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ComparativeObservations on theNear Eastern EpicTraditions Jack M. Sasson2005 год

Comparative Observations on the Near Eastern Epic Traditions
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Аннотация: We must not doubt that stories were told and enjoyed long before humans learned how to transpose what the ear hears into what the eye sees.Whether brief or developed, transmitted verbatim or embellished, these tales were likely sung, chanted, intoned, or declaimed, with or without bodily accompaniments.Neither must we doubt that long before what we call writing (characters with visual codes) developed just over 5,000 years ago, people had found many ways to stimulate their memory of words they have heard: through distinctly shaped tokens, via paintings or artifacts, evocative music, or the dance.We may imagine, too, that at the dawn of history the literature that we want to call ''epic'' had been evolving for millennia.People gathered around fires and made their world more human by telling and hearing stories about worthy deeds, gained or lost.Therefore, when in this chapter we focus on the ancient Near East's manifestation of the epic tradition, we have already lost the thread of its earliest development.The ''Ancient Near East'' (henceforth ANE) is a vast and unwieldy setting from which to draw the material for our discussion.The label itself is of relatively recent coinage and has no equivalent in ancient documents.Beyond a unity of time and space and a participation in technological developments, the cultures were regionally distinct, in the languages they spoke, in the religions they professed, in the governments they shaped, in their art, in their architecture and, as we shall see, in their literature.Let us arbitrarily but reasonably limit the time span to the two and half millennia before the Christian era and the area to those in Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Canaan, Israel, and Egypt.The comments will address selected issues about diversity of contexts, process in the development of epic literature, and literary features. Diversity LanguagesWe are told by linguists that each century witnesses regressively the extinction of many more languages than are generated.This is true of the ANE as well, where names of places and of individuals often betray unknown linguistic families.Some of the languages we know from recovery of documents resist attachment to families (Sumerian, Hurrian, Hattic, Elamite).Others represent the earliest written representatives of Indo-European (Hittite, Luwian).Most belonged to branches of Semitic that have not survived the times:Foley/Companion to Ancient Epic 1405105240_4_014 Page Proof page 215 15.12.
Год издания: 2005
Авторы: Jack M. Sasson
Ключевые слова: Ancient Near East History, Historical, Religious, and Philosophical Studies, Eurasian Exchange Networks
Другие ссылки: doi.org (HTML)
Discover Archive (Vanderbilt University) (PDF)
Discover Archive (Vanderbilt University) (HTML)