Greece's Orient, expressed

The publication in 1987 of Martin Bernal's Black Athena precipitated considerable controversy among classicists. His claims that classical scholars had systematically "written out" the contribution of Afro-asiatic cultures to Greek civilisation generated much heat, if little light, at the time. A welcome result of the controversy was the renewal of a trend in classical scholarship that - despite Bernal's charges - had explored interconnections between the Aegean and "eastern" cultures.

Bernal's challenge on the "facts of the case" failed to convince because he was himself insufficiently engaged with the detailed scholarship required to elucidate the complex relationships he had oversimplified. Scholarly insufficiency is not a charge one could level at Walter Burkert, a senior figure well known for his extensive publications on Greek religion and ritual. This volume, based on four lectures delivered in Venice in 1996, returns to the theme of an earlier book first published in 1984 and translated into English in 1992 as The Orientalising Revolution: Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age . For this project, Burkert structures the discussion around the major cultures of Mesopotamia, Egypt and Achaemenid Persia, epitomised by the three capital cities of its English-language title.

Burkert begins with a brief history of the study of classical Greece and of the recovery of Egyptian, Mesopotamian and Hittite written histories and literatures that were largely ignored by mainstream Hellenists in the 19th century, setting the scene for the situation Bernal had criticised. The first chapter, "Alphabetic writing", concisely charts the adoption of the West Semitic script to create the alphabet in which the Greek texts that Burkert draws on were written.

Four chapters follow, based on his original lectures. In the first, he explores textual links between Homer's works and the major "Mesopotamian" epics, Enuma Elish , Atrahasis and Gilgamesh . Homer, he argues, can be understood neither as purely Indo-European nor simply as an inheritance from the Greek Bronze Age, but rather as a product of a vigorous fusion between Greek and "eastern" traditions.

Chapters three to five then each focus on links with one of the cultures suggested by the book's title. "Oriental wisdom literature and cosmogony" concentrates on the culturally and politically diverse region of Mesopotamia and its influences on early Greek poetry and philosophy.

"Orpheus and Egypt" then examines the origin of mystery cults associated with Orpheus in Greece, now much better understood as a result of recently recovered Greek texts. "The advent of the magi", finally, seeks to demonstrate links between Greek philosophical-religious thought and Zoroastrianism.

Burkert's data are increasingly attenuated as the book progresses, the Zoroastrian links being the most tenuous. By the end, however, we can better appreciate the "results of interaction and dialogue in a continuing eastern Mediterranean koine " that formed a Greek culture that would be defined as "classical" in later periods.

Burkert emphasises the historical circumstances by which Greeks and others must have come into contact, notably the geopolitical changes engendered by the Persian conquest of Anatolia. Missing, however, is an appreciation of the human contexts in which ideas travelled, such as those provocatively suggested for the transmission of the alphabet in Barry Powell's Writing and the Origin of Greek Literature (2002). There is also a parallel book to be written on interrelations within the material world of the eastern Mediterranean.

Babylon, Memphis, Persepolis: Eastern Contexts of Greek Culture reflects its origin as a lecture series and reads smoothly, with Burkert's prodigious scholarship made manifest in the 30 pages of endnotes. For those unconvinced by Bernal, this wide-ranging and scholarly demonstration that Greek culture did not emerge in isolation might just be the right book.

John Bennet is professor of Aegean archaeology, Sheffield University.