The project Bridging East and West: Wisdom Literature in Cuneiform and Greek Traditions (BRISDOM) explores similarities and differences in wisdom in Mesopotamian and Greek traditions. BRISDOM represents the first ever attempt to provide a comprehensive study of wisdom in Mesopotamia and Greece. Wisdom reflects on some of the most fundamental questions of mankind, such as the meaning of life, mortality, and relations with the divine. Wisdom literature had an enormous circulation in both Mesopotamia and Greece and includes very different text types such as sayings, proverbs, fables, books of instructions, diatribes and dialogues. The project aims at understanding the conceptualization of wisdom in Mesopotamian and Greek traditions through a definition of the corpus of “wisdom texts” as well as highlighting similarities and differences of wisdom literary motifs between Mesopotamia and Greece.
Comparative studies have been undertaken from the nineteenth century in the early days of the discovery of Mesopotamian civilizations and continued throughout the twentieth century. The world renown classicist Martin West summarized the relation between Mesopotamia and Greece in a famous statement “Greece is part of Asia; Greek literature is a Near Eastern literature.” Despite these efforts, comparative studies have been substantially limited to a collection of parallels. Moreover, classics have been largely dominated by a Eurocentric outlook that, to quote another major classicist, Walter Burkert, “used to see the Greeks … as isolated, classical.” BRISDOM aims to overcome these restraints by studying the socio-cultural context of wisdom in Mesopotamia and Greece rather than chasing for parallels.
In a widespread opinion the Middle East represents a radically antithetic culture from the Western/European civilization. This opinion is not the product of the dramatic events of the last twenty to thirty years that have devastated the Middle East and the consequent flow of migrants knocking on the European doors. This opinion is deep-rooted in the nineteenth century Romanticism and its idea of innate characteristics (Geist) of every culture and the idealization of ancient Greece. The Orient was seen as “the great other”. These concepts combined with the racial political ideologies that developed in the late nineteenth and early twenty centuries endure in the society and in political views still today. The commonly perceived incompatibility between the East and the West results in the paradigmatic and often misused concept of ‘clash of civilizations.’ However, academic studies on the links between Greece and the Near East have ultimately revealed the undoubted oriental influence on the formation of the European civilization. By studying wisdom and wisdom literature BRISDOM may lead to understand how Mesopotamia and Greece were interrelated and whether they were parts of a globalized, multi-cultural world unhindered by cultural or linguistic boundaries. This project reveals its potential far beyond the pertinent field because it may provide the basis for a reconsideration of the roots of Western civilization and its ways of thinking. Thus, the intercultural contacts highlighted by the comparative study of wisdom in Mesopotamia and Greece may provide new insight on the cultural setting of those ancient societies that eventually survives in present day Europe through the Graeco-Roman culture.
