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2 results

Language and Cosmos in Greece and Mesopotamia
  • Jacobo Myerston
  • Published online:
    16 May 2023
    Print publication:
    06 April 2023
  • Theorizing about language and its place in the world began long before Plato and Aristotle. In this book, Jacobo Myerston traces the trajectories of various proto-linguistic traditions that circulated between Greece and Mesopotamia before the institutionalization of Greek philosophy. By following the threads of transcultural conversations, the author shows the impact of Mesopotamian semantics and hermeneutics on early Greek thinkers. He reconstructs the Greek appropriation of Mesopotamian semantics while arguing that, despite geographical distance and cultural constraints, the Greeks adopted and transformed Babylonian cosmological and linguistic concepts in a process leading to new discoveries. This book covers conceptions of signification present in cuneiform word lists, esoteric syllabaries, commentaries, literary texts like Enuma elish, Gilgamesh, Hesiod's Theogony, and the Homeric Hymns as well as the philosophical commentary preserved in the Derveni papyrus.

  • Introduction

  • Jacobo Myerston, University of California, San Diego
  • Book:
    Language and Cosmos in Greece and Mesopotamia
    Published online:
    16 May 2023
    Print publication:
    06 April 2023, pp 1-14

  • Summary

    Extraordinary individuals in ancient Greece claimed to know the real meaning of names. They understood "real meaning" to be the theological and cosmological truths hidden in language. Although the truths were plural and there was no consensus about what true names ultimately reveal, the theoretical assumptions of those individuals were essentially similar: they believed that language in general, but more specifically the names of the gods, contained crucial information about the cosmos. Classicists tend to think that those views were already present in archaic hexametric poetry and further developed centuries later by philosophers, sophists, and religious innovators of the sixth and fifth centuries BCE. But did Greek philosophies of language and the semantics of divine names effectively develop in isolation? The present book explores points of contact between Greek and Mesopotamian systems of thinking about language and reality and argues for the importance of bringing into a dialogue cuneiform and Greek texts concerned with the cosmic function of language.