was transmitted alongside the myth it was rooted in. It is also unknown whether Greeks adopted a foreign motif to represent a preexisting local myth, or if either the imported art motif or the myth it was derived from influenced the formation of the story of Perseus. Book of Giants One of the eponymous giants in the Book of Giants, variously referred to as Ḥôbabiš, Ḥôbabis or Ḥōbāīš, is assumed to be derived from Mesopotamian Humbaba. The connection was first noted by Józef Milik. He is attested both in the Aramaic version from Qumran, which reflects an older Jewish tradition, and in a later Michaean adaptation written in Middle Persian, found in Turfan. While the same sources also preserve the name of Gilgamesh, reinterpreted as an evil giant, there is no indication that their compilers were familiar with the Epic of Gilgamesh, and they might have been aware of their names thanks to other cuneiform texts still in circulation in the first millennium BCE (for example omen compendiums) or from derived oral traditions. Yoram Cohen suggests that they might have been borrowed from an unknown western tradition about Humbaba. Matthew Goff proposed the author might have had indirect knowledge of the Epic of Gilgamesh which relied on information originally brought westwards by returning members of an eastern diaspora. The surviving sections do not indicate that either name is present in a context resembling the earlier Humbaba narratives, and according to Andrew R. George it is safe to say that both are only “incidental characters in a story that revolves around other giants and is unrelated to any episode of the Gilgamesh epic”. During an assembly held by giants, one of them, ‘Ohyah, informs them about “what glgms (Gilgamesh) has said to him, and what Ḥôbabis yelled”; the topic of this message is unknown, but apparently it inspired joy in the gathered crowd. The form of Humbaba’s name preserved in the Book of Giants was seemingly also known to a number of later Arab writers, as indicated by a reference to a Manichaean “spirit of darkness” named Hummāmah in an Islamic polemic and to the presence of presumed corrupt forms of the name in incantations from the fifteenth century showing a degree of influence from Manichaeism, written by Al-Suyūṭī. Disputed or disproved proposals Attempts to connect Humbaba with the biblical Kenite Hobab are considered baseless, and the latter name is more