Fashioning Pandora: Ancient Near Eastern Creation Scenes and Hesiod

This chapter offers a detailed analysis of a famous Hesiodic narrative, the creation of Woman, that considers Mesopotamian, Egyptian and Biblical comparanda but also looks further, to Nordic mythology, ethnography and the study of folklore. Coupled with an understanding of the Pandora-scene’s connections to episodes of adornment in other early Greek hexameter poetry, the analysis avoids simplistic notions of direct derivation from this or that Near Eastern source, and concludes that the tale of Pandora represents, instead, a Greek poet’s declension of a common Eastern Mediterranean and Near Eastern mythological motif and compositional pattern.