Greek hybrids cannot be read in isolation. To understand them requires an examination of the Near Eastern antecedents. The Greek imagination was powerfully influenced by a creative engagement with other cultures throughout the eastern Mediterranean. These engagements were characterized by bilingualism, intermarriage and the movement of artisans, traders, poets and itinerant religious practitioners. Such a pattern of cultural exchange can be seen in the so-called International Style of the Late Bronze Age, which relied heavily on hybrid motifs to fashion a shared visual language for the elites of Egypt and the Near East. In this context, the significance of hybrids varied depending on audience or market. Taweret in Egypt was utterly transformed when taken up on Crete. Greek and Near Eastern cosmogonies shared many characteristics, but Greek speakers freely adapted old motifs. Wherever we find traces of cultural exchange, ideas and objects always take on new forms in Greek settings. Each instance of a hybrid emerging in a Greek context it is testimony to the flexibility of hybrids to convey new meanings in new settings. Hybrids gave a face to the shock of the new.

This chapter presents a detailed examination of the theory of language put forward in the Babylonian cosmogony, Enuma elish. This poem locates the origin of language at the very beginnings of the cosmos’ formation, even before the gods came to be. Accordingly, language is one of the first principles on which the world is founded. Thus, just as there is a temporal and spatial dimension of existence, there is also a linguistic one that is beyond the human and the divine. The poem futher explores this idea in using wordplay and etymology of sacred places, divine objects, and gods. In this context, the patron god of Babylon, Marduk, is conceptualized as a polyonymous cosmic divinity who incorporates into his persona the names of other gods.

Chapter three examines Mesopotamian conceptions of human nature. I argue that Mesopotamians viewed the human as a composite nondivine-divine space. Having been created from slain deities, the physical body participated in the divine nature. For some Mesopotamians, participation in the divine state was not wholly positive. The aspect of the deities that influenced them to rebel in heaven in fact formed part of the body’s constitution. Thus humanity’s propensity to disrupt the ordered cosmos stemmed from its share in the divine nature. The human was also conceived as a microcosm of the temple. As a microcosm of the cosmos, the temple was originally created to be the meeting point between divine and nondivine. Likewise, the deities created the human self as a physical space in which they could install themselves. The human was therefore a physical embodiment of the divine on a general level, just like the temple, and like the cosmos before that. Divine embodiment in a human context was clearest in ideas surrounding the royal self. The king participated in the divine nature to the point that, like true deities, he could install himself within multiple bodies at the same time.