In the Ugaritic epic of Aqhat, the hero Aqhat is tempted by the goddess Anat’s offer to give him eternal life in return for his hunting bow. He responds, ‘‘Do not lie, Maiden, for to a hero your lies are rubbish! What does a mortal get as his fate? What does a mortal get as his end? Glaze will be poured on my head, lime on top of my skull... the death of all I will die. I too will certainly die!’’ His defiant response to the powerful goddess echoes the fatalism of another hero in Ancient Near Eastern epic, that of Gilgamesh, king of Uruk in Mesopotamia, who loses the plant of rejuvenation to a serpent and finally resigns himself to his mortal destiny; he too will die, he is not a god, and must give up his quest to live forever. The Ugaritic epic from Syria and the Akkadian-Sumerian cycle of Gilgamesh, both from among some of the oldest literatures in the world, demonstrate the timeless human concern with fate and the human condition.
Somber reflection about death, however, does not alone characterize the flavor of the Ancient Near East’s contributions to world literature. Humor abounds in jokes and stories; animal fables appear, as do erotic love poetry, instructional texts of both the serious and the tongue-in-cheek variety, autobiographies of the ancient rich and famous, prayers and hymns to the gods, and even the purported words of the gods themselves set down as oracles and prophecies, and the stories of the gods.
A survey of the kinds and nature of literature in the Ancient Near East must necessarily be selective. One first notes that while writing for accounting and administrative purposes began with Sumer in southern Mesopotamia toward the end of the fourth millennium bce, literary compositions in Sumerian do not emerge until around 2600 BCE at the cities of Shuruppak and Abu Salabikh, and those in Akkadian sometime around 2400 bce. In Egypt, which developed its own independent writing system also before 3000 bce, our oldest literary pieces date to about 2400 bce. As for Syria-Palestine, whose Canaanite alphabetic script goes back to the early second millennium BCE, pride of place in the literary impetus goes to the Ugaritic texts from Ras Shamra on the coast of Syria from around 1400-1200 bce. The writings of the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament, which represent the most extensive corpus of literature from Syro-Palestine before the Hellenistic period probably date mostly to 586-165 bce.
In formal terms, one may define literary texts as connotative, that is, admitting a high level of ambiguity and evoking a variety of mental and sensual associations. This is in contrast to non-literary texts, which are more narrowly referential. Unfortunately, while scholars can agree on what is ‘‘literary’’ in Ancient Near Eastern texts (Gronenberg 1996: 60), other aspects such as genre, authorship, readership, and purpose remain difficult. Not only is there no outline of native poetics or literary precepts, but it is difficult to analyze ancient aesthetics when one is far removed in time and language from the original context (Black 1998: 24-8; Rubio 2004a).
Drawing on stylistic devices and other kinds of signals from within the texts and utilizing Fowler’s typology of features shared by texts of the same genre (1982: 54-74), this discussion will be organized around categories of literary texts. The list is not intended to be exhaustive, and some categories overlap.
World History
