Greek Appropriations of Semitic Thinking?

 

Taken from:

http://forum.bib-arch.org/archaeologists-scholars-and-other-personalities/cyrus-gordon/15/?PHPSESSID=bd93951935dfad9019bd1e7b3b0e879b;wap2

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Edwin M. Yamauchi, states, “Though we cannot uncritically accept all the stories which ascribed a Near Eastern inspiration for the various Greek philosophers of Ionia, a careful study of both the historical situation and of the respective texts of the west and of the east, convinces M. L. West that the traditions of such borrowing are sound in the case of the following 6th-cent. BC philosophers: Pherecydes, Anaximander, Anaximenes, and Heraclitus” (M. L. West “Daniel and Contacts between the Aegean and the Near East Before Alexander,” EQ 53.1 [1981]: 47).
Greece and Babylon: Early Contacts between the Aegean and the Near East (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1967), 85;
Persia and the Bible (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1996), 379–94; “Greece and Babylon Revisited,” in To Understand the Scriptures: Essays in Honor of William H. Shea (David Merling; Berrien Springs, MI: Institute of Archeology/Horn Archaeological Museum, 1997), 129–55;
Peyton Randolph Helm, “ ‘Greeks’ in the Neo-Assyrian Levant and ‘Assyria’ in Early Greek Writers,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1980);
M. L. West, The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Early Greek Philosophy and the Orient (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971);
Robert Mondi, “Greek Mythic Thought in the Light of the Near East,” in Approaches to Greek Myth (ed. L. Edmunds; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 142–98.
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Walter Burkert, The Orientalizing Revolution–The Near Eastern Influence in the Early Archaic Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).
C. Lambrou-Philippson, Hellenorientalia: The Near Eastern Presence in the Bronze Age Aegean, C. 3000–1100 B.C. (Göteborg: Aström, 1990).
.... James D. Muhly, review of Michael C. Astour, Hellenosemitica, an Ethnic and Cultural Study in West Semitic Impact on Mycenaean Greece, JAOS 85.4 (1965): 585–8;
Edward Ullendorff, “Ugaritic Studies within their Semitic and Eastern Mediterranean Setting,” BJRL 46 (1963): 236–49.
Michael C. Astour, Hellenosemitica: An Ethnic and Cultural Study in West Semitic Impact on Mycenaean Greece (2d ed.; Leiden: Brill, 1967). Michael Astour was a student of Cyrus H. Gordon and classmate of Edwin M. Yamauchi. He had an influence on Martin Bernal, a professor of political science at Cornell and the grandson of the Egyptologist Alan Gardiner. Bernal was also influenced by another of their classmates, David Owen. However, Bernal in his series, Black Athena, goes far beyond the evidence. Edwin M. Yamauchi, “Martin Bernal’s Black Athena Reviewed,” JAC 14 [1999]: 145–52.
.... Edwin M. Yamauchi, “Daniel and Contacts between the Aegean and the Near East Before Alexander,” Evangelical Quarterly 53.1 (January-March 1981): 45–46;
Peter Walcot, Hesiod and the Near East (Cardiff: University of Wales, 1966);
Éléments orientaux dans la religion grecque ancienne (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1960); Les syncretismes dans les religions de l’antiquité (Leiden: Brill, 1975).
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(Mark J. Geller, “The Influence of Ancient Mesopotamia on Hellenistic Judaism,” in Civilizations of the Ancient Near East (4 in 2 vols. ed. Jack M. Sasson; Peabody: Hendrickson, 2000), 1:43.)
.... Eviatar Zerubavel, The Seven Day Circle: The History and Meaning of the Week (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 7;
Cecil H. Brown, “Naming the Days of the Week: A Cross-language Study of Lexical Acculturation,” Current Anthropology 30.4 (1989): 536–50;
W. M. O'Neil, Time and the Calendars (Manchester, Mich.: Manchester University Press, 1976).

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Book: The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influence On Greek Culture In The Early Archaic Age

The rich and splendid culture of the ancient Greeks has often been described as emerging like a miracle from a genius of its own, owing practically nothing to its neighbors. Walter Burkert offers a decisive argument against that distorted view, replacing it with a balanced picture of the archaic period "in which, under the influence of the Semitic East, Greek culture began its unique flowering, soon to assume cultural hegemony in the Mediterranean". Burkert focuses on the "orientalizing" century 750-650 B.C., the period of Assyrian conquest, Phoenician commerce, and Greek exploration of both East and West, when not only eastern skills and images but also the Semitic art of writing were transmitted to Greece. He tracks the migrant craftsmen who brought the Greeks new techniques and designs, the wandering seers and healers teaching magic and medicine, and the important Greek borrowings from Near Eastern poetry and myth. Drawing widely on archaeological, textual, and historical evidence, he demonstrates that eastern models significantly affected Greek literature and religion in the Homeric age.

The splendid culture of the ancient Greeks has often been described as emerging like a miracle from a genius of its own, owing practically nothing to its neighbors. Walter Burkert offers a decisive argument against that distorted view, pointing toward a balanced picture of the archaic period "in which, under the influence of the Semitic East--from writers, craftsmen, merchants, healers--Greek culture began its unique flowering, soon to assume cultural hegemony in the Mediterranean.