Language is the most significant product of human mind. It is the means by and through which man encoded one's beliefs, emotions and ways of thinking, using that system of signs and sign symbols. Language is, thus, symbolic; the earliest symbolic form which unlocks human thought is myth. Being a cultural meaningful product, myth with its principles and constraints will be explored from a semiotic stance. Semiotics, in this sense, is the exploration of culture and meaning products. The study aims at investigating the structure of Mesopotamian and Greek myths respectively as semiotic systems in terms of the theory of signs. In addition, the study tries to find out the universal principles that govern the underlying structures of myth, and the specificity of the mythic code of each culture, and then deciding the universality of the semiotics of classical myth, based on semiotic analysis.

Autorentext

SAMIR AL-SHEIKH(PhD)( b.1953) (critic, poet, translator) is current Professor of linguistics and literature at Misan University, Iraq. His main conceptual areas of concern are stylistics, semiotics and culture. He is the author of the published book, The Blue Rose at Twilight: On Modern Arabic Verse (Bloomington, 2012).