This is the first collection of scholarly essays on the Homeric Hymns, a corpus of 33 hexameter poems celebrating gods that were probably recited at religious festivals, among other possible performance venues, and were frequently attributed in antiquity to Homer. After a general introduction to modern scholarship on the Homeric Hymns, the essays of the first part of the book examine in detail aspects of the longer narrative poems in the collection, while those of the second part give critical attention to the shorter poems and to the collection as a whole. The contributors to the volume present a wide range of stimulating views on the study of the Homeric Hymns, which have attracted much interest in recent years.

This book presents new standard editions of all the hitherto known hymns of Urnamma, the founder of the Third Dynasty of Ur (fl. 2100 B.C.), and adds new perspectives to the composition and development of the genre of Sumerian royal hymns in general. The first chapter is introductory in nature. The second chapter presents a general survey of Urnamma's hymnic corpus. The third chapter deals with correlations of Urnamma's hymns with other textual sources pertaining to him. A fourth chapter is devoted to aspects of continuity and change in royal hymnography by analysing the Urnamma hymns in relation to other royal hymns and related genres. Chapter 5 presents editions of Urnamma hymns,

Elizarenkova, perhaps the greatest living scholar of the Rgveda and certainly its greatest linguist, explains here the relationships between a very complicated grammatical system and the peculiarities of style of the archaic religious poetry. The laudatory hymn is treated as an act of verbal communication between the poet Rsi and the deity, with the hymn itself transmitting certain information from man to god. From this viewpoint, the hymn is used as a means to maintain a circular exchange of gifts between the Rsis and their gods.