Author Description

The question of the place of orality in the production and transmission of the great literary traditions of the ancient Near East has been widely discussed since at least the 19th century. While the idea of a dichotomy between orality and writing, with the hypothesis of a first oral phase preceding the writing of texts, has long dominated historical reconstructions, recent work has placed more emphasis on the contemporaneity of orality and writing in textual composition, editing and transmission. The very idea of contemporaneity raises new questions regarding the articulation between oral and written, a complex interweaving that may take various forms, depending on the socio-historical and cultural contexts, the literary genres and the function of the texts. With the aim of deepening our understanding of such articulations, the colloquium "Orality and Writing in Eastern Antiquity: The Processes of Composition and Redaction" was held at the College de France on May 26-27, 2016. Taking a comparative perspective, the volume addresses different geographical areas, periods, and bodies of texts, thus offering a nuanced overview of the variety of possible interactions between orality and writing in the ancient Near East.