Skip the Directions
Last week in my post, I observed how inaccurate ideas of a foundational “Western Civilization” tragically influenced excavation of Troy. A recent post in The Ancient Near East Today “Goddesses of Myth and Cultural Memory” opens with a similar notion about the actual indebtedness of Greek mythology to Mesopotamian origins.
Despite the old prejudices, there wasn’t a grand Western tradition that sprang directly from Greek minds unsullied by eastern peoples. A look at early elements of the Near East reveals the sources for many later Greek ideas and myths. The ANET article notes how scholars have found:
“precursors to the goddesses described in Hesiod, Homer, and the Homeric hymns in Mesopotamian and Near Eastern texts. Akkadian, Sumerian and Hittite texts document a common heritage. There are similarities between the Hurrian creation myth, for example, and the Greek mythology of Ouranos, Kronos, and Zeus. Love and war, virginity, promiscuity, bloodthirstiness, and theogonic fecundity did not originate with Hesiod.”
Always a Borrower Be
Such borrowings across the ancient world exist on many levels. When I wrote my novel set within the Trojan War, Hand of Fire, I found several hints. For example, the god Telipinu in Hittite myth is a possible source for aspects of the legendary Achilles.
I enjoy this far richer way of viewing an interconnected ancient world. Certainly, the growing evidence in recent years of widespread economic trade provides other tangible clues as to the links between the various regions around the Bronze Age Mediterranean, Europe, and Near East.
The article in ANET “Goddesses of Myth and Cultural Memory” discusses a recently published scholarly book of that title. If you are interested, here’s a quick summary:
“Goddesses of Myth and Cultural Memory documents the presence of goddesses in a wide range of literature, philosophy and theology across the centuries. They appear in such divergent contexts as Hermeticism, Gnosticism, Neoplatonism, Kabbalah, Medieval allegory, and in our time, feminist and psychoanalytic literature.”
The photo at the top is a of Babylonian terracotta relief of Ishtar from Eshnunna (early second millennium BC), © Marie-Lan Nguyen / Wikimedia Commons.