Philosophy before the Greeks: The Pursuit of Truth in Ancient Babylonia

by Marc Van de Mieroop

There is a growing recognition that philosophy isn't unique to the West, that it didn't begin only with the classical Greeks, and that Greek philosophy was influenced by Near Eastern traditions. Yet even today there is a widespread assumption that what came before the Greeks was "before philosophy." In Philosophy before the Greeks, Marc Van De Mieroop, an acclaimed historian of the ancient Near East, presents a groundbreaking argument that, for three millennia before the Greeks, one Near Eastern people had a rich and sophisticated tradition of philosophy fully worthy of the name.In the first century BC, the Greek historian Diodorus of Sicily praised the Babylonians for their devotion to philosophy. Showing the justice of Diodorus's comment, this is the first book to argue that there were Babylonian philosophers and that they studied knowledge systematically using a coherent system of logic rooted in the practices of cuneiform script. Van De Mieroop uncovers Babylonian approaches
to knowledge in three the study of language, which in its analysis of the written word formed the basis of all logic; the art of divination, which interpreted communications between gods and humans; and the rules of law, which confirmed that royal justice was founded on truth.The result is an innovative intellectual history of the ancient Near Eastern world during the many centuries in which Babylonian philosophers inspired scholars throughout the region-until the first millennium BC, when the breakdown of this cosmopolitan system enabled others, including the Greeks, to develop alternative methods of philosophical reasoning.

Genres: Philosophy, History, Ancient History, Nonfiction

312 pages, Hardcover

First published October 27, 2015

About the author

is a professor of Ancient Near Eastern history at Columbia University.

Reviews

[Sense of History]

This is an incredibly rich and interesting book, with a very original approach. But it is also an extremely tough and very specialized read at the same time. In fact, Van de Mieroop takes on the defense of the Mesopotamians against the Western arrogance that they were not rationalist at all. “The fundamental difference between Greece and Babylon should not lead to the conclusion that the Babylonian approach was not philosophical or systematic. On the contrary, it was a rigorously disciplined, scientific search for truth.”

Van de Mieroop focuses on what we might call the 'listomania' of the Mesopotamians. Over the past centuries, millions of cuneiform tablets have been unearthed with endless lists. The best known of these are the lexicographic lists: endless series of words, which appear as early as the beginning of the third millennium, and which were continued until almost the end of the cuneiform tradition, more than 2,500 years later. Van de Mieroop analyzes them in detail. "Babylonian lexicography was a scientific activity intended to foster understanding of the world. Its practitioners gave structure to reality. They did not just record vocabulary but aimed to clarify the relationship between the realities words signified.” And it wasn't just about word lists. Van de Mieroop also puts the long lists of ‘omen’ and how to interpret them, under the magnifying glass. Endless variety is trump here: “Lexical lists taught people what the possibilities of the writing system were and how they could expand written vocabulary, even inventing words without a referent in reality.” The latter is essential: the lists did not start from spoken language, nor from real observations (not even in the field of astrology!). "Writing created its own reality independent from speech and manifest to the reader alone. This creativity had multiple aspects. Not only could Babylonian scribes generate words that made sense solely in writing, but they also elucidated and strengthened the meaning of words by carefully selecting how to write them.” In other words: Mesopotamian epistemology was not related to reality, but to writing itself. The comparison that Van de Mieroop draws with mathematics (the basis of Western exact sciences) is illuminating: mathematics also starts from a theoretical, not -empirical basis, although practical applications always are possible .

And then the inevitable conclusion is: “The list was not just a device of fictional literary creativity, it was the foundation of intellectual creativity in general. Everything could be and was explored in lists, using a methodology that was fully coherent within the list structure. Details were altered, specifications added, and the polysemy of the elements used to write them down was investigated in all its possibilities. The Babylonians did not create order in the universe by investigating its component parts; they created order in lists and applied the results to the universe. The text preceded reality. It had a primary status.”

