Gods and Mortals in early Greek and Near Eastern Mythology
- Submitting institution
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University of Oxford
- Unit of assessment
- 29 - Classics
- Output identifier
- 1352
- Type
- B - Edited book
- DOI
-
-
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press
- ISBN
- 9781108480246
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- March
- Year of publication
- 2021
- URL
-
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- Supplementary information
-
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- Yes
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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16
- Research group(s)
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-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- The recent wave of scholarly discussions of Near Eastern influence on early Greek culture has suffered from several major methodological flaws, above all the inability of Classicists to engage properly with the latest advances in the scholarship on the civilisations and traditions of the ancient Near East. The research interests of the editors, evinced in several leading publications, led to a conference in Oxford to address precisely this shortcoming: for the first time specialists in Greek literature and culture shared the room with scholars of Assyrian, Babylonian, Sumerian and Akkadian literature, debating, critiquing and comparing subjects and methods. The great methodological advance on all sides was the acknowledgment that the field must move past simple genealogical stemmatology and start looking for deep structures and purposes of comparison, identifying the role of shared elements in their individual cultures. This is a major shift in this very popular but contentious area of research, and the volume will represent a watershed, directing scholars away from stemmatology and into true comparison and contextualisation.
As conference organiser Kelly selected the speakers Classical side to represent both this new approach and some excellent exponents of the current orthodoxy, and contrasted / conjoined them with the most prominent scholars from a range of Near Eastern traditions and angles. The resulting volume fell into three parts, corresponding to different research directions which could be applied to the material: context, influence, and difference. Together with Christopher Metcalf, Kelly wrote an introduction on the history of scholarship as related to the current project; both commented twice on each chapter, critiquing methodologies and evidence, and providing rebuttals and counterarguments for the authors. The resulting volume succeeds in reflecting the intellectual and scholarly ferment of the original conference and thus renews this crucial academic field.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -