Ancient and Late Antique Narrative Travelling East: Introduction

This Special Issue collects five papers that focus on the reception of ancient and late antique narrative across languages and cultures in the Eastern Mediterranean.Over the past few decades, the reception of ancient narrative has become a hot topic in scholarship.Whereas the influence on eastern cultures of other forms of ancient cultural production, such as philosophy, medicine and science, has been widely documented, 2 scholarship on ancient narrative travelling east is far less extensive.It has tended to gravitate either towards a limited number of specific narratives, such as the Alexander Romance (one of the great "best-sellers" of the Middel Ages whose cross-cultural circulation took spectacular proportions) 3 and the first-century novel Metiochus and Parthenope (which reappears a millennium after its composition in Persian medieval epic), 4 or towards specific religious or mythological figures, such as Thecla 5 and Hermes Trismegistus.6 In an attempt to break new ground, this collection brings together contributors from Greek and Middle Eastern studies, aiming to explore how Byzantine, Syriac and Arabic traditions adopted and re-employed several ancient and late antique narratives.The rationale behind the collection is that analyses of a variety of practices of cross------1 This publication received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 819459 -NovelEchoes). 2 See Gutas 1998 for a general overview.3 See, for example, Zuwiyya 2011, and, on eastern receptions specifically, Doufikar-