I am completely unable to judge whether Van de Mieroop's approach makes sense or not. His argument certainly is strong, but for my taste it smells a bit too much like the French (post)structuralists Foucault or Deleuze. He offers a challenging and enticing view that must not be wiped off the table too quickly, but I'm unsure whether it can stand the test of time. Just one counter-argument: the very precise astronomic data the Mesopotamians collected, aren't they a proof of a clear empirical focus? Van de Mieroop rejects this argument: the real empirical activity only surfaced very late in Mesopotamian history, namely in the 8th and 7th century BCE (if so, why then?) and, according to him, it wasn't representative in the context of the listomania. I must say I'm not totally convinced by this argument, though the estimations by Van de Mieroop raise very interesting questions. In general, it's my feeling that it is so difficult to reconstruct the Mesopotamian reality of so many millennia ago that a realistic reconstruction of Mesopotamian 'mind' probably never shall be attainable. Still, Van de Mieroop offers a lot of stuff to ponder about. (rating 3.5 stars)

[Marc Lamot · Rating 3 out of 5]

Certainly not a book for the layman. Van de Mieroop (° 1956, professor Near Eastern History Columbia University) is an absolute authority in the history of Mesopotamia (for a reason unknown to me he systematically speaks about “Babylonia” which refers to a much more limited area). But in this book he goes into some very technical aspects of Mesopotamian civilization. He makes a structuralist analysis of the enormous numbers of lexicographical lists and lists in which omens are described, and he also briefly covers some legal texts. His basic thesis is that in the successive Mesopotamian cultures cuneiform writing was not related to some oral tradition, but was an activity on its own: scribes simply indulged themselves in inventing endless new words and omen forms, independent from reality. Translated into philosophical language: according to Van de Mieroop Mesopotamian epistemology was very different from the later, empirically founded approach that was passed on to the West via the Greeks. I found this extremely fascinating, but perhaps not always convincing. Moreover, it does require some perseverance from the reader. More about that in my History account on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show....

[Cmoreglass · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's my first time reading something about Babylonia. Three genres of Babylonian writing are very interesting. This is a study based on the structuralistic theory and accessible for those who knew almost nothing before about Assyriology.

[William Bies · Rating 5 out of 5]

There persists an innate flaw in Enlightenment reason, dominated as it is by modern empirical science: for science can know only the generic yet human existence is rooted in particulars, one belongs to a given family, resides in a given country, at a given period in history (cf. F.W.J. Schelling’s late positive philosophy, in which he criticizes the inability of critical reason – for him, a purely negative philosophy, typified at its summit by Kant – to establish knowledge of any real existing state of affairs). The problematical disposition to focus on the scientifically knowable to the neglect of the given individual subject and concrete facts about it goes back to the Greeks, from whom the Western mind inherited its predilection for abstraction and conceptuality, as taught by the great philosophical tradition.

In Philosophy before the Greeks: The Pursuit of Truth in Ancient Babylonia (Princeton University Press, 2016), the distinguished Assyriologist Marc van de Mieroop poses the fascinating question as to whether this fate represents the only conceivable kind of rationality? For by the age of the flourishing of classical Greek culture in the fifth century before Christ urban civilization and writing itself were already three thousand years old. The Greeks themselves attributed the origins of their wisdom to the Orient. Thus, it makes for an exciting scholarly enterprise not merely to seek out the roots of Greek philosophy but also to inquire into the possibility of an altogether different manner of relating to the world, one no less concerned to reach truth but grounded in an intellectual framework alien to Greek civilization (and a fortiori to ours).

Van de Mieroop’s radical thesis maintains that Babylonian epistemology was rooted in its cuneiform writing system. The principal feature of cuneiform one must bear in mind is that it is not alphabetical; rather, it employs a mix of syllabic signs and ideograms (numbering in the hundreds) that is bewildering in its complexity, since the symbols themselves are polyvalent – that is, is given sign could stand for any of a number of syllables and, conversely, a given syllable could be represented by any of a number of signs. What is more, an ideogram in Sumerian could be read syllabically in Akkadian! Needless to say, confronted with such an elaborate array of possibilities, the Babylonian scholars felt compelled to become grammarians – at a much earlier stage in their civilization than did the Greeks, among whom grammar appears as a scholarly discipline only relatively late, in the Hellenistic era – and produced an extensive lexical corpus intended to help educated readers find their way around the possible confusions inherent to the cuneiform literature. These efforts became all the more necessary once Sumerian fell out of everyday use and, when Babylon rose to international prominence during the second millennium, cuneiform began to be used to write in other languages of the ancient near East.

