Ancient Near Eastern Mythology

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Title
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Ancient Near Eastern Mythology

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General Information
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Author: The Teaching Company
Course Number: 2917—24
Lectures: 24 (30 minutes/lecture)
Taught by: Professor Shalom L. Goldman—Emory University

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MP3 Information
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Mono/Stereo: Stereo
ID#3 Tags: Yes
Source: CD

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Posting Plan
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Lectures
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Part I
Lecture 1: Studying Ancient Near Eastern Myth
Lecture 2: The Emergence of Civilization in the Near East
Lecture 3: Hittites and Canaanites
Lecture 4: Archaeology, Science, and Ideology
Lecture 5: Principles of Writing Systems
Lecture 6: Literary and Religious Aspects of Myth
Lecture 7: Ancient Near Eastern Myths and the Bible
Lecture 8: The Ancient Gods—Egypt and Mesopotamia
Lecture 9: The Ancient Gods—Syria/Canaan
Lecture 10: The Creation Myths of Egypt and Mesopotamia
Lecture 11: Epics of the Gods—Syria/Canaan
Lecture 12: The Epic of Gilgamesh, Part One

Part II
Lecture 13: The Epic of Gilgamesh, Part Two
Lecture 14: Myths of Death and Destruction, Part One
Lecture 15: Myths of Death and Destruction, Part Two
Lecture 16: The Individual and Society—Legal Texts
Lecture 17: The Individual and Society—Myth and Legend
Lecture 18: Love, Lust, and Poetry
Lecture 19: Marriage, Divorce, and Other Arrangements
Lecture 20: Kingship and the Gods
Lecture 21: Royal Historians, Poets, and Artists—Mesopotamia
Lecture 22: A Royal Couple—Myth and Reality
Lecture 23: Royal Historians, Poets, and Artists—Egypt
Lecture 24: Wisdom Literature; Conclusions


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Course Description
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In a time seemingly more devoted to practical realities with each passing
year, why would we want to study myths? What can the fables of ancient
civilizations long since gone to dust tell us about the world we must deal
with today, where each morning plunges many of us anew into a frenzied
pace of professional tasks, madcap scheduling, and day-to-day concerns on
a scale those ancients never could have imagined, leaving us precious little
time to ponder the deeper questions about life itself and our place in the
world?

The answer is that the ancients did imagine such things—or at least their world’s
version of them—along with the same deep questions we ourselves yearn to solve.
And we are connected to them in more ways than we ourselves might ever imagine.

They looked out upon their crops and wondered if the lands on which their lives
depended would continue to be fruitful. And they looked toward the skies or across
the oceans—or even, in their mind’s eye, into the darkness of the underworld—and
wondered if the gods who ruled them were displeased, and how to placate them if
they were. And they wondered why, despite all of their efforts, misfortune still fell
upon them, and what this portended about the fate of humanity itself.

And in their myths, which contemporary scholars are still wresting from the past,
they gave us their answers—the ways they thought they should live and die, the
rules of love and marriage, how to raise their children, the rituals of worship, and the
relationship they would have to their gods.

These are, of course, the same answers those of us in modern times spend our own
lives trying to find. So in looking at the ancients’ mythology from a variety of
different perspectives, we can learn an extraordinary amount about not only their
world and how they viewed it, but about ourselves as well. And we also gain the
benefit of experiencing the pleasures of literature in reading these very first stories—
humanity’s oldest—from the cradle of civilization.


Provocative Parallels With the Old Testament

Ancient Near Eastern Mythology opens a remarkably clear window into that
ancient world, made all the more inviting because of the provocative parallels the
region’s mythology shares with the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, and the opportunity
those parallels provide for us to gain new perspectives on the wellsprings of the
religious heritage shared by so many.

In exploring the mythology of this vital region—which encompasses both Egypt and
Mesopotamia, the “superpowers” of the time, and the Hittite and Canaanite cultures
that lay between them—scholars of myth must confront the problems imposed by
the lack of any central source of “ancient myth.”

They have had to painstakingly gather what they know from many genres, including
poetry; religious ritual; administrative documents such as “king lists” that might
claim the reign of an actual historical ruler to be hundreds of years, thus revealing
embedded mythic material; and archeological finds, from pottery to ancient texts.

