Book Review: Mummy Wheat

Drew Griffith's Mummy Wheat is an important but controversial book that argues for Egyptian influence not only on Homer's viewpoint of the afterlife, but also on the Eleusinian mysteries and other aspects of the ancient Greek religious system. The author begins his discussion with a specific passage from Homer's Odyssey in which for the first time in Greek literature a reference to an Elysian plain (Ἠλύσιον πεδίον) is made. This new idea of the afterlife, according to the author, was imported from the Egyptian system of funerary ideas, expressed mainly in the collections of the Pyramid Texts, the Coffin Texts and the Book of the Dead. The author supports this argument, which has also been advanced and debated in earlier scholarly works, by collecting evidence for parallels and borrowings between the Homeric epics and the culture of ancient Egypt. In this way, the author argues against taking this reference to Elysium as an isolated parallel. Instead, according to him, one should consider this instance as part of a larger network of borrowed terms and ideas that penetrated Greek culture through Homer. Hence, this study is addressed mainly to classical philologists who are interested in topics of cultural interaction between ancient Greece and the Near East and thus conversant with a long scholarly debate to which well-acclaimed scholars, such as Walter Burkert and Martin West, as well as controversial ones, such as Martin Bernal, have so far contributed. The author cites these scholars very frequently and, in fact, often employs the questionable methods of Martin Bernal, using his type of etymological and other linguistic explanations as evidence for intercultural influence.

In contrast to Bernal's work, however, the author is paradoxically aware of the limitations of this type of evidence, although he uses it extensively throughout his study. Some of the explanations of elements of Greek culture as borrowings from Egypt seem to be sound, while other explanations seem far-fetched.