Now, the salient point for van de Mieroop is that this, to us very strange characteristic of their cuneiform writing system inevitably influences the manner in which the Babylonians thought about their world. Indeed, van de Mieroop will go so far as the declare an affiliation with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis when he asserts,

So let us return to the relationship between Babylonian and Greek philosophies for a moment. It is clear that the Greeks could not adopt the Babylonian methods of philosophy because they did not adopt their methods of reading. [p. 10]

In outline, an arresting exercise in scholarship: 1) first, to examine in minute detail the lexical lists in order to see what they disclose about the characteristically Babylonian way of interpreting human existence; then 2) second, to undertake a parallel investigation of divination as it was practiced by the Babylonians, whose view of reality, needless to say, was deeply religious; and 3) third, to study the less extensive law codes (such as Hammurabi’s), which also display a typical pattern reflective of the style in which the lexical and omen lists are also written.

As to the lexical lists, van de Mieroop analyzes them at two levels: first the syntagmatic, then the paradigmatic. What he means with this jargon: internal structure to each item in the list, versus external structure that manifests itself in the ordering of items (implicitly, since the ancient authors themselves felt no need to call out in express terms their handling of their material).

Second, the omen lists. The religion of ancient Mesopotamia was mankind’s first concerted attempt to bring the world to intelligibility. Like all ancient peoples, the Mesopotamians believed in a world populated by divinities, or ‘full of gods’ (Thales). The ultimate level of explanation of all phenomena was mythological. The terrestrial globe came into existence either as a result of a coupling of the sky and the earth, or when the above settled the initial struggle of chaos by withdrawing from the below. The Atrahasis myth accounted for the origin of mankind as the resolution of a dispute between the higher and lower gods (divine society being modeled on human society as they knew it). What is interesting about the Mesopotamians is that they did not content themselves with myths about the large-scale features of the world, but pursued divine explanations into the details of everyday life. They saw anything that departed from the usual course of events as a divine sign. In contrast, the normal state of affairs corresponded to no message. The writing of the gods in events could be decoded by means of divination. All manner of abnormal events covering all spheres of life— birth defects, dreams, astrology, chance occurrences of everyday life—were tabulated, each with its corresponding omen, either for good or for evil. The elaborate codes were recorded on hundreds of tablets amounting to more than twenty thousand lines.

In Part III, van de Mieroop exhaustively analyzes the omen lists along lines similar to what he has done for lexical lists in Part II. Likewise for the law codes in Part IV, at somewhat lesser length. We leave it to the reader to delve into the details so as to look at how van de Mieroop describes the Babylonian genius in Part V:

The range of similitudes Zeno set out was the same as the range that existed in Babylonian thought: they could be opposites, combinations, analogies, transpositions, enlargements and reductions. But there was a radical difference between Stoic and Babylonian ideas. The Stoics focused on physical appearance. The resemblances the Babylonians saw were much more manifold as they related to every aspect of a subject, its shape and its name, both as uttered in speech and as put down in writing….Instead of formulating the rules that guided these intellectual steps, the Babylonians listed cases in which they were applied, progressing systematically through what can seem endless minor variants that, like a pointillist painting, end up providing a clear picture. Each statement had meaning only within the overall context. [p. 187]

The practice of listing cases in the codes – and in other Babylonian scientific writing – has been regularly criticized as horizontal thinking that can only multiply examples and fails to cover all grounds, unlike the Classical approach that creates abstract categories to be used as measures for any potential case. The Graeco-Roman methodology is often considered superior, as it is all-encompassing and is thought to have supplanted the weaker Babylonian practice. This seems to ignore that the case-by-case format survived in Greek law into the Classical period, as quotations in court speeches show, and it still flourished in medieval Europe; it existed in parallel with more abstract statements about law as found in philosophical writings. The verdict of inferiority contains a strong value judgment, especially when it comes from scholars trained in a tradition that expresses itself through hierarchical principles. We cannot see the laws in isolation from other areas of Babylonian science whose format they clearly share. All show the same intent – they search for truth. [p. 176]

In his synthesis of his findings, van de Mieroop refines his argument by engaging in a debate with scholars of the past century who contend for a linguistic determinism, which supposedly imposes a Sumerian will to order even if attenuated by the Semitic elements of Akkadian. Van de Mieroop disagrees. He would locate the Babylonians’ uniqueness not in a determinism of language but in a cultural practice, namely, the disposition to formulate everything in terms of lists:

The list format is probably universal, but the Babylonians are the ones who explored its creative potential to the fullest extent. From the moment they invented script they used lists as the chief format of expression. The first accountants of late-fourth-millennium Uruk stuck rigorously to it to record assets and expenses, and nearly until the dying days of cuneiform writing, administrative lists numerically dominated the record….Lists were also a standard format in Babylonia’s creative writing….But the Babylonians took the format a step further. The list was not just a device of fictional literary creativity, it was the foundation of intellectual creativity in general. Everything could be and was explored in lists, using a methodology that was fully coherent within the list structure. Details were altered, specifications added and the polysemy of the elements used to write them down was investigated in all its possibilities. The Babylonians did not create order in the universe by investigating its component parts; they created order in lists and applied the results to the universe. The text preceded reality. In lexicography, written words were invented that were meaningless outside the list but completely valid within its structure. In divination, occurrences were explored that were physically impossible but again wholly meaningful within their list context. In law, the list-making behavior may have been more sober but the same underlying principles governed, and entries were created within the codes according to their internal logic. Each statement in a list was like a cuneiform sign within a sentence: its meaning depended on the entries surrounding it, and it was unstable until the entire list was read. After this was accomplished, the Babylonian scholar turned to reality to observe what had been established in the list. [pp. 220-221]

In summary, let us warmly recommend this profound investigation of Babylonian epistemology and concur that it represents a fully developed type of philosophy before the Greeks. This recensionist’s reflections occasioned by van de Mieroop’s analysis:

1) Certainly, the early Christians were closer in spirit to the Mesopotamians than are we. They, too, inhabit a world pregnant with religious symbolism. When we read that

It happened that while Apollos was in Corinth, Paul made his way overland as far as Ephesus, where he found a number of disciples. When he asked, ‘Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you became believers?’ they answered, ‘No, we were never even told that there was such a thing as the Holy Spirit’….When he heard this, they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus, and the moment Paul laid hands on them the Holy Spirit came down on them, and they began to speak with tongues and to prophesy. [Acts 19:1-7]

or

While Peter was still speaking the Holy Spirit came down on all the listeners. Jewish believers who had accompanied Peter were all astounded that the gift of the Holy Spirit should be poured out on gentiles too, since they could hear them speaking strange languages and proclaiming the greatness of God. [Acts 10:44-46]

– we must take this to be an actual and observable effect, which someone in the know could discern at once. Therefore, the early Christian experience included an apprehension of the immediate presence of the kingdom of heaven, through which the providential course of events is orchestrated and the operation of which is perceivable through its signs of grace.

The difference from the way the Babylonians sought to decipher their signs consists in that the textualism of the early Christians is founded on scripture (Old Testament and the intertestamental writings) rather than an authoritative cuneiform manuscript collection. The admirable coherence of the world-view brought by the Logos may not be directly accessible to a polytheistic theology – and it was the evidential force of such coherence that ultimately contributed to the ascent of Christianity, witness Justin Martyr and Clement of Alexandria, who, after having been educated in the pagan philosophical schools and after having gone through a protracted period of seeking, proclaim Christianity the true philosophy upon being inducted into it by a sufficiently versed believer.

If we turn to the prologue of the gospel of John, we can begin to see what the Babylonians were missing. For John the evangelist discerns in Jesus,

The Word was the real light that gives light to everyone; he was coming into the world. He was in the world that had come into being through him, and the world did not recognize him. He came into his own and his own people did not accept him. But to those who did accept him he gave the power to become children of God, to those who believed in his name who were born not from human stock or human desire or human will but from God himself. The Word became flesh, he lived among us, and we saw his glory, the glory that he has from the Father as only Son of the Father, full of grace and truth. [John 1:9-14]

The existence of glory implies a cosmological perspective, in light of which human history must be revalued. For human acts for good or for evil respond to a situation that is co-determined by God in his glory. The miracles performed by Jesus had the effect of provoking, through their wonder, a kernel of awareness of God’s glory, which is why Jesus warned in his preaching that the kingdom of heaven was at hand.

The arrival of the kingdom of heaven is already an eschatological event for the person concerned, once he willingly embraces the God who reveals himself. In principle, this can be done on earth, so we must take eschatology in the Johannine, realized, sense. Many places in Paul’s letters offer a glimpse of what the experience of a faith-filled life must have been like. With their theory of the universe as a ‘writing of the gods’ the Babylonians were on the right track, to be sure, but they had at most a diffuse knowledge of glory – so Christianity in the sense of a realized eschatology, as practiced by the early church, represents the fulfillment at last of the age-old yearning for a communication with a saving God to which the Babylonian divinatory practices so eloquently attest.

