Raising the Dead: The Neo-Assyrian Ideological Background of Odyssey 11

Abstract

This article reanalyzes the Near Eastern background for the ritual that Odysseus performs at the entrance of the Underworld in Odyssey 11. The scholarly consensus is that this ritual was borrowed from the Hittites during the Late Bronze Age and survived until it appears in the text of the Odyssey. Recent work has shown that the Sargonid Assyrian kings also performed a similar ritual in the same era as the textualization of the Homeric poems and invested it with ideological importance. Using the globalization phenomenon of glocalization as a frame, this article resituates Homer’s adaptation of the ritual against this background to argue that the adaptation has important implications for how Greeks conceived of themselves in the wider Mediterranean world and how we should approach Greco-Near Eastern literary parallels.