Perhaps your surprising feeling relates to the fact that storytelling is a very old art, and we have been practising it intensely for a long time.
In the greater scheme, maybe 3400 years isn't as long for storytelling as it is for most arts and practices that you'd be comparing to. Rock n Roll from 2022 isn't that different to someone from 2002. Rock and Roll from 1972 is very different to 1952. You could blow a 1952 mind mind with Ziggy Stardust or Houses of the Holy.
But the fact that the way the story was told (the structure of the story) as well as the characters psychology was very "modern".
For example, I think I can't like japanese literature (for the few I've read) because of their weird way of telling stories [0]. So I would have expected something older and less "cosmopolitan" to be harder to get into... Well perhaps the translator took some "freedom" by modernizing it.
Perhaps your surprising feeling relates to the fact that storytelling is a very old art, and we have been practising it intensely for a long time.
In the greater scheme, maybe 3400 years isn't as long for storytelling as it is for most arts and practices that you'd be comparing to. Rock n Roll from 2022 isn't that different to someone from 2002. Rock and Roll from 1972 is very different to 1952. You could blow a 1952 mind mind with Ziggy Stardust or Houses of the Holy.