2) The existence of a full-fledged Babylonian alternative to a stereotypically Western, flatly rationalistic attitude has also a bearing on an important concern of Martin Heidegger’s, what he styles the ‘turning’ [Kehre]. After all, what was he seeking in the pre-Socratics? An escape from a modern calculative rationality for which technological control over the forces of nature figures as the summum bonum, so as to rest in a more contemplative stance:

Daß Welt sich ereigne als Welt, daß dinge das Ding, dies ist die ferne Ankunft des Wesens des Seins selbst….Erst wenn Einblick sich ereignet, lichtet sich das Wesen der Technik als das Gestell, erkennen wir, wie im Bestellen des Bestandes die Wahrheit des Seins als Welt verweigert bleibt, merken wir, daß alles bloße Wollen und Tun nach der Weise des Bestellens in der Verwahrlosung beharrt….Ob der Gott lebt oder todt bleibt, entscheidet sich nicht durch die Religiosität der Menschen und noch weniger durch theologische Aspirationen der Philosophie und der Naturwissenschaft. Ob Gott Gott ist, ereignet sich aus der Konstellation des Seins und innerhalb ihrer. Solange wir nicht denkend erfahren, was ist, können wir nie dem gehören, was sein wird. Ereignet sich Einblick in das was ist? Werden wir als die Erblickten in den Wesensblick des Seins so eingholt, daß wir ihm nicht mehr entgehen? Gelangen wir dadurch in das Wesen der Nähe, die im Ding dingen Welt nähert? Wohnen wir einheimisch in der Nähe, so daß wir angfänglich in das Geviert von Himmel und Erde, Sterblichen und Göttlichen gehören? Ereignet sich Einblick in das was ist? Entsprechen wir dem Einblick durch ein Blicken, das in das Wesen der Technik blickt und in ihm das Sein selbst gewahrt? Sehen wir den Blitz des Seins im Wesen der Technik? Den Blitz, der aus der Stille kommt als sie selbst? Die Stille stillt. Was stillt sie? Sie stillt Sein in das Wesen von Welt. Daß Welt, weltend, das Nächste sei alles Nahen, das naht, indem es die Wahrheit des Seins dem Menschenwesen nähert und so den Menschen dem Ereignis vereignet. [Die Technik und die Kehre, pp. 42-47]

The reflective reader of van de Mieroop will realize this, then – a renewed openness to the capacity of the world to reveal wonder, possessed by the Babylonians in abundance and indeed, implicit in their lexical epistemology, could well bring about the turning Heidegger so dearly longs for but does not himself know how to reach (condemned, like Moses, to proclaim a promised land he could not enter). For what he intuited in the pre-Socratics he deems impossible for us in an age of the ascendancy of the technological mind-set. But remember, it is we who subject ourselves to the imperative of a technological understanding of being; if only we could wield a technique like that of Babylonian pointillism, it would set us free for a more originary relation to being! For techne constitutes but a means by which the artist produces, that is, imposes his design upon his materials, whereas the pointillist unfolds the revelatory logic inherent in real things, and thus receives the meaning thereby disclosed as a gift. The two means of relating to being are meant to co-exist. Here, one may well wonder whether (something the famed art historian Erwin Panofsky fails to dilate upon, see our review of Eidos – Eidolon here) the Neoplatonic ideal of artistic creativity emerging during the Renaissance became in the course of subsequent centuries inevitably distorted and over-inflated, exerting a baleful influence up to now, when a return to a more balanced and receptive stance towards the beauty of nature is clearly in order.

[Errol Orhan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Van de Mieroop sets out to explain that the Babylonians did engage in philosophy. The book does quite an excellent job in analyzing the importance and working of cuneiform in Babylon and the wider Near East. I also believe that it does indeed live up to the promise, and provides an argument on what Babylonian epistemology is like. I think the biggest flaw is that the definition of 'philosophy' remains largely implicit. This then makes it at times hard to follow in which ways Babylonian thought is actually 'philosophy' and how it compares to Greek thought. But I think that, in the end, he makes his point and makes you discover Babylonian intellectual history as well. Which is exciting!

