Originally published in 2013.

First paperback published in 2015.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

The romance between Greece and the East / Tim Whitmarsh -- Part 1: Egyptians. Greek fiction and Egyptian fiction: are they related, and, if so, how? / Ian Rutherford -- Manetho / John Dillery -- Imitatio Alexandri in Egyptian literary tradition / Kim Ryholt -- Divine anger management : the Greek version of the Myth of the Sun's Eye (P. Lond. Lit. 192) / Stephanie West -- Fictions of cultural authority / Susan Stephens -- Part 2: Mesopotamians and Iranians. Berossus / Johannes Haubold -- The Greek novel Ninus and Semiramis : its background in Assyrian and Seleucid history and monuments / Stephanie Dalley -- Ctesias, the Achaemenid court, and the history of the Greek novel / Josef Wieseh�ofer -- Iskander and the idea of Iran / Daniel L. Selden -- Part 3: Jews and Phoenicians. Josephus' Esther and diaspora Judaism / Emily Kneebone -- The eastern king in the Hebrew Bible : novelistic motifs in early Jewish literature / Jennie Barbour -- Lost in translation : the Phoenician Journal of Dictys of Crete / Karen N�i Mheallaigh -- Milesiae Punicae : how Punic was Apuleius? / Stephen Harrison -- Part 4: Anatolians. The victory of Greek Ionia in Xenophon's Ephesiaca / Aldo Tagliabue -- Milesian tales / Ewen Bowie -- Part 5: Transmission and reception. Does triviality translate? : the Life of Aesop travels East / Pavlos Avlamis -- Mime and the romance / Ruth Webb -- Orality, folktales and the cross-cultural transmission of narrative / Lawrence Kim -- History, empire and the novel : Pierre-Daniel Huet and the origins of the romance / Phiroze Vasunia.

The contact zones between the Greco-Roman world and the Near East represent one of the most exciting and fast-moving areas of ancient-world studies. This new collection of essays, by world-renowned experts (and some new voices) in classical, Jewish, Egyptian, Mesopotamian and Persian literature, focuses specifically on prose fiction, or 'the ancient novel'. Twenty chapters either offer fresh readings - from an intercultural perspective - of familiar texts (such as the biblical Esther and Ecclesiastes, Xenophon of Ephesus' Ephesian Story and Dictys of Crete's Journal), or introduce material that may be new to many readers: from demotic Egyptian papyri through old Avestan hymns to a Turkic translation of the Life of Aesop. The volume also considers issues of methodology and the history of scholarship on the topic. A concluding section deals with the question of how narratives, patterns and motifs may have come to be transmitted between cultures.--Publisher description.