Autorentext
Mary R. Bachvarova is Professor in the Department of Classical Studies at Willamette University, Oregon. She was trained both in classics and in the languages and cultures of Anatolia and the Near East. She is the co-editor, with B. J. Collins and I. C. Rutherford, of Anatolian Interfaces: Hittites, Greeks and Their Neighbours (2005). She has also written a new translation of Hurro-Hittite narrative songs in the recently published Ancient Mediterranean Myths: Primary Sources from Ancient Greece, Rome, and the Near East, edited by C. López-Ruiz (2013).

Klappentext

This book takes a bold new approach to the prehistory of Homeric epic. It argues that the Near Eastern influence on early Greek hexameter poetry primarily came from a single Syro-Anatolian tradition of oral narrative song, which included the Song of Gilgamesh and the Kumarbi Cycle, starting in the eleventh century BCE.

Inhalt

1. Introduction; 2. Hurro-Hittite song at Hattusa; 3. Gilgamesh at Hattusa: written texts and oral traditions; 4. The Hurro-Hittite ritual context of Gilgamesh at Hattusa; 5. The plot of the Song of Release; 6. The place of the Song of Release in its Eastern Mediterranean context; 7. The function and prehistory of the Song of Release; 8. Sargon the Great: from history to myth; 9. Long-distance interactions: theory, practice, and myth; 10. Festivals: a milieu for cultural contact; 11. The context of epic in Late Bronze and Early Iron Age Greece; 12. Cyprus as a source of Syro-Anatolian epic in the Early Iron Age; 13. Cultural contact in Late Bronze Age Western Anatolia; 14. Continuity of memory at Troy and in Anatolia; 15. The history of the Homeric tradition; 16. The layers of Anatolian influence in the Iliad; Appendix. Contraction and the dactylic hexameter.