Synopses & Reviews
Review
Brilliant...[Burkert] is consistently thorough and challenging...Without denying the role of innate talent, he shows that much of the Greek miracle grew from an openness to influences from other cultures...[His] careful scholarship...has constructed the bridge that he set out to build. Carol G. Thomas
Review
An elegant and academically influential work...The Orientalizing Revolutioncan be enthusiastically recommended.
Review
An elegant and academically influential work...The Orientalizing Revolution can be enthusiastically recommended. American Historical Review
Review
This thought provoking work is an updated translation of Burkert's Die orientlisierende Epoche in der griechischen Religion und Literature, 1984...It is refreshing to see a classical scholar follow in the footsteps of eminent Near Eastern scholars such as Cyrus Gordon and Michael Astour who have long argued for interconnections in the ancient Mediterranean world. Greece and Rome
Review
Burkert's The Orientalizing Revolution remains an outstanding, or rather the outstanding, contribution to the question of `Near Eastern influence on Greek culture in the Early Archaic Age. Simon Hornblower - Times Literary Supplement
Synopsis
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.
About the Author
Walter Burkert is Professor Emeritus of Classics, University of Zurich.
University of Zurich
Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction
1. "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
2. "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
3. "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
Conclusion
Abbreviations
Bibliography
Notes
Index of Greek Words
General Index