This book provides a groundbreaking reassessment of the prehistory of Homeric epic. It argues that in the Early Iron Age bilingual poets transmitted to the Greeks a set of narrative traditions closely related to the one found at Bronze-Age Hattusa, the Hittite capital. Key drivers for Near Eastern influence on the developing Homeric tradition were the shared practices of supralocal festivals and venerating divinized ancestors, and a shared interest in creating narratives about a legendary past using a few specific storylines: theogonies, genealogies connecting local polities, long-distance travel, destruction of a famous city because it refuses to release captives, and trying to overcome death when confronted with the loss of a dear companion. Professor Bachvarova concludes by providing a fresh explanation of the origins and significance of the Greco-Anatolian legend of Troy, thereby offering a new solution to the long-debated question of the historicity of the Trojan War.

AbstractI examine the literary and conceptual background of a Hurro-Hittite ritual calling on divinized royal ancestors (dšarrena), characters from Hurro-Hittite song, members of the Sargonic dynasty, a variety of kings from far-off lands, and the “lord of Hatti” (KUB 27.38). I show that the ritual provides a unique glimpse of the complex Near Eastern tradition telling the history of the world from its beginning. The ritual also helps us to understand how historical memory informed ritual behaviors that legitimated the kingship of regional rulers, allowing them access to the distant past and connecting them to world events. Overall, thešarrenaritual suggests that the histories of the divine and human worlds were linked into a single master narrative by the middle of the second millennium BCE.

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Mountains were nodes of contact and places of continuity that allowed for the transfer across space, time, and cultures within Anatolia of stories connected to the storm god’s rise to kingship in heaven. Versions of the Bronze Age stories other than the ones available to us lie behind the story of the births of Cybele and Agdistis in Arnobius (Adv. Nat. 5.5–6), which represented versions not aimed at the concerns of the Hittite court, fo- cused less on kingship and more on transgressive sexuality, gestation, and birth, which were metaphorized as volcanic and metallurgic processes.

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