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Article

Chaeremon (2), of Alexandria (1), Greek author, 1st cent. CE  

Christopher Pelling

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
07 March 2016
Subjects:
  1. Greek Literature
  2. Near East
  3. Roman History and Historiography

Chaeremon of *Alexandria (1), where he held a priesthood: Greek writer on Egypt. He taught the young *Nero. His writings treated Egyptian history, religion, customs, astrology, and hieroglyphic writings. A Stoic viewpoint is visible.

Article

Heliodorus (4), Greek novelist, c. 4th century CE  

Benedek Kruchió

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
07 March 2016
Subjects:
  1. Greek Literature
  2. Late Antiquity
  3. Near East
  4. Reception
Heliodorus was the author of the Aethiopica, the latest and longest Greek novel to survive from antiquity. In his work, Heliodorus claims to be a Phoenician from Emesa, but there are good reasons against treating this as an authoritative autobiographical statement. The Aethiopica tells the adventures of Charicleia, the white daughter of the black queen and king of Ethiopia. Her mother abandons her, and she is brought up by foster-fathers in Ethiopia and Delphi. There she falls in love with the young Greek Theagenes, with whom she travels via Egypt to Ethiopia. They are almost sacrificed to the local gods, but Charicleia’s parents eventually recognise her. The protagonists become priests and marry. The novel is a narratologically ambitious work that draws on the structure of the Odyssey (in mediis rebus beginning, embedded heterodiegetic narratives) and takes these devices to a whole new level. A wide range of topics play important roles in the Aethiopica, such as religion, multiculturalism, identity, and epistemology.

Article

Herodian (2), historian  

Alexander Hugh McDonald and Antony Spawforth

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
07 March 2016
Subjects:
  1. Greek Literature
  2. Near East
Herodian (2) of eastern origin, perhaps from *Antioch(1), a subordinate official in Rome early in the 3rd cent. ce and probably an imperial freedman (see PIR I, II, III2 H 160), wrote a Greek History of the Empire after Marcus in eight books from M. *Aurelius to *Gordian III (ce 180–238).

Article

Near Eastern Myths, Sumerian-Akkadian  

J. Cale Johnson

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
27 August 2020
Subjects:
  1. Ancient Geography
  2. Greek Literature
  3. Near East
Sumerian-Akkadian mythology reaches back to the earliest lists of gods in the third millennium bce and preoccupied the Mesopotamian intellectuals for more than 2000 years. This overview describes four major moments in the earlier phases of that history, each putting in place a different type of cosmic building block: ontologies, infrastructures, genealogies, and interfaces. These four phases stretch from the first mythological narratives in the mid-third millennium down to the late second and first millennium bce, when Mesopotamian materials are reconfigured and adapted for cuneiform scribal traditions in northern Mesopotamia, Syria and the Levant. Rather than limiting ourselves to late, somewhat heterodox recompilations such as the Enuma Elish or the Baal Epic, this contribution argues that the most important and long-lived features of the mythological tradition in Mesopotamia came into existence between 2500 and 1500bce.Like the poetry of a particular language or the usual turns of phrase in a family, the mythology embedded in a particular culture or civilization provides decisive clues to the central concerns of that society. These clues are indirect hints at most, constrained by the need to transmit specific textual materials (mythologems, proverbs, or narratives), while at the same time producing the local pragmatic effects that they are thought to achieve. Surprisingly, then, mythological materials are also usually quite susceptible to translation, giving the unknowing reader the impression that things were not so very different four thousand years ago in ancient Iraq. If we adopt a definition of myth that limits our quarry to “stories about deities that describe how the basic structures of reality came into existence,” excluding thereby .

Article

Teucer (3), of Cyzicus, Greek writer, c. mid-1st cent. BCE  

Alexander Hugh McDonald and Kenneth S. Sacks

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
07 March 2016
Subjects:
  1. Greek Literature
  2. Near East

Wrote several books about the contemporary near east, including coverage of Pompey's settlement in 63–62. His Περὶ χρυσοφόρου γῆς (‘On the Gold-Producing Land’) does not necessarily identify him with *Teucer(4) of Babylon.

Article

Troy  

Peter Pavúk

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
07 March 2016
Subjects:
  1. Greek Literature
  2. Greek Material Culture: Bronze Age
  3. Near East

Major Bronze Age fortified settlement on the West Anatolian coast, south of the Dardanelles, consisting of a citadel and a lower town, changing in size and importance over time. The site, formerly called formerly Hisarlık, has been intermittently excavated for more than a century now, mainly thanks to Heinrich Schliemann’s identification of the site with Homeric Troy. Whereas the Homeric question has become less central over the years, it is clear by now that Troy, thanks to its localisation in the border-zone between Anatolia, the Aegean, and the Balkans, but also thanks to its uninterrupted occupation from c. 2900 bce to the 6th century ce, is an important archaeological site on its own. Troy became a major reference point, with two main cultural peaks: during Troy II/III (c. 2550–2200 bce) and later on during Troy VI Late/VIIa (c. 1400-1180 bce). It must have profited from a fertile surrounding, the trade in raw materials, or its facilitation, and possibly human resources. Situated on the edge of the Near Eastern civilisations, it was still part of the broader Bronze Age world.

Article

Uranius, Greek writer about Arabia  

Simon Hornblower

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
09 June 2016
Subjects:
  1. Greek Literature
  2. Late Antiquity
  3. Near East

His date is not quite certain, but 4th century ce (rather than three centuries earlier) seems likeliest. He is a source for much of the Arabian information in Stephanus of Byzantium, in whose treatise on ethnics he is praised highly.