The Romance between Greece and the East / Edited by Tim Whitmarsh, Stuart Thomson. The Romance between Greece & the East Whitmarsh, Tim, editor of compilation. Thomson, Stuart, editor of compilation. PA3010 .R66 2013 880.09 23 Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 09 Oct 2015). The contact zones between the Greco-Roman world and the Near East represent one of the most exciting and fast-moving areas of ancient-world studies. This new collection of essays, by world-renowned experts (and some new voices) in classical, Jewish, Egyptian, Mesopotamian and Persian literature, focuses specifically on prose fiction, or 'the ancient novel'. Twenty chapters either offer fresh readings - from an intercultural perspective - of familiar texts (such as the biblical Esther and Ecclesiastes, Xenophon of Ephesus' Ephesian Story and Dictys of Crete's Journal), or introduce material that may be new to many readers: from demotic Egyptian papyri through old Avestan hymns to a Turkic translation of the Life of Aesop. The volume also considers issues of methodology and the history of scholarship on the topic. A concluding section deals with the question of how narratives, patterns and motifs may have come to be transmitted between cultures. 2013 Text 1 online resource (412 pages) : http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139814690 eng