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.

Adrian Kelly is Tutorial Fellow in Ancient Greek Language and Literature at Balliol College, Oxford, and Associate Professor & Clarendon University Lecturer in Classics at the University of Oxford. He is the author of A Referential Commentary and Lexicon to Homer, Iliad VIII (2007) and Sophocles: Oedipus at Colonus (2009), and co-editor (with P. J. Finglass) of Stesichorus in Context (Cambridge, 2015). He is completing a Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics commentary on Homer, Iliad XXIII (Cambridge, forthcoming) and co-editing (with Henry Spelman) Text and Intertext in Archaic and Classical Greece (Cambridge, 2021) and (with Bill Beck and Tom Phillips) The Ancient Scholia to Homer's Iliad: Exegesis and Interpretation (2021). CHRISTOPHER METCALF is Official Fellow of The Queen's College, Oxford, and Associate Professor in Classical Languages and Literature at the University of Oxford. He is also the author of The Gods Rich in Praise: Early Greek and Mesopotamian Religious Poetry (2015) and Sumerian Literary Texts in the Schoyen Collection. Volume I: Literary Sources on Old Babylonian Religion (2019).