Table Of ContentCultural Contact and Appropriation in the Axial-Age Mediterranean World
Culture and History of the
Ancient Near East
Founding Editor
M.H.E. Weippert
Editor-in-Chief
Jonathan Stökl
Editors
Eckart Frahm
W. Randall Garr
Baruch Halpern
Theo P.J. van den Hout
Leslie Anne Warden
Irene J. Winter
Volume 86
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/chan
Cultural Contact and
Appropriation in the Axial-Age
Mediterranean World
A Periplos
Edited by
Baruch Halpern
Kenneth S. Sacks
Associate Editor
Tyler Edward Kelley
LEIDEN | BOSTON
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Contents
Contributors vii
Introduction 1
Baruch Halpern and Kenneth S. Sacks
Zeus and Prometheus: Greek Adaptations of Ancient Near
Eastern Myths 17
Kurt A. Raaflaub
The Theogony and the Enuma Elish: City-State Creation Myths 38
Stephen Scully
Achaemenid Propaganda and Oral Traditions: A Reassessment of
Herodotus’ Early Persian Logoi 60
Jonathan David
Evidence of Peace and War in Persian Period Yehud 83
John W. Betlyon
Alphabetic Writing in the Mediterranean World: Transmission
and Approriation 103
André Lemaire
The Name of the Prophet ḥăbaqqûq 116
David S. Vanderhooft
ἀμόργη/Amurca: A Semitic Loanword? 125
Eric Lee Welch
Twin Peaks: From Mt. Saphon to the Pillars of Herakles 129
Assaf Yasur-Landau
A Cache of Terracotta Votives from Mendes: Elements of Popular Religion
in the Axial Age 137
Susan Redford
vi contents
The Origin and Termination of the Foreign Colony-Garrison
at Elephantine 149
Donald Redford
When Chimaeras were Chimaeras 158
Baruch Halpern
Medicine and Mathematics in Fifth-century Greece and the
Question of Near Eastern Influence 177
Markus Asper
Who Markets Ideas? Elite and Non-elite Transmission of Culture
and Technology 212
Kenneth S. Sacks
Bibliography 243
Ancient Sources Index 298
Modern Authors Index 307
Contributors
Markus Asper
studied Classics and Philosophy at Freiburg and Vienna. He did his PhD work
at Freiburg on the Hellenistic poet Callimachus and his habilitation on Greek
science writing. Having held positions at Konstanz, State College, PA and New
York, in 2010 he became Professor of Classics at Humboldt University at Berlin.
Asper has published on Hellenistic poetry and ancient Greek science and its
literatures.
John W. Betlyon
is Senior Lecturer in Jewish Studies and Classics and Ancient Mediterranean
Studies at Penn State’s University Park Campus. He has worked as the numis-
matist on numerous archaeological excavations in Israel, Jordan, and Tunisia.
Jonathan David
has been teaching in the Department of Classics at Gettysburg College
since 2009. His principal interests include early historiography and the inter-
connections between the Graeco-Roman world and the Near East. Over the
past several years, he has also served as assistant director for the Jezreel Valley
Regional Project archaeological survey and excavations in northern Israel.
Baruch Halpern
is the Covenant Foundation Professor of Religion, Jewish Studies and
Linguistics at the University of Georgia, and Emeritus Chaiken Family Chair in
Jewish Studies, History, Classics and Mediterranean Studies and Religious
Studies at Penn State. A former co-director of the Megiddo Expedition, and
editor of several scholarly book series, he is not to be taken at all seriously.
André Lemaire
After being researcher at the National Center for Scientific Research (Paris),
André Lemaire was professor of “Hebrew and Aramaic Philology and
Epigraphy” at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (Sorbonne, Paris). He
extensively published on West Semitic Epigraphy and History of the Levant
and is now Professor emeritus.
Kurt A. Raaflaub
is David Herlihy University Professor and Professor of Classics and History
Emeritus at Brown University where he was also Royce Family Professor in
viii contributors
Teaching Excellence (2005–8) and Director of the Program in Ancient Studies
(2000–9). His research has focused on the social, political, and intellectual his-
tory of archaic and classical Greece, the social and political history of the
Roman republic, the comparative history of the ancient world, and issues of
ancient historiography as well as war and peace. He is currently editing The
Landmark Caesar and working on a book on Early Greek Political Thought in
the Intercultural Context of the Eastern Mediterranean World.
Donald Redford
a product of the University of Toronto, has taught at Brown University,
University of Toronto, Ben Gurion University, University of Pennsylvania, and
Pennsylvania State in Near Eastern and related departments. From 1968 he has
participated in and directed excavations in Israel, Jordan and Egypt, including
Buto, Mendes, Migdol and Karnak. His academic interests include the Amarna
Period, urbanism, the Egyptian language and relations between Egypt, Western
Asia and Greece.
Susan Redford
is a faculty lecturer in the Dept. of Classics & Ancient Mediterranean Studies at
Pennsylvania State University. As the director of the Akhenaten Temple
Project’s Theban Tomb Survey and the co-director of the Mendes Expedition,
she has mounted annual expeditions to the Valley of the Nobles and has car-
ried out archaeological excavation in the eastern Nile delta. She has been fea-
tured in documentaries produced by National Geographic and the Discovery
Channel.
Kenneth S. Sacks
is professor of History and Classics at Brown University. He works on the
ancient Greek world (especially historiography and intellectual thought),
classical reception in the United States, and American Transcendentalism.
Stephen Scully
teaches classical studies at Boston University. His interests include epic, Plato,
translation, and Renaissance studies. His book, Hesiod’s Theogony: From the
Babylonian Creation Myths to Paradise Lost, will be published by Oxford in 2015.
David S. Vanderhooft
is sometimes preoccupied with Israel’s prophetic literature, sometimes with
Northwest Semitic epigraphy, and always wondering about scribal culture in
Mesopotamia and its western shadows. He has recently collaborated with
contributors ix
Oded Lipschits on a study of the Persian period administration of Judah and
has his sights set on a commentary on Habakkuk. If any of these research inter-
ests can be fostered while paddling a kayak, so much the better.
Eric Lee Welch
is an historian of the ancient Near East. He is Visiting Assistant Professor of
Jewish Studies at the University of Kansas.
Assaf Yasur-Landau
is currently the chair of the Department of Maritime Civilization, Director of
the Laboratory for Coastal Archaeology and Underwater Survey, and a senior
researcher at the Recanati Institute for Maritime Studies at the University of
Haifa. He has co-directed excavations at Tel Kabri, Tel Achziv, Qiriat Shmona,
as well as underwater surveys at Dor and Achziv. He is the author of six books
and edited volumes, including The Philistines and Aegean Migration in the Late
Bronze Age (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and Household Archaeology in
Ancient Israel and Beyond (co-edited with J. Ebeling and L. Mazow; Brill, 2011),
as well as more than seventy scholarly articles.
