"The Lord confused the language of all the earth," so the Tower of Babel story in the Hebrew Bible's book of Genesis tells us to explain why the world's people communicate in countless languages while previously they all spoke only one. This book argues that the biblical confusion really happened in the ancient Near East, not in speech, however, but in writing. It examines the millennia-long history of writing in the region and shows a radical change from the third and second millennia to the first millennium BC. Before "Babel" any intellectual who wrote did so as a participant in a...