Professor Hooke shows how mythology can play a role in ritual, how it can explain the origin of a custom or cult and glorify a hero, tribe or city. All of these functions are relevant to the strange and haunting myths of the Mesopotamians, Egyptians, Canaanites and Hittites, slowly revealed by decades of archaeological research and retold here. Yet it is also these early religious traditions that underlie the familiar stories of Genesis, Noah's flood and the Garden of Eden. Even the Nativity and Resurrection narratives, whatever their basis in fact, can be paralleled elsewhere. We ought, in other words, to consider the Middle East as a single unit and to look at the Bible in that context.