And though many approaches have been taken to the study of myth, your
professor—whose experience with the subject matter is itself multidisciplinary,
including a foray into opera with famous American composer Philip Glass—lets you
experience them from four different thematic perspectives:

• Myth as ancient science, functioning as a way for the ancients to explain
things: the origins of the earth; the creation of human beings; the social
order of the times and the need for kings to stay in power; the great
questions of human life such as issues about death or suffering...

• Myth as a refraction or reflection of history, so that in reading the tales of the
gods we are really gaining an understanding of the dynamics of royal
families...

• Myth as connected to ritual, an approach that links religious practice and
sacred narrative, so that we see how people of the time expressed their ideas
about the divine and about the world, and especially how to achieve and
maintain the cosmic harmony that was essential to life not being disrupted;
and...

• Myth as embodying psychological and spiritual truths, with the commonality
that is borne out by the appearance of universal themes in all mythologies
telling us something about human psychology.


A Wealth of Insight From a Treasure Trove of Material

Professor Goldman’s approach to the material is as intimate as it is knowledgeable—
sharing, rather than lecturing about, a remarkably varied assortment of poems,
stories, anecdotes, and insights, including:

• The controversy over whether finding common threads between ancient
myths and the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament—such as the story of the flood
from The Epic of Gilgamesh and the story of Noah, or the episodes of the
infant set afloat in a reed basket in both the autobiographical The Sargon
Legend and the story of Moses—supports or undermines religion, as well as
the strategy of famed British archaeologist Leonard Woolley, who used this
very controversy to ensure funding for his research;

• The cycle of death and rebirth as carried out by the Egyptian pharaohs, in
whom are embodied, in life and death, respectively, Horus, god of kingship,
and Osiris, god of the dead;

• The chilling passions of the goddess Anath, who was sister/consort to the
Canaanite deity, Baal, and whose joy in bloodshed and war—literally bathing
in blood—personified for the people of Ugarit (an ancient city and kingdom in
what is now Syria), and the other peoples of the ancient Near East, the fear
of war and the idea that war, once begun, is soon beyond anyone’s control;

• The intense romantic passion of the original Song of Solomon, and how it
differs from the Song of Songs that appears in so many church Bibles;

• Some intriguing and unexpected highlights from the Code of Hammurabi—the
laws promulgated by the Babylonian king of the 18th century B.C.—including
a major difference in the way in which Egyptian and Mesopotamian society
differed with respect to both marriage and adultery;

• The story of Enmerkar and the Land of Aratta, which includes mythic
elements, a recognition of the need for statecraft, and also a wonderful detail
that gives insight into Sumerian ideas about the mythic origins of writing,
which made their civilization possible;

• Vivid sections from The Adoration of Inanna of Ur, one of the great poems of
the ancient Near East. Attributed to Enheduanna (who was appointed by her
father, Sargon, as priestess of Sin, the moon goddess), the poem was, along
with The Sargon Legend, a rare instance of two surviving documents from the
same family, and gives us information about the place of women in the rituals
of ancient Near East culture; and

• The amazing tale of Akhenaten and Nefertiti—whose 10-year reign in
Akhetaten inspired an unfinished revolution in Egyptian religion and art—
including the discovery of the Amarna letters, a treasure trove of diplomatic
correspondence that revealed a surprising sense of internationalism and
pragmatism by the Egyptians.

In these and other glimpses of a mist-shrouded world, Ancient Near Eastern
Mythology sharpens our view of our own world.

About the professor:

Shalom L. Goldman (Ph.D., New York University, 1986) is Associate Professor of Hebrew and Middle Eastern Studies at Emory University, where he teaches both graduate and undergraduate courses in Middle Eastern Studies and conducts a graduate seminar in the Comparative Literature program. He has received awards for distinguished undergraduate teaching at both Emory and Dartmouth—where he taught from 1988 to 1996 before joining the Emory faculty—and was recognized in 2002 by the Emory chapter of Phi Beta Kappa for his contribution to excellence in undergraduate education. In the mid-1980s, he worked with American composer Philip Glass to create the opera Akhnaten. The opera is organized around a famous set of ancient Near Eastern texts, the Amarna letters and inscriptions. Professor Goldman is the editor of Hebrew and the Bible in America (1993) and the author of The Wiles of Women/The Wiles of Men: Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife in Ancient Near Eastern, Jewish and Islamic Folklore (1995) and God’s Sacred Tongue: Hebrew and the American

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