Homer, the polyglot young Greek in the Assyrian office,

who read everything he could get his hands on, saw the beginning of the end of Assyrian power in the dishonourable death of Sargon II around 650 BC and in the religious self-doubts of the Assyrian elite.

More clairvoyantly than others he recognized the near end of Assyrian culture, later as an epicist he proclaimed the Greeks as the true heirs of Assur.

As Vergil was annoyed that the Greeks defeated by Rome had the greater poet and he wrote the Aeneid as a result, so Homer was annoyed by the cultural inferiority of his Greek compatriots compared to the Assyrians, who were in decline.

In the far-flung duel with the poet of the twelfth tablet of Gilgamesh and the author of the “Eighth Campaign” of Sargon II in 714 B.C., Homer put all his ambition into giving the Greeks a poem that was in no way inferior to Assyrian literature.