Before Homer and the Bible: A Narrative Review of the Ancient Near East's Literatures
Year: 2026
Type: review
Abstract: Literature did not begin in Greece: the earliest written literatures --- Sumerian hymns and proverbs, Akkadian epics and debates, Egyptian tales and laments, Canaanite myths --- are the traditions from which the later Mediterranean canons borrowed, and their modern editions are comparative literature's foundation documents. This article presents a narrative review of the literature that recovered them. The synthesis is organized around three themes: the recovery and the anthologies, in which Pritchard's Ancient Near Eastern Texts, Dalley's and George's Gilgamesh, Foster's Before the Muses, and the Atra-Hasis edition assembled the cuneiform canon --- creation, flood, and hero together; the Egyptian and Canaanite traditions, in which Lichtheim's three volumes, Parkinson's Sinuhe poems, Coogan's Canaanite stories, and Assmann's mind of Egypt fixed the Nile's and Ugarit's literatures --- instruction, lament, and myth as genres; and the Sumerian roots and the epic's evolution, in which Kramer's Sumerians, Black and colleagues' literature of Sumer, and Tigay's Gilgamesh evolution traced the tradition's beginnings and the epic's eighteen centuries of growth. It is concluded that the recovered literatures teach one comparative lesson: the ancient Near East wrote every major genre --- epic, myth, hymn, lament, instruction, debate --- before Greece, and the modern editions are not antiquarian curiosities but the primary evidence for literature's own origins.
Authors: Revista, Zen, LITERATURE, 10
Institution: Faculdades Guarulhos
Language: English
Topic: Ancient Near East History
Subfield: Archeology (arts and humanities)
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7204808557