Hesiod's Theogony

21 Pages 5180 Words

tradition in which Homer appears in a direct line of descent. Extant Ugaritic poetry preserves accounts of war among the gods, especially the storm-god Baal's war against Yammu, "Sea," and Mot, "Death." Some poems are about men, however, and we have some hymns.

Next, Hebrew literature, by which is meant, of course, the Bible, a topic of gargantuan proportions that W. somehow summarizes in eight pages: songs, psalms, prophets, wisdom, the Song of Songs, history. Remarkably, there is no epic in Hebrew literature.

Our most regretted loss is the closely related Phoenician literature, because the inventor of the Greek alphabet knew this form of the West Semitic writing, or was even himself a Phoenician. Its nearly complete loss must depend on its having been preserved on papyrus or leather, on the lack of a tradition of writing on clay.

Finally, the ill-defended Hurrians of north Syria, called the Mitanni, prominent internationally in the Late Bronze Age, took over Sumero-Akkadian traditions and handed them to the Indo-European Hittites o...