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.

The author of the Derveni papyrus makes wide use of etymologies of divine names to interpret an Orphic theogony. With the help of these etymologies, he links episodes of the Orphic theogony with a philosophical model of the evolution of the cosmos. In this article, I argue that the techniqu es used by the Derveni author for the analysis of divine names are related to Meso potamian hermeneutical and theological traditions that go back to the end of the second millennium BCE, but were still alive in the fourth century BCE when the text of the papyrus was presumably composed. I compare the interpretative strategies of the Derveni author with those of Assyrian and Babylonian scholars as found in Tablets VI and VII of Enūma eliš, in certain Akkadian commentaries, and cuneiform god-lists to show that there is a similar system of beliefs in the text compared.

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In this article I explore a selection of texts from Greece and Mesopotamia that either recount or comment on the succession myth. I argue that representations of violence in those texts differ considerably within the same culture and time period. I explain these variations as social deixis, positing that ancient authors and interpreters of the succession myth used different representations of violence to present themselves as innovative figures. I argue that both mythmakers and myth-interpreters increased and decreased the intensity and number of violent features to mark a position in the competitive field of cosmological knowledge. Through the comparison of the sources, I show that there was as much competition and innovation in Greece as in Mesopotamia within the field of cosmology. The similarity of social contexts and practices may explain the cross-cultural transfer of knowledge between specialists of these two regions.