific temperament, which is to say, their methodological exclusion of the mythological? Vernant’s closing chapter on political power in the polis is of less vital concern to this recensionist; it is not so clear to him that the Greek polis did exclude the sacral dimension of political power, although to be sure it is less overt there than in the Orient; see, for instance, Sophocles’ Antigone.

All around, an intriguing and unconventional account of wonderfully ancient history and cultures!

[Amir A. · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is a trainwreck -- from the title that misrepresents the book's content, to the scholarship that is at times sketchy, to the prose that is frustratingly bad.