Ancient Greek Origin Myths

Origin myths from the ancient Greek world constitute a rich body of comparative material for the study of medieval origin myths. Not only did individual ancient Greek origin myths sometimes enjoy medieval afterlives, but the corpus of ancient Greek origin myths is a large and diverse one, facilitating many lines of analysis and comparison. In this paper, we will set out a brief overview of this corpus as a whole, highlighting the diversity of source material, thematic trends, as well as structural commonalities. Through this, we aim to shed light on how origin myths functioned in the ancient Greek world – how they acted both in and on society. To do this, we shall employ a »big data« approach, using both quantitative and qualitative methods to draw conclusions from a dataset comprising over a thousand individual mythic episodes. We hope that both the experimental methodology employed, and the insights it permits into the nature and function of ancient Greek origin myths, may be helpful in stimulating comparative discussions

Ancient Greece · Ancient Greek · Greek mythology · Mythology · Classical Antiquity Studies · Historical, Religious, and Philosophical Studies · Linguistics and language evolution