This volume centres on one of the most important questions in the study of antiquity – the interaction between Greece and the Ancient Near East, from the Mycenaean to the Hellenistic periods. Focusing on the stories that the peoples of the eastern Mediterranean told about the gods and their relationships with humankind, the individual treatments draw together specialists from both fields, creating for the first time a truly interdisciplinary synthesis. Old cases are re-examined, new examples discussed, and the whole range of scholarly opinions, past and present, are analysed, critiqued, and contextualised. While direct textual comparisons still have something to show us, the methodologies advanced here turn their attention to deeper structures and wider dynamics of interaction and influence that respect the cultural autonomy and integrity of all the ancient participants.
Author(s): Adrian Kelly, Christopher Metcalf
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: 400
City: Cambridge
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Contents
Tables
Contributors
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction
PART I Contexts
1 ‘Let Those Important Primeval Deities Listen’
2 Siting the Gods
3 Politics, Cult, and Scholarship
4 The Scholar and the Poet
PART II Influence
5 Playing with Traditions
6 Etana in Greece
7 Of Gods and Men
8 Tales of Kings and Cup-Bearers in History and Myth
9 Heroes and Nephilim
10 Berossus and Babylonian Cosmogony
PART III Difference
11 Borrowing, Dialogue and Rejection
12 Divine Labour
13 Influence and Inheritance
14 Fate and Authority in Mesopotamian Literature and the Iliad
15 Fashioning Pandora
16 Sexing and Gendering the Succession Myth in Hesiod and the Ancient Near East
Bibliography
Index
