Description

Ancient canonical narratives from Mesopotamia, Greece, and the Hebrew Bible fused landscapes (topographic space) and human bodies (corporeal space) when personifying mountains. Built environments (architectonic space) also correlated with these anthropomorphic landscapes. As blends of fundamental spatial categories, such mountains exemplified mythic space and minimally counter-intuitive concepts characteristic of religious cognition. In so far as these personified mountains expressed such "mythic thinking," they invite a re-reading informed by spatial and mythological analysis. Taking up this invitation, Eric J. P. Wagner focuses on the Epic of Gilgames, Homeric epic (the Iliad and Odyssey), and Genesis-2 Kings to identify and analyze personified mountains in each corpus. Ultimately, he traces the meaning(s) and function(s) of these "living landscapes" across each ancient narrative.