How many languages can you speak?

[alik-vit]

I think every supervisor has his method. I liked both my supervisors very much, because they always pointed out things I really needed to know.

I had only one, from my first year as student till the "defense" of my first PhD, i.e. during 9 years. And of course he was greaaaaat influence as scholar and person:

Ruslan Skrynnikov - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

 

[Ben Jackson]

My supervisor is also trying to extract the answer to that question from me ?
In general, I am looking at the cultural exchange in the Eastern Mediterranean in the Late Bronze Age (late 2nd and early 1st millennium BC).
Since the 1970s, many parallels have been identified between especially early (so-called "archaic") Greek poetry (Homer, Hesiod, the lyric poets) and the (much or somewhat) earlier literature of the Near East (broadly understood and encompassing everything from Asia Minor to Egypt). It is however still hotly debated how we are meant to understand these parallels - there is a significant number of scholars in the field today who are not opposed to the idea that the poets contributing to the Iliad had a direct access to, for example, Mesopotamian literature (e.g. Gilgameš) and consciously drew from it, even played with it. Others prefer to think of the influence through intermediaries (such as the Hittites, who had a powerful empire in Anatolia in the mid-2nd millennium BC). Still others don't believe we are dealing with direct influence of any sort, but with independent developments or common origin.
The matter is further complicated by the state of the texts as we have them today: to take just one example, the so-called "Homeric Question" has been raging in the field of classics since the 18th century - are the "Homeric epics" work of a single poet, two poets, a succession of poets or is it wholly inappropriate to talk of any number of "individual" poets, and what we are dealing with is more akin to a long oral tradition spanning centuries which slowly accumulated into what we now call the Homeric epics, perhaps with help of an editor. Or is it all these things at once? Obviously, the way we imagine the Homeric epics interacted with the literatures of the Near East has to be grounded in the way we understand the Homeric epics to have been composed. And the same types of questions can be asked for a great many other texts from the region.
My thesis focuses on a particular set of myths (the so-called "destruction myths" ?) which I am comparing across the region in an attempt to offer an explanation of the perceived parallels.

I wish you luck my friend. This will be a very tough dissertation, indeed.

 

[shipeichong]

Two, english and mandarin.