Divine Narratives in Ancient Greece and the Near East

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Divine Narratives in Ancient Greece and the Near East

(Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies, Oxford, 3-4 July 2017)

This conference will bring together Classicists and Assyriologists from Britain, Europe and America in order to foster informed interdisciplinarity in one of the most important and vibrant current debates in ancient scholarship: the interaction between the civilisations of the Near East and Archaic Greece. Though it is now well-established that early Greek literature was to some extent inspired by ancient Near Eastern models, the mechanisms and effects of cultural influence are still hotly debated. This conference hopes to promote a dynamic interface between the two fields, which are still too separate in their activities, and so prone to using isolated or out of date methods in their individual approaches to this common question.

The conference is organised by Johannes Haubold (Durham), Adrian Kelly (Oxford) and Christopher Metcalf (Oxford), and supported by the Craven Committee (Faculty of Classics, Oxford), the Classics Faculty Board (Oxford), the Balliol Interdisciplinary Institute, the Jowett Trust (Balliol College) and the London Centre for the Ancient Near East.

Aside from the organisers, the confirmed speakers are Mary Bachvarova (Willamette), Bernardo Ballesteros-Petrella (Oxford), Angus Bowie (Oxford), Yoram Cohen (Tel Aviv), Bruno Currie (Oxford), Andrew George (SOAS, London), Andre Lardinois (Nijmegen), Robert Rollinger (Innsbruck), Ian Rutherford (Reading), Frances Reynolds (Oxford), Ruth Scodel (Michigan), Mark Weeden (SOAS, London).

Attendance is £20, to help with the cost of lunch and tea / coffee, but free to members of Oxford University. If you wish to attend, please register by emailing Adrian Kelly (adrian.kelly@balliol.ox.ac.uk) or Chris Metcalf (christopher.metcalf@queens.ox.ac.uk).

The London Centre for the Ancient Near East (LCANE) is offering a limited number of travel grants to research students at UK institutions wishing to attend the conference: interested students should apply directly to LCANE by sending a CV, a brief cover letter and details of travel costs to the chairman, Dr Mark Weeden (mw41@soas.ac.uk). Grants will be paid out after the conference is finished on receipt of a short report and evidence for payment of travel costs.The deadline for LCANE grant applications is 30 April 2017.