Maxwell Stocker
Published: 21 January 2019
An exploration of portrayals of cultural identity and self-definition in one of the ancient world’s most storied and interculturally saturated regions: the Eastern Mediterranean.
University of St Andrews
An exploration of portrayals of cultural identity and self-definition in one of the ancient world’s most storied and interculturally saturated regions: the Eastern Mediterranean.
It explores the ways in which experiences of migration and diaspora are reflected in Archaic Greek and Middle and Late Egyptian narrative poetry, and it uses these themes as a prism through which to examine the cross-cultural encounter between Egypt and Greece over the long term of the second and first millennia BCE. I adopt a multidisciplinary approach, building on recent developments within Classics, and applying insights from recent studies of migration, exile, and diaspora in other contexts. I then analyse the successive themes of exile, homesickness, self-rediscovery, homecoming, and reintegration within a finite body of selected case-studies from Egyptian, Homeric, and Hesiodic epic, examining the unexplored relationship of cross-fertilisation, transmission, and imitation between Egyptian and Greek literature.
First published: 21 January 2019