From Babylon to Baghdad

The path of the cultural influence that the Babylonians made in those who came after them took two different ways; the way of texts, when stories are transferred by themselves, and the way of literary traditions, when specific texts cannot be transferred but rather customs and literary practices, and formal types with their own characteristics in language use and interpretation. And with the spread of texts eastward and westward, and the domestication of texts and traditions in new cultures, it was necessary to consider a process that occurs slowly and secretly, which is the process of adapting texts and traditions for the purpose of domestication and localization. Thus, layers of new additions accumulate over the original texts and traditions belonging to other cultures. Texts and traditions do not remain fixed, but change slowly and imperceptibly to suit the literary and cultural environments into which they are transferred. But after long periods, when these texts and traditions return to the environment from which they originated, their external features have changed, and they appear as if they have lost their belonging, at least in form, to the original historical image with which they began. This is exactly what happened when some texts and traditions returned to Arabic literature, representing texts belonging to the last cultures they adopted, and even the Arab culture itself manipulated them through adaptation and modification. The book continues to explore the forms of adaptation of Babylonian myths when they reach neighboring literatures, especially when they end up in Arabic literature, as well as the patterns of literary genres and their themes; such as the slaying of the demon, the death and origin of the hero, the myth of the hero’s birth, the formation of heroic tales, and proverbs. It also traces myths in their ways of transmission from Babylonian heritage directly to Arabic literature, or through intermediate routes they passed through. Number of pages: 356 Year of publication: 2023 Publisher: Dar Al-Rafidain for Publishing and Distribution