Comparative Observations on the Near Eastern Epic Traditions

We must not doubt that stories were told and enjoyed long before humans learned how to transpose what the ear hears into what the eye sees. Whether brief or developed, transmitted verbatim or embellished, these tales were likely sung, chanted, intoned, or declaimed, with or without bodily accompaniments. Neither must we doubt that long before what we call writing (characters with visual codes) developed just over 5,000 years ago, people had found many ways to stimulate their memory of words they have heard: through distinctly shaped tokens, via paintings or artifacts, evocative music, or the dance. We may imagine, too, that at the dawn of history the literature that we want to call ‘‘epic’’ had been evolving for millennia. People gathered around fires and made their world more human by telling and hearing stories about worthy deeds, gained or lost. Therefore, when in this chapter we focus on the ancient Near East’s manifestation of the epic tradition, we have already lost the thread of its earliest development. The ‘‘Ancient Near East’’ (henceforth ANE) is a vast and unwieldy setting from which to draw the material for our discussion. The label itself is of relatively recent coinage and has no equivalent in ancient documents. Beyond a unity of time and space and a participation in technological developments, the cultures were regionally distinct, in the languages they spoke, in the religions they professed, in the governments they shaped, in their art, in their architecture and, as we shall see, in their literature. Let us arbitrarily but reasonably limit the time span to the two and half millennia before the Christian era and the area to those in Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Canaan, Israel, and Egypt. The comments will address selected issues about diversity of contexts, process in the development of epic literature, and literary features.