Why is Ancient Middle Eastern literature so underwhelming compared to Greco-Roman works?
The Bible fricking sucks. One could argue that this is by design, because, being a religious text, it tends to appeal to the lowest common denominator. However, Mesopotamian literature is exactly the same. Everything written in the Middle East is hieratical, graceless and terrible.
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gilgamesh is good literature.
if you take greek philosphy, sophistry and rhetoric you can extend the words and meaing to make the bible mean more than some baldy getting mad and calling god to send a bear to maul 42 children.
Tell me what you've read on Ancient Middle Eastern literature and we can take it from there.
Not him, but what would you suggest for Middle Eastern philosophy or political theory? I've read a good bit of Western stuff like Adam Smith, Thomas Paine, Edmund Burke, Plato, Marcus Aurelius, Locke, Machiavelli, etc. and would like to start reading into Middle Eastern philosophy and political theory.
The Quran was created from Allah (swt) so it is the most perfect text in literature. All of the answers in the world are written in there. Happy journeys brother.
OP you're wrong about everything. The Epic of Gilgamesh is the oldest introspection on confronting the certainty of one's own death.
The Torah is a multi-book epic of the origin of the hebrew people that interwove many disparate traditions and folk tales.
Kings is a theological-historical essay on the demise of the Israelite kingdoms written from exile.
There's a whole world of depth of literature here, most of this excepts some of the Bible written centuries or mellenia (in the case of Mesopotamian literature) before Greco-Roman literature. It is deserving of appreciation.
>Everything written in the Middle East is hieratical, graceless and terrible.
Read the book of Job.
The bible was read by a priestly class and by scholars known as pharisees, who would eventually evolve into rabbis, the intellectual elite of the most intelligent ethnic group on the planet, not for the lowest common denominator.
Two Bible books that are generally considered masterpieces are Job (sapiential poetry) and Ecclesiastes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecclesiastes#Influence_on_Western_literature
The book of Samuel (Samuel 1 and 2 for christians) are pretty fun adventure books if you prefer something like that
The Old Testament is a piece of shit and the fact that you are suggesting the most hellenized of its books as proof of "good content" (Ecclesiastes) is very telling.
The Qur'an sucks even more than the Old Testament.
You will not find a single original thought in the 3000 pages of a Bible. Cope harder.
Gilgamesh is "fine" but it can't compete with Homer, Hesiod, Virgil or Ovid.
>Gilgamesh is "fine" but it can't compete with Homer, Hesiod, Virgil or Ovid
Well, that's your opinion, and remember Gilgamesh is in a language we still poorly understand, and parts of our copies of it are incomplete, causing us to not fully understand parts of the narrative.
dismissed as the usual moronic vomit of this board, except for one exceptional sentence:
>being a religious text, it tends to appeal to the lowest common denominator.
perhaps the most moronic thing i've read this week
Genetics.
>the bible fricking sucks
Ecclesiastes and proverbs are absolute kino. You're just a fricking brainlet who can't appreciate it because 'le religion bad '
Ecclesiastes is a boring judaized carbon copy of stoicism. Literally discount hellenism. Cope harder:
>The dispute as to whether Ecclesiastes belongs to the Persian or the Hellenistic periods (i.e., the earlier or later part of this period) revolves around the degree of Hellenization (influence of Greek culture and thought) present in the book. Scholars arguing for a Persian date (c.450–330 BCE) hold that there is a complete lack of Greek influence;[2] those who argue for a Hellenistic date (c.330–180 BCE) argue that it shows internal evidence of Greek thought and social setting.[26]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecclesiastes#Title,_date_and_author
>Scholars arguing for a Persian date (aka brainlets) hold that there is a complete lack of Greek influence
surely you, an absolute mouth breather who posts on IQfy, knows better then scholars, right?
Also
>The presence of Ecclesiastes in the Bible is something of a puzzle, as the common themes of the Hebrew canon—a God who reveals and redeems, who elects and cares for a chosen people—are absent from it [...]
>The Talmud even suggests that the rabbis considered censoring Ecclesiastes due to its seeming contradictions.
the bible has a bunch of different perspectives that don't agree with one and other. Its not just Ecclesiastes
>The Bible fricking sucks.
WAAAAH I CAN'T BE A BAD PERSON NOOOOOO THAT DISRUPTS MY COMFORT ZONERINOOOO
Joomers.don't have soul. They're well aware of this. That's why they seethe.
They were too bussy sticking gold up their ass. israelites don't know better.
If buttholes could fly, this thread would be an airport!
What are you on about? Even Nietzsche admitted that the translation of the bible by Martin Luther was the greatest work of German literature ever since germs have produced no better literature.
Makes sense since Nietzsche was fricking moronic. Now explain to me how a Greek text full of gramatical mistakes can be "great literature". I guess my shitty ESL posts are equivalent to the Divine Comedy as well.
>germs have produced no better literature
Insane cope.
>Insane cope.
Name a few brilliant German works of writing.
>*blocks your path*
Not to Nietzsche
> In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche describes Luther's Bible (without irony) as "the masterpiece of German prose" and "the best German book so far" (BGE 247). The "so far" here indicates that he understood his own stylistic achievements, and Thus Spoke Zarathustra in particular, to have surpassed Luther's, but whether or not one agrees with this self-assessment, it is clear that Luther's German remains one of Nietzsche's two great stylistic models (the other being Goethe's). Nietzsche, then, can be considered as part of the long tradition of German writers (others would be Goethe himself, Büchner, Marx, and Brecht) who, although nonbelievers, indeed actively hostile to the Christian Church, have nevertheless acknowledged the sheer rhetorical accomplishment of the (Luther's) Bible as literature, and treated it as an enduringly powerful resource on which to draw in an increasingly post-Christian age as Nietzsche puts it, “In comparison with Luther's Bible, almost everything else is mere ‘literature’ - something that did not grow in Germany and hence also did not grow and does not grow into German hearts, as the Bible has.”
Even if it WAS true that Luther's Bible was a masterpiece of literature, the source from which he is translating has books that are literally written in dog Greek. If it IS a masterpiece it's because of Luther, not because of any Ancient Middle Easterner.
The fact that you use the amerimutt term "middle east" which was invented in the 20th century and haven't read any literature
NTA but what would you call the region instead? Near and Far East?
It's typically referred to as the Near East, but autists and archeologists call it West Asia.
>Near East
To Europe? I never bothered searching up the terminology, I just associate that term with everything up to India basically, but I'm still sorta confused as to whether there's a "Far East" either.
>To Europe?
Basically, yes. Historians refer to pre-Islamic period Mid-East as the Near East and after that it is referred to as the Middle East. Don't ask me why, it's just convention.
Perhaps it's a culture thing? Maybe the Ancient Greeks and Persians had more in common than the Byzantines and Arabs?
WTF is this autism? I'm from Spain and this place is called "Oriente Medio" aka "Middle East".
Well in America at least this is the case, for the pre-Islamic period that is.
Much of ancient Greek literature was influenced by the middle east in the same ways that the Greeks would later influence the Romans.
>Mesopotamian literature is exactly the same
I don't know dude I liked the story of Akhiqar, also Gilgamesh is topkino.