Ancestor of the West: Writing, Reasoning and Religion in Mesopotamia, Elam and Greece Book

This book includes 3 essays originally written in French and translated into English. I found Bottero's essay on Mesopotamia very accessible to someone who has read a bit of Mesopotamian history and Vernant's essay on Greece fairly accessible to someone who has read a bit about early Greek history.

Herrenschmidt's essay on Elamite, Persian, Greek and Hebrew writing and thinking, however, includes a bit more linguistic detail and what I assume is valid linguistic theory (but might just be a lot of academic hooey...) than I was able to enjoy. If sentences like this make sense to you, perhaps you'll get more out of the essay than I did: "This separation of language and the signs used to write it, this independence between the sign and the syllabic unit, brought about an irreversible movement toward the appropriation of language by people." (p. 85) "Consonant alphabets mean significant progress in humans' appropriation of language, but they did not inscribe the sounds in the body of the speaker, but halfway between his body and his speech." (p. 96)