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
Collège 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.
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