The Orientalizing Revolution

Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age

Translated by Margaret E. Pinder

Paperback

ISBN 9780674643642

Publication date: 08/11/1998

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.”

Praise

Brilliant...[Burkert] is consistently thorough and challenging...Without denying the role of innate talent, he shows that much of the Greek miracle grew from an openness to influences from other cultures...[His] careful scholarship...has constructed the bridge that he set out to build.

—Carol G. Thomas, American Historical Review
An elegant and academically influential work...The Orientalizing Revolution can be enthusiastically recommended.

—Simon Hornblower, Times Literary Supplement
Burkert's The Orientalizing Revolution remains an outstanding, or rather the outstanding, contribution to the question of `Near Eastern influence on Greek culture in the Early Archaic Age.

—Greece and Rome
This thought provoking work is an updated translation of Burkert's Die orientlisierende Epoche in der griechischen Religion und Literature, 1984...It is refreshing to see a classical scholar follow in the footsteps of eminent Near Eastern scholars such as Cyrus Gordon and Michael Astour who have long argued for interconnections in the ancient Mediterranean world.

—Mark W. Chavalas, Near East Archaeological Society Bulletin