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At a couple of points in this class we'vementioned that the Greeks are not sittingin isolation they're connected to manyother cultures around this wonderfullyconnective body of water, theMediterranean Sea.In the case of Homer, sometimes theseconnections are hard to find.It's difficult to find direct linkagesbetween the kind of themes and subjectmatter that Homer treats and otherparallel stories around the Mediterranean.Needless to say they must have existed wejust don't have a rich enough evidencebase to tell us what they were.When we get to Keesia, the pictures alittle bit different.We actually have Connections with Hesean'stheogony that we can isolate and, andlabel in many different traditions aroundthe ancient near-east especially.The way that this general picture goesillustrated on the map behind me.

We have very, very old cultures in thefertile crescent.The Sumerians and Babylonians were therefor many, many millennia in the, beforethe common era and much earlier than theGreeks are.There are also literary records thatsurvived.From this these groups some millenniaafter the fact but the literary records dosurvive in cuneiform and we have sometellings of poetic stories with a coupleof linkages to things like the Odyssey or

the Iliad but with really strikingresemblances to some of the themes thatanimate Hesiod's Theogony.So talking about this connection withthese other cultures is a very helpful wayto start our discussion of Hesiod'sTheogony.The underlying concepts in the Theogonyare not at all, All exclusive to Greekmyth.Several near eastern cultures have theirown religions, and also their own creationmyths.

And they have sometimes strikingsimilarities with Hesiod's Theogony.The Babylon, Babylonians have their epic.The Enume Elish.The creation epic.It's a story of the creation of theuniverse, and serves as a justification,justification for the supremacy of, of, oftheir highest god.Marduk is this person, and Marduk defeats,

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an earlier goddess called Tiamat.One of two original divinities in theworld.Scholars have long recognized manysimilarities between Marduk And Zeus.Like Zeus Maduke is a sky god.He is of a younger generation.He overthrows an older generation andestablishes himself as, top dog, creatingorder, and, overthrowing his parents inorder to triumph.The Babylonians intended that the EnumaElish should serve as a song of praise,for the king of their gods.Similarly, in Hesiod's story where I see akind of triumphant narrative about the,the, the, the, the Greatness of Zeus.And this is gonna serve as a kind ofhymnic praise for Zeus's position in theUniverse.Also the Sumerians occupying the scene,well for our purposes, Fertile Crescent soin that general region.The Sumerians had their own system of Gods

and Goddesses.Among the principal Sumerian Gods were Ahna Sky God and the Supreme Authority AndInanna, The queen of the gods and thegoddess of sexual love and war.And Lisle, a storm god who is also activein earthly events.Their myths covered a variety of topicsincluding creation of the world and ofhumans.The Sumerian gods also figure prominentlyin Gilgamesh, the epic of Gilgamesh theoldest epic in existence, thanks to the

cuneiform that kept that intact.Gilgamesh's story has surprisingsimilarities to some of the militaryaspects in the Iliad and some of thejourney parts of the Odyssey.The culture of the Hittites and theHurrians located there, As the cultures inthe fertile crescent expand and move intothe Anatolian plain.Hittites and the Hurrians had their ownsets of gods and goddesses, with somerelationship to what we see in theSumerian and Babylonian traditions.

There is a kingship in heaven myth for theHittites.The complete story is not fully know, butthe kingship in heaven bares some Obvioussimilarities to, what we know of it, bearsobvious similarities to what's happeningin the theogony.The first god of heaven, Alalu, isoverthrown by Anu, who assumes his role.His cup bearer is named Kumarbi.

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And Kumarbi challenges Anu, and eventuallycuts off his genitals and swallows them.Anu then tells Kumarbi that he as becomeimpregnated with several divinities.Kumarbi then spits out something whichprobably included the genitals of Anu.At this point, the text breaks off andwe're not quite sure what the rest, where,where the rest of it goes but as we'rereading the Theogony, we're gonna see thatseveral of these things.Strange and difficult as they seem aregonna bear relationship with themes thatwe're gonna see in Theogony.From generations, where younger ones throwolder ones to things like castration tothe to a kind of efficacious power of thegenitals, after they're Sliced off andthen further leading into some of thedetails of Hesiod's story.In the case of Hesiod we are able to findthese links a little bit more readily.It just so happens that the literarytradition that preexisted Hesiod survives

a little bit more intact than the literarytradition than, presumably, the literarytradition that preceded Homer.We don't have as many connections that wecan draw with Homer but as I said at thebeginning, I think we can be quite surethat they are there.Just that the historical record in a waygives Homer a kind of free pass.We can't draw connections with others AndHomer just kind of seems to sit there inhis magnificent isolated glory.If we didn't have all these other epics to

compare Hesiod with, we'd probably thinkthe same of him.Once these cultures make contact with oneanother, you can see the overlandpossibilities in our prior map, as, as,cultural forums move from the fertilecrescent over across the Anatolian plainand into Greece.Once contact is made it, it leaves a markand it helps the Greeks shape their ownideas about how creation might work, aswe'll see when we turn to the pages thatopen up Hesiod's Theogony.