Extract
Greek Myths and Mesopotamia: Parallels and Influence in the Homeric Hymns and Hesiod.
Connections between the oldest surviving Greek literature and ancient Mesopotamian texts are a fascinating but difficult field of study, where the borders between the highly plausible, the possible, and the improbable are not clearly defined. The most successful work so far has been achieved in relating parts of the Theogony of Hesiod to ancient Near Eastern myths. The book under review uses particularly the Homeric Hymns, though Hesiod and other Greek sources are drawn upon as appropriate. The author is a Classical scholar who has taken a serious interest in cuneiform texts and spent periods at the universities of Munich, Heidelberg, and Oxford, where he was well guided. Thus this book is generally well informed and up to date both in the Classical Greek and in the Near Eastern spheres (both Sumerian and Akkadian), something rarely achieved in the work of a single scholar.
The general result argued for is...See the full content of this document
Sponsored links
