Il Romanzo di Nino tra due culture: analisi del testo, ricostruzione del contesto, definizione del genere

By the reading and analysis of the remaining fragments of the Ninus Romance it can be seen that the dynamics of the characters, even if broadly related to the structure of the Greek novel of the Imperial Age, do not correspond to a Greek culture matrix, therefore the origin of the text was elsewhere, more precisely in the environment that immediately emerges from the fragments, namely the Mesopotamian one. Many elements of the plot of this 'novel', which contain in them germs and ways that will be taken up again in the Imperial Era, are strongly influenced, in fact, by patterns and plots of the ancient Near East. All these elements appear congruent to a syncretic culture like the Hellenistic one, the age in which the work was probably born. The research then took place in the direction of an analysis of elements, structures and details of the world of Near-Eastern mythological narrative that could have influenced the plot of Nino's novel. In particular, the attention has turned to stories and myths of Sumerian and Assyrian-Babylonian culture and the possibilities of comparison were remarkable. Enlil and Ninlil and Enlil and Sud, datable to the end of the III and the beginning of II millennium BC, are the Sumerian myths in which the almost precise correspondences have been found. The quantity and the quality of the similarities between these myths and our text pushes more to consider the work, object of research, an erudite revisitation of myths of the Ancient Near East. The analysis has turned to look for connections between the environment created around the Hellenistic kings of the dynasty of Seleucids, which at the time were the rulers of that geographical area, and the ancient myths that constituted the local cultural substratum. Even here the connections were strong.