Gods and Mortals in Early Greek and Near Eastern Mythology

Description

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. Copyright_page 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