Greek Myths and Mesopotamia: Parallels and Influence in the Homeric Hymns and Hesiod.

• Author: Lambert, W.G.

Connections between the oldest surviving Greek literature and ancient Mesopotamian texts are a fascinating but difficult field of study, where the borders between the highly plausible, the possible, and the improbable are not clearly defined. The most successful work so far has been achieved in relating parts of the Theogony of Hesiod to ancient Near Eastern myths. The book under review uses particularly the Homeric Hymns, though Hesiod and other Greek sources are drawn upon as appropriate. The author is a Classical scholar who has taken a serious interest in cuneiform texts and spent periods at the universities of Munich, Heidelberg, and Oxford, where he was well guided. Thus this book is generally well informed and up to date both in the Classical Greek and in the Near Eastern spheres (both Sumerian and Akkadian), something rarely achieved in the work of a single scholar.

The general result argued for is that many more connections can be established than have been noticed previously, by extracting motifs from the various narratives, which, it is argued, prove connections. The one most stressed is the motif of a "journey for power": a deity travels to acquire or display power. The first example given is that of Inanna/Ishtar in her descent to the netherworld. The goddess, it is claimed, argued her way into the netherworld to gain power and was successful, in that eventually she alone acquired the power to return to the upper regions and so was victorious. The facts are that the goddess was in some sense asserting power by pushing her way into the netherworld (but note the qualifications on pp. 246-47), where the power of upperworld gods did not reach. But the claims of success and victory for her seem greatly exaggerated. When she got down there she was put to death, was revived only by the skill and trickery of the god Enki/Ea, and was allowed out as a special privilege only on the condition that she send down a substitute, so satisfying the requirement that, once down there, a person was in principle not allowed to return. She chose her spouse Dumuzi as her substitute, but the arrangement was made that she and he would alternate, each spending half the year in the netherworld. To claim that Inanna/Ishtar was victorious over the netherworld in this escapade is not to use words in their normal sense. It was Enki/Ea who outwitted the queen of the netherworld and so saved Inanna/Ishtar, but though the requirement to send back a substitute did give her power to choose, that was hardly an acquisition of power or "victory" in the ordinary sense of the word.

It must be observed that much mythology is based on human experience, and that in life one often has to go somewhere to perform a particular act. Thus a deity in a myth doing just that can mean that the journey is an incidental background item, and not a major motif to be used in comparison with other myths. The author often betrays the fragility of his adducing such motifs by his use of, e.g., "apparently," "appears to be," and "seems to have" (all on p. 43).

The same technique is applied to the Homeric Hymns. In the Hymn to Delian Apollo, Leto wanders around the Aegean seeking a suitable place for giving birth to her son. This is found in Delos, where, however, birth does not at first take place easily due to the absence of the birth goddess Eileithuia. She eventually arrives and birth ensues. This is interpreted as another journey for power (p. 79; the son born, Apollo, was indeed a powerful god), and after his birth he too travels around, but to establish his cult centers. The author admits that his "journey for power" motif "is not immediately apparent" (p. 79) but insists that, with a knowledge of the Mesopotamian myths, the matter can...