Near Eastern Influences on Greek Cosmology and Biblical Thought

The wisdom and cosmological traditions of Egypt and Mesopotamia did not remain confined to their originating cultures but were transmitted, through a variety of documented and inferred channels, into both early Greek philosophical thought and the biblical literature of ancient Israel, producing two parallel and independently significant streams of influence from a shared ancient Near Eastern reservoir of ideas. Contact between Ionian Greek city-states such as Miletus and the older civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia was mediated by several overlapping networks: Phoenician maritime trade, which had also transmitted the alphabet itself to Greece in the eighth or ninth century BCE; the Lydian kingdom under rulers such as Croesus, which controlled overland routes linking Ionia to inland Anatolia and Mesopotamia; and direct Greek mercantile and mercenary presence in Egypt, attested archaeologically at the Greek trading post of Naucratis in the Nile Delta, established under Pharaoh Psamtik I in the seventh century BCE.