Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [7]
These same ancients “invented” the myths that grew hand in hand with their civilizations, making it impossible to separate one from the other. While the impact of myths may seem less obvious than that of the wheel, writing, or a mug of beer, these ancient legends are still a powerful force in our lives today. They remain alive in our art, literature, language, theater, dreams, psychology, religions, and history.
With that in the background, Don’t Know Much About Mythology traces the story of myths through the ages and shows how myths helped make civilization. It also looks at the way myths moved from one group to another in the exchange of civilizations. The familiar mythology of the Greeks did not emerge full-blown from the sea—the way Aphrodite supposedly did. It drew upon ideas from Mesopotamia, Egypt, Crete, and other ancient neighbors. While many of us may be somewhat familiar with the stories of Adam, Eve, Noah, and the later tales of the Hebrew patriarchs which were set down in the Book of Genesis, we may not know about their connection to much older Mesopotamian stories, such as the epic poem Gilgamesh, a tale of a very flawed hero from the same part of the world. Myths don’t just spring up from virgin ground—they are often borrowed from older sources and then molded and remade into new myths.
In telling the story of the connections between these age-old traditions and civilizations, this book is an outgrowth of Don’t Know Much About the Bible. In writing that book, I learned about the deep, primordial connections between the civilizations of the ancient Near East and the people who emerged as the Jews of the Old Testament. Some scholars and historians believe that the idea of the one God of the Hebrews might have been inspired by an Egyptian pharaoh named Akhenaten who unsuccessfully tried to replace the vast pantheon of Egyptian deities with a single sun god. Some historians believe this concept may have been adopted by the ancient Hebrews while they were in Egypt. It is a controversial and unproved idea, but there is no question that comprehending the myths and civilizations of Egypt and ancient Mesopotamia adds to an understanding of the Judeo-Christian world, which was later, similarly, influenced by the Greek and Roman worlds, in which Christianity was born, and by the world of the “pagan” people to whom the early Christian missionaries began to preach the gospel of Jesus—all of these worlds alive with myth and ancient religions.
To accomplish this, I use the techniques I have employed in all the books of the Don’t Know Much About series: questions and answers, timelines that show historical connections, “voices” of both real people and mythic sources, and stories about the “household names” of ancient myths—including Hercules, Jason, Ulysses, Romulus and Remus, as well as many more unfamiliar names from other cultures. This book also draws on a vast array of recent archaeological and scientific discoveries that have shed new light on the ancient societies that created these myths.
The chapters are organized by the various civilizations, starting with the two with the earliest known mythologies and worship systems—Egypt and Mesopotamia. The book then moves through the other major Western mythologies in rough chronological order—Greece, Rome, and Northern Europe. The major Eastern myth systems of India, China, and Japan come next, followed by chapters on the remaining areas of the world as they were opened up to Europeans: sub-Saharan Africa; the Americas; and the Pacific island areas—the last places “discovered” in the world.* That raises two important points. First, while this guided world-tour is an overview of the world’s principal civilizations and their myths, it is obviously not an “encyclopedic” treatment. It would be impossible to cover every myth and every god from each civilization—large and small—in a single volume such as this. Instead, this book