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Walter Burkert, Babylon, Memphis, Persepolis: Eastern Contexts of Greek Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004. Pp. vii + 178. ISBN 0-674-01489-8. $22.95.
One of the most important works in the study of Greek-Near Eastern cross-cultural interaction has been Walter Burkert's The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age (Harvard, 1992). In his latest volume, Babylon, Memphis, Persepolis: Eastern Contexts of Greek Culture (Harvard, 2004), Burkert reinforces the bridge that connects ancient Greece and the Near East in modern scholarship. The volume is a translation and revision of a series of lectures given by the author in 1996 at the Università Ca Foscari in Venice; it has been previously published in French, Spanish and German.
Significant additions to the original lectures include the introduction and first chapter. The introduction (1-15) offers the non-specialist an overview of the history of the study of the classical world's interaction with the Near East, followed by a brief account of the historical contexts of that interaction and short summary of the specific articles which the Greeks adopted from the Near East. Chapter 1, "Alphabetic Writing" (16- 20), offers an all too brief account of the Greek adoption of the West Semitic alphabet. The more than casual reader would be better served by reading the parallel section on the alphabet in Burkert's Orientalizing Revolution (25-33).
In Chapter 2, "Orientalizing Features in Homer" (21-48), Burkert republishes much of his material from Chapter 3 in Orientalizing Revolution, "Or a Godly...