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Building on well over a decade of research and publications, Mary R. Bach-varova’s From Hittite to Homer presents a definitive synthesis of the author’s investigations into connections between the Homeric poems and Anatolian narrative traditions. Generously supplemented with maps, tables, an appendix on the history of the dactylic hexameter, and a 100-page bibliography, the book is a major work of scholarship. It will easily take its place beside such earlier landmark studies as Walter Burkert’s The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age (Cambridge, Mass., and London 1992) and Martin West’s The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth (Oxford 1997), with both of which the author is in (occasionally critical) dialogue as she outlines a new model for the relationship between Greek epic and Near Eastern narrative and song traditions.
As the title of the book suggests, the Bronze Age Empire of the Hittites figures prominently in that model. In the multilingual libraries and archives of the Hittites’ polyglot capital, Hattusa, Bachvarova finds important evidence not just for the role of the Hittite empire in the transmission of narratives from Mesopotamia to the peoples of the eastern Mediterranean, including ultimately the Greeks, but also for the specific mechanisms and vectors of that transmission. One of Bachvarova’s major contributions is her consistent emphasis on orality in her account of this process. Fully versed in the work of Milman Parry, Albert Lord, Gregory Nagy, John Miles Foley, and Paul Zumthor (but acknowledging...