The Romance between Greece and the East

The contact zones between the Greco-Roman world and the Near East represent one of the most exciting and fast-moving areas of ancient-world studies. This new collection of essays by world-renowned experts (and some new voices) in classical Jewish Egyptian Mesopotamian and Persian literature focuses specifically on prose fiction or ''the ancient novel''. Twenty chapters either offer fresh readings - from an intercultural perspective - of familiar texts (such as the biblical Esther and Ecclesiastes Xenophon of Ephesus'' Ephesian Story and Dictys of Crete''s Journal) or introduce material that may be new to many readers: from demotic Egyptian papyri through old Avestan hymns to a Turkic translation of the Life of Aesop. The volume also considers issues of methodology and the history of scholarship on the topic. A concluding section deals with the question of how narratives patterns and motifs may have come to be transmitted between cultures.