Introduction

Status questionis

Scholars of the ancient world have long since recognized that the Akkadian Epic of Gilgamesh has striking parallels with Homers Iliad and Odyssey. But, how could Greek poets have learned of the legendary deeds of the third-millennium Mesopotamian king? And, why were the Greeks interested in a story like his or in any of the other Near Eastern stories that have been shown to have influenced the poetry of Homer and Hesiod? In this book I present an entirely new approach to the first question by focusing on the second one, and I look for answers in Anatolia and Cyprus, where Greeks were in intense contact with Near Eastern cultures for hundreds of years before Homer’s time, rather than in Mesopotamia, with which they had no direct contact. I rely primarily on the information provided by the tablets found I the libraries of the second-millennium Hittites, whose capital Hattusa was located in central Anatolia. Here the stories of Gilgamesh’s deeds have been found in three different languages, along with narratives of how the gods established the current world order, and stories of the Akkadian conqueror Sargon the Great’s voyages into the unknown and of his grandson Naram-Sin’s failings, all of which I shall argue played a role in shaping the Greek tradition of epic.