The Height of Cosmopolitanism

Abstract

AbstractIn the second half of the second millennium bc, Babylonian literate cosmopolitanism was at its height with courts all over the Near East, including in Egypt, employing scribes who could write the language and the cuneiform script. Alongside it, other languages appeared, some of them written in distinct scripts. The multilingualism is extremely well documented in Hittite Hattusas, where a variety of local and translocal languages were used. The evidence on lexical materials and belles-lettres from various sites in Syria, Canaan, Elam, and Egypt shows multiple attitudes toward the Babylonian tradition but also a widespread familiarity with it. In their letter correspondence, scribes wrote a variety of contact languages, mixing local features with the cosmopolitan, but the latter held the system together. Early alphabetic scripts emerged, each one of them used in restricted areas in Syria-Palestine alone, while the use of Babylonian cuneiform to write local languages also expanded throughout the Near East. In this world Babylonia and Assyria stood out, the former under a dynasty speaking the foreign Kassite language and with little preserved evidence of literate creativity, the latter adopting Babylonia’s literate culture wholesale.