Ale to Polika

21 Pages 5180 Words

styles of luxurious behavior. Zeus is a god of storm and high places, and so was Baal of the Levant; each received the same kinds of sacrifices performed in the same way. Finally, W. emphasizes how the transmission of cultural artifacts did not take place at one time but was an ongoing process demonstrable from the Early Mycenaean period down to the sixth century B.C. Chapter 1 is an overview of the whole argument, developed in the rest of the book.

It is hard to restrain enthusiasm, or measure praise, for Chapter 2, "Ancient Literatures of Western Asia," which tells us in short compass the things we want to know about these opaque literatures but could not find the time to discover. First, a bilingual cultural continuum of the Sumero-Akkadians beginning in the third millennium has left mythical narrative poems about a man who escaped the flood, about a hero Gilgamesh who killed a great monster and sought to escape mortality, and about the emergence of the world order through the agency of watery beings. These myths, which tell of the exploits of gods, are now fairly well known among classicists, but little known is the evidence for "historical epic," narratives flattering the conquests of kings. As W. proceeds he illuminates with consistent clarity the meaning of his terms, the relations of language to language and script to script, and in his bibliography alerts the reader to the major publications. W. also describes Sumero-Akkadian wisdom literature, hymns, disputations, and royal inscriptions.

W. turns next to the extremely important Bronze Age literature from Ugarit, the north Syrian port and virtual gateway to the West. Ugaritic literature was written in a writing structurally identical to the later West Semitic Phoenician, Aramaic, and Hebrew scripts, whence sprang the Greek alphabet; so-called Ugaritic cuneiform is the earliest clear historical attestation to this family of scripts. Ugarit therefore offers hope for a tra...