98 THE MYTHS OF CREATION: THE GODS
reaching manhood, he must come into his own by overcoming challenges and
adversaries: his father Cronus and the Titans, the Giants, and Prometheus. Very
special on the list of his triumphs is the slaying of a dragon. By killing Typhoeus,
Zeus, the supreme god, may be proclaimed as the archetypal dragonslayer—one
of the most powerful and symbolic of all divine and heroic achievements.
In the end, as we shall see in the next chapter, Zeus emerges as the ultimate
victor and wins a bride, a kingdom, and supreme power. He triumphs to become
almighty god, although even then his exploits and trials are by no means over.ADDITIONAL READING
PARALLELS IN MYTHS OF GREECE AND
THE ANCIENT NEAR EAST
Five basic myths are important for the identification of parallels in the myths of
ancient Near Eastern civilizations. These are the myths of Creation, Succession,
the Flood, the Descent to the Underworld, and the hero-king Gilgamesh.They
have striking parallels in Greek mythology, as we have already observed. "Are
there migrating myths?" asks Walter Burkert, and he and others answer that the
similarities are undeniable evidence for the influence of Near Eastern cultures
over Greek mythology. How this influence traveled cannot be known precisely,
but trade is the most likely means, as it has been shown that contacts between
the Greek and Near Eastern worlds flourished especially in two periods, the thir-
teenth and fourteenth centuries and the eight and seventh centuries B.c.^24 Near
Eastern myths appear in the cultures of Sumer and Akkad—southern and north-
ern Mesopotamia, respectively. The Sumerians were the earliest (from the fourth
millennium B.c.) to develop a civilization with urban centers, such as Ur and
Uruk. They developed cuneiform ("wedge-shaped") script on clay tablets, and
their religious architecture was distinguished by ziggurats (temple towers). They
were absorbed by Semitic peoples speaking a different language (Akkadian), but
still using cuneiform script. The chief Akkadian urban center (from the late third
millennium) was Babylon, which reached its first zenith under king Hammurabi,
around 1800 B.c. Babylon was conquered in about 1250 B.C. by the northern Akka-
dians, who established the Assyrian empire, with its center at Nineveh.
Among the peoples associated with the Akkadians were the Hurrians of
northern Syria, who in their turn were absorbed by the Hittites after about 1400
B.c. The Hittite empire flourished in Anatolia (the central and eastern area of
modern Turkey) during the second millennium B.c., with its center at Hattusas,
the modern Boghaz-Kôy. Hittite myths absorbed Hurrian themes and the names
of Hurrian gods, and several of these myths have themes in common with Greek
myth. The same is true of Egyptian, Phoenician, and Hebraic myths, the last-
named being more familiar to Western readers, especially in the biblical Chris-
tian narratives of Genesis (Chapters 1 and 2), Psalms (many references, for ex-
ample, Psalms 33 and 104), and Job (Chapter 38).