Babylon, Memphis, Persepolis: Eastern Contexts of Greek Culture

Walter Burkert's book explores key themes in unifying our understanding of the ancient world. We've long understood that the mythologies of the Aegean dating to to the early 2nd Millennium BCE were informed by thousands of years of previous, brilliant civilization in Africa and Western Asia; e.g., Egypt and Mesopotamia. Classical Western deities like Venus and Aphrodite can trace their roots many centuries further back (before even the age of Saul, David, and Solomon which is at a "young" circa 1000 BCE) to, say, Astarte; in places like Sumer, Akkad, and old Babylon among others. I think, for example, that the little feral goddess as I call her, Artemis, predates all of it going back to Stone Age hunting cultures. I am enjoying the Burkert book very much.

Greece is traditionally treated as a unique culture, more innovative than any of its predecessors. While there is truth in that viewpoint, it ignores the context that classical Greek civilization emerged in. As Burkert points out, Greece looks more unique than it was, partly because its tradition ended up being carried by successor cultures, while neighboring cultures gradually died out. In the 1990s, the Black Athena controversy challenged the assumption that Greece owed little to its neighbors. Burkert, a very influential classicist, wrote this book to reexamine outside influences on Greece in a much more sober way than Black Athena proponents.The first, very brief chapter is on the alphabet, which was invented and used by West Semitic peoples before the Greeks picked up and adapted it. The alphabet is far easier to learn than the complicated cuneiform or hieroglyphic writing systems, which took years of training. It allowed for widespread literacy and exchange of ideas; it made Greece's subsequent innovations possible.The second chapter examines parallels between Mesopotamian epic poems—mainly Gilgamesh and the early portions of Enuma Elish and Atrahasis—and those attributed to Homer. Although Homer's works are very much a product of Greek oral culture, they do resemble the Mesopotamian epics on some basic points, and more importantly, specific passages closely resemble each other. Even the earliest and most fundamental of Greek texts borrowed from Near Eastern sources.The next three chapters are about Near Eastern religions' influence on Greece. One examines the Egyptian, and to a lesser extent Anatolian, influence on Orphic mystery rites and beliefs about the afterlife. Perhaps the most important chapters are about the influence of Near Eastern wisdom literature and Zoroastrian religious beliefs on Greek philosophy, cosmogony, and cosmology. Philosophy is considered one of the Greeks' most fundamental and unique innovations, but Burkert points out that there was not much difference between the philosophical speculations of the Presocratic thinkers and the religious speculations of other peoples in the eastern Mediterranean. The Presocratics were often directly influenced by those foreign ideas. It was mainly the creation of formal schools by Plato and his successors that set Greek philosophy apart.Burkert says little about the general process of cultural contact between Greece and its neighbors. The book is a sampler of Near Eastern influences on Greece rather than a systematic examination of them, but it does prove that those influences were profound. Greece had advantages: "no kings, no powerful priests, and no houses of tablets, which meant more mobility, more freedom, and more risk for mind and letters." But Greece's interaction with other cultures stimulated its creativity and made its innovation possible.

read a really good and comprehensive review of this book at Bryn Mawr Classical ReviewReviewed by Molly M. Levine, Howard University-------------------------------With its user friendly tone and emphasis on ideas and interpretation,this slim book makes good on the author's promise to stick to the spirit of its origins in a 1996 lecture series at the Universita Ca Foscari of Venice on the now popular subject of cultural exchange in the ancient Mediterranean. Well before Bernal there was Burkert, who here speaks with the authority of one who has devoted a lifetime to once unpopular alliances of Classics with,inter alia, anthropology,evolutionary psychology, and the Near East.

The books is composed of five lectures on Early Oriental-Greek interactions: 1) Alphabetic Writing; 2) Orientalizing Features in Homer; 3) Oriental Wisdom Literature and Cosmogony; 5) Orpheus and Egypt; and 5)The Advent of the Magi (total, 124 pages plus bibligraphy and notes). I.E., no general framework is provided on Oriental-Greek relations, only some interesting but few issues are treated.In my opinion, that is rather poor for a book whose subtitle is "Eastern Contexts of Greek Culture". I would much rather reccomend "The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies"by Thomas McEvilley.