Religion at the Interface: Interactions between the Religious Systems of Late Bronze Age Anatolia and Ancient Greece

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There is growing awareness that the early Greek civilization was heavily imbricated in the cultures of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Near East, and needs to be understood in that context. One of the aspects of society that particularly betrays Near Eastern background is that of religion, broadly understood to include ritual-practice, religious institutions, divine personalities and myth. Scholars such as Walter Burkert, Martin West and Jan Bremmer have begun over the last quarter century to illuminate these connections, and to speculate on how and when interaction between Greek religion and the Near East is likely to have taken place.Work in this area is only beginning, however, and much remains to be done. One very rich source which merits investigation is the relation between Greece and the religions of Late Bronze Age Anatolia. The main source for the latter are extensive the Hittite state archives discovered at Boghaz Köy, which document the religious practices of the Hittites and the cultures they encountered in the region, such as the Luvians of Western and Southern Anatolia, and the Hurrians of the state of Mitanni in North Syria. The Hittite records are remarkably detailed, providing the full text of many rituals, as well as lengthy outlines of major state festivals. Our picture of Anatolian religion has become a lot clearer the last 15 years, thanks to the appearance of a near definitive history of Hittite religion by Volkert Haas, and a series of fundamental studies.Additionally, we now know a lot more about the history of Greek interactions between Greece and Anatolia. It is now virtually certain that the country 'Ahhiyawa' referred to in Hittite diplomatic texts is Mycenaean Greece, and archaeology has provided a detailed picture of Greek presence in SW Anatolia in the late 2nd millennium BCE, particularly around Millawanda (later Miletus). Over the last few decades a number of scholars have drawn attention to parallels between Greek religion and mythology and Late Bronze Age Anatolian rituals or myths. Most attention has been paid to a sequence of songs in Hurrian dealing with divine succession which resembles parts of the Theogony by the Greek poet Hesiod. Other scholars have pointed to Anatolian 'vanishing deities', which seem parallel to the Greek myth of Demeter. Attention has also been paid to details of ritual: it has been noted, for example, that the ritual Odysseus performs at the entrance to the Underworld in Homer's Odyssey bears a striking resemblance to a ritual described in a Hittite tablet; and details of Anatolian sacrificial ritual seem to resemble Greek practice. There has, however, been no systematic attempt to assess the relationship between the religions of Late Bronze Age Anatolia with those of Greece, and this is what I propose to do. The main focus will be on establishing relationships between the religions of Late Bronze Age Anatolia, and the religions attested in the Greek world in the 1st Millennium BCE; I will include Greek religion of the Late Bronze Age ('Mycenaean Religion') as well, although this is comparatively poorly attested. There will be two parts to the project: - first, a survey of points of striking similarity and difference between Late Bronze Age Anatolian religions and Greek religion, as well as explicit borrowings between them, grouping these under a number of headings:, such as ritual (sacrifice, processions, feasting, song), institutions, divination, cult places and instruments of ritual practice, personality of deities, and myth;- secondly, an interpretation of the evidence so collected, testing it against a range of theoretical hypotheses, which are likely to include: transmission of practice from one culture to another; migration of population or diasporas; common inheritance or independent derivation from some other culture; or the existence of a well established cultural koine in the region.