Lament Ritual Transformed into Literature: Positing Women's Prayer as Cornerstone in Western Classical Literature

Research into the origins of Western classical literature has considered the performance of epic poetry by male performers, but the possibility of womenÕs participation in the crea-tion of the oral literature that gave rise to the classics has not been adequately investi-gated. Here I look at the role of women chanters in the creation of spontaneous lament, point to similarities in the structure of the poems the Iliad and the Odyssey, and suggest that these two epics of classical literature may have been based originally on women's words.