[Köksal KÖK]

Antik Yunan'dan Önce Felsefe & Eski Babil'de Hakikat Arayışı
Philosophy before the Greeks: The Pursuit of Truth in Ancient Babylonia
Marc Van De Mieroop

içindekiler:
önsöz, 9
ı. kısım, babil epistemolojisi üzerine bir deneme
1., bölüm: yaratıllş zamanl, 15

ıı., kısım, şeylerin düzeni
2., bölüm: sözcük listeleri: kısa bir tarihçe 63
3., bölüm: gerçekliğin inşası, 101

ııı., kısım, tanrıların yazdıkları
4., bölüm: babil kültüründe kehanet listeleri. 143
5., bölüm: evren bilgisinin yapısı, 187

ıv., kısım, yasanın ifadesi
6., bölüm: antik kanunnameler, 235
7., bölüm: filozof-kral, 257

v. kısım,bir babil epistemolojisi
8., bölüm:, babil epistemolojisinin tarihi, 301
9., bölüm: babil epistemolojisinin kavramsal, özerkliği, 349
kaynakça, 363
dizin, 405

***
Marc Van De Mieroop:
Eski Yakın Doğu uzmanı olan yazar Belçika’da 1956 yılında doğmuştur- Alanının önemli Asur bilimcisidir. Doktorasını Yale Üniversitesi’nde tamamladıktan sonra, Yale ve Oxford’da ders vermiştir. 1996 yılından beri Columbia Üniversitesi’nde ders vermektedir. Profesör Van de Mieroop’un ilgi alanı Eski Yakın Doğu’nun sosyoekonomik ve politik tarihi üzerinde yoğunlaşmıştır. Türkçede yayımlanmış diğer eserleri şunlardır: Hammurabi (İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları, 2012)lEski Mısır Tarihi (Homer Kitabevi, 2019) ve Eski Yakındoğu Tarihi (Homer Kitabevi, 2019).

Gökhan Kağnıcı (çevirmen):
1981 yılında İstanbul’da doğmuştur. 2012 yılında Ege Üniversitesi’nde Eski Çağ tarihi alanında doktorasını tamamlamıştır. 2015-2018 tarihleri arasında Berlin Freie Universitât ve Yale Üniversitesi’nde Eski Yakın Doğu tarihi üzerine araştırmalar yapmıştır. 2020 yılından beri İzmir Kâtip Çelebi Üniversitesi’nde Eski Çağ tarihi üzerine dersler vermektedir. Çalışmaları genellikle Eski Mezopotamya’da bilim, siyaset ve düşünce tarihi üzerine yoğunlaşmıştır. Şu andazYale Üniversitesi’nde çivi yazılı kaynaklarda.engelli insanlarla ilgili bir araştırma yürütmektedir.

[Truls Ljungström · Rating 3 out of 5]

Det är ju alltid så med en främmande tradition att gränsen mellan idéhistoria, mytologi, och symboltyngd filosofi blir grumlig. Så även i denna bok. Den är inte enkel, och har inte speciellt många insikter av som är applicerbara. Snarare anlägger den vad jag hade beskrivit som ett etnografiskt perspektiv. Som sådan är den mer intressant som historiedokument. Samtidigt har jag varken hjärta att rekommendera den eller rekommendera folk att undvika, bland läsare som är mer intresserade av tankeregler eller tankebanor: detaljer som användandet av kontextualiseringskluster i listor är spännande, liksom idén om dubbeltexter bland assyrierna.

[Maan Kawas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such a great book, I highly recommend.

[Matthias · Rating 4 out of 5]

More imaginative than convincing, writes a lot of checks it can't cash, but tremendous fun.

[Shapur · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating hypothesis of how the written word can influence the thought process, especially regarding cuneiform (obviously), and how the script can control the life and actions of people. A somewhat overanalytical description of different lists and official documents of Mesopotamian cultures (predominantly Babylonian, with hints of Assyrian) and how they affect the purcuit of truth in ancient times. Although inevitably connected to the divine and to a polytheistic religion, one can notice the seeds of a future intelectual development and probably the soil from which philosohy would be born.

You *could* in my view, after reading the book, argue for philosophical thought in pre-Persian Mesopotamia too, mainly regarding epistemology. The "pursuit" of these cultures seems to be strictly directed to the collection of evidence for divine meaning, for analysis of events, for preventing or ensuring such events, for means of augur and forethought, for turning the written into spoken and for endless interest in the writing itself. However, the single most philosophical aspect of Mesopotamian thought - the Sumerian concept of "Me", which is similar in nature to Platonic ideas - seems to have lost its meaning or significance with later cultures. I even don't see it mentioned here.

