The orientalizing revolution : Near Eastern influence on Greek culture in the early archaic age / Walter Burkert.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Burkert, Walter, 1931-2015, author.

Series:

Revealing antiquity ; 5.

Revealing antiquity ; 5

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Greece--Civilization--To 146 B.C.

Greece.

Greece--Civilization--Middle Eastern influences.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (ix, 225 pages) : illustrations.

Other Title:

Orientalizing revolution

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 2018.

Summary:

The rich and splendid culture of the ancient Greeks has often been described as emerging like a miracle from a genius of its own, owing practically nothing to its neighbors. Walter Burkert offers a decisive argument against that distorted view, replacing it with a balanced picture of the archaic period "in which, under the influence of the Semitic East, Greek culture began its unique flowering, soon to assume cultural hegemony in the Mediterranean." Burkert focuses on the "orientalizing" century 750-650 B.C., the period of Assyrian conquest, Phoenician commerce, and Greek exploration of both East and West, when not only eastern skills and images but also the Semitic art of writing were transmitted to Greece. He tracks the migrant craftsmen who brought the Greeks new techniques and designs, the wandering seers and healers teaching magic and medicine, and the important Greek borrowings from Near Eastern poetry and myth. Drawing widely on archaeological, textual, and historical evidence, he demonstrates that eastern models significantly affected Greek literature and religion in the Homeric age.

Contents:

"Who are public workers" : the migrant craftsmen: Historical background ; Oriental products in Greece ; Writing and literature in the eighth century ; The problem of loan-words "A seer or a healer" : magic and medicine: "Craftsmen of the sacred" : mobility and family structure ; Hepatoscopy ; Foundation deposits ; Purification ; Spirits of the dead and black magic ; Substitute sacrifice ; Asclepius and Asgelatas ; Ecstatic divination ; Lamashtu, Lamia, and Gorgo "Or also a godly singer" : Akkadian and early Greek literature: From Atrahasis to the "Deception of Zeus" ; Complaint in heaven : Ishtar and Aphrodite ; The overpopulated earth ; Seven against Thebes ; Common style and stance in Oriental and Greek epic ; Fables ; Magic and cosmogony.

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.