The orientalizing revolution
Subtitle: Near Eastern influence on Greek culture in the early archaic age
By: Walter Burkert ; translated by Walter Burkert and Margaret E. Pinder.
Series: Revealing antiquity ;; 5
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 1992
Place of publication: Cambridge, Mass
Language: eng
Number of pages: 225
Subjects: Greece -- Civilization -- To 146 B.C; Greece -- Civilization -- Middle Eastern influences
Description: 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.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 135-152) and index.
Translation of: Die orientalisierende Epoche in der griechischen Religion und Literatur.