Still, I won't argue Babylonians had in any way developed philosophical thinking outside of the divine, nor did they manage to outdo the Sumerian Renaissanse in terms of trying to reach that goal.

Nonetheless, a very informative and fascinating read and yet another fine addition to my neverending avarice for Mesopotamian culture.

The titles is dangerously missleading, since you won't be learning much of Babylonian religion, which is, ironically, the closest thing to philosophy they achieved. Yet I will say this is one of the best books about Babylonian lexicography and epistemology you'll find.

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

For those who work in the field of Ancient Near Eastern Studies, especially with a focus on texts, Van De Mieroop's volume has great implications. It also brings clarity to some of the puzzling areas of the ANE written record, not just in Babylon, but throughout the Levant, Anatolia, and Egypt (although he does not deal with these other geographic areas in depth). The major short-coming, from my perspective, is that the title of this volume mistakenly leads those who do not know Van De Mieroop's previous work and are not familiar with ancient Babylonian writings to assume that this book has more to do with philosophy and Greeks than it actually does.

I am actually very grateful that the Greeks are not center-stage in this book, because it is important to understand the Babylonians on their own accord and not just as a foil to the Greek way of philosophy. That being said, I did want a more fleshed-out answer to the question "So what?" at the end of the book. I was able to follow all of Van De Mieroop's arguments about the various genres he discussed, but I wanted to hear more of the author's thoughts about how text-as-first-philosophy shaped the ancient Near Eastern mind and experience. Van De Mieroop is, after all, one if not the most learned scholar of ancient Babylonian texts of this generation and I wanted to have a richer take-away --- however, this book is now in my head. I know it has implications that are significant, but those are for the reader to explore for him/herself.

[Tvrtko Balić · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book was a terribly disappointing read. It barely even touches the subjects it promises to talk about, instead focusing almost exclusively on tangents such as linguistics, literature and law. The book doesn't even analyse Babylonian religion in great detail for seemingly no real reason than that the author just really like ancient lists. From this book I have learned very little about actual philosophy in ancient Babylonia, if anything it made me more sceptical. The author annoyingly feels a need to characterise previous writings on the subject as bigoted, but those writings will probably ironically tell you more on Babylonian philosophy, even if they refuse to look further than religion, that would at least tell us something about the basic world view and values of people advocating such religion. This book doesn't even do that, instead focusing on the most unimpressive of things and failing to describe anything in an interesting way.

tl;dr: an all around terrible book that I would not recommend.

[Yasin Çetin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Antik Yunan'dan Önce Felsefe başlığı vaat ettiğini tam sağlamıyor. Ancak Babil kültürü ve etkisi üzerine etkili bir eser olmuştur. Düşünce ile çiviyazısı ilgisi, düşünce ile cümle yapısı, sözlükbilimi, kehanet ve yasa metinlerinin yapısı üzerine doyurucu bir şekilde verilmektedir. Babil kültürünü anlamak için okunabilir.

[Iset · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have to agree with other reviewers that the title of this work is misleading. It is really a study of cuneiform writing and languages, barely touching on philosophical concepts. As such, it feels like a missed opportunity, and a disappointment.

[Adam Wilcox · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very thought provoking - highly recommended to anyone interested in ancient thought and its relationship to texts.

[Enkidu_ · Rating 2 out of 5]

If it wasn't for the title, the book could have received greatest appraisals, notably on the unparalleled lexicographical tradition of the Babylonians and its intricate complexity and emanations, but the title was suggesting a possible deep comparison between the speculative secretions of Ancient Babylonia and what the later Greeks came up with ; yet the "epistemology" exorcised in the book not only remains superficially touched upon, but there's no beginning of a genuine intellectual confrontation with Greek schools of philosophy as one could naively expect from the title of the book.

[Thomas Yaeger · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've written a critical summary of Marc Van De Mieroop's book under the title 'A Saussurian Approach to Babylonian Epistemology'. The blogpost can be found at:

http://shrineinthesea.blogspot.co.uk/...

An interesting book, which illuminates much about the processes of Babylonian textual exegesis, but Van De Mieroop makes no serious effort to show the relationship between Greek philosophy and its Babylonian antecedents.

[Theraaa · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book does none of the things it promises - it might be a valuable discussion of Babylonian lexicography, but it stops just when, armed with all the information about ancient scholars and their worldview through the practice of writing and reading, philosophy could really begin. I was almost expecting a "to be continued" at the end of it.