The Epic of Gilgamesh, in its tablet form, is both fragmentary and rather wooden in translation. It is very difficult to derive meaning from it when read in isolation: you practically have to be an Ancient Near Eastern scholar to fully grasp the context in which it was written and appreciate it.
Since most people don't have sufficient time on their hands to do that, I think the epic would greatly benefit from a rewrite into modern prose, not unlike the fantastic work that Neil Gaiman did not too long ago with his excellent Norse Mythology novel.[0]
A mushy remixed translation already exists, by Stephen Mitchell. That being said, I was surprised by how many timeless themes are clearly present in the fragmentary scholarly translations available.
SPOILERS FOR THE OLDEST EXISTING LITERATURE: It's a story about a man trying to conquer monsters for the sake of timeless fame and glory, witnessing the death of his friend as a result of this quest, reflecting in his own mortality, trying to overcome death... and failing. There are other things going on with the story, the humor is repetitious and hard to embrace, and there are plenty of passages everyone is unsure about the meaning of, but this man-trying-to-overcome-mortality-and-failing theme is such a obviously human trope and it's clearly present in Gilgamesh. Compare and contrast to Ridley Scott's Prometheus.
the world's oldest joke - a Sumerian rib-tickler dating back to 1,900 BC which goes: "Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap."
The ancient Egyptians had a sense of humor. The problem is that ancient Egyptian literature is usually only read by people who are learning the Egyptian language. Wenamun is a comedy of errors. Setne Khamwas contains slapstick. Hathor's rampage across the earth in the form of Sekemet is ended with massive quantities of beer dyed red.
How do we know the Egyptians or the Romans had no sense of humor?
A lacking written record proves only that: a lacking written record.
Can you imagine a society w/o laughter?
Every expert seems to look down on the Stephen Mitchell version. I happened to read and enjoy it, not as a scholar of the ancient near east but just as a text that happened to be in front of me.
Is there a more detailed breakdown of what's wrong with it? I seem to only find generalities.
Yeah, I'm not claiming it's accurate, but what do you expect from a mushy modern version? I've read Mitchell's version, as well as couple different scholarly translations, but it's been years and I don't think I could cite specific differences besides cutting out most of the super repetitious parts (Babylonian comedians thought it was funny to say the same thing way too many times when describing a long journey) and filling in broken sections with words that worked well enough to continue the story. My memory of his Tao Te Ching "translation" is a bit better, and it's usually the one I recommend to people who have never read the Tao Te Ching just becauee it's worded so beautifully. He has some changes I really dislike, though; at one point he replaces a line about animals being like "straw dogs" (a sacrificial idol crushed under foot in a traditional ceremony) to the tao and people being like straw dogs to the master with a line that promotes pacifism, which is the change I hated most due to it actually seeming antithetical to what most scholars translate the passage as. He also replaces references to ancient weaponry with references to nuclear weapons, and stuff like that -- but I don't think he gave Gilgamesh an AK, as far as I recall ;)
The "same thing way too many times" is common in most oral epics, it helps the teller to remember, and the audience to follow along. So you get formulaic things in Homer like "darkness covered his eyes" each time someone dies in battle, for example. Gilgamesh and Enkidu walking and walking to the forest to battle with Humbaba also helps drive home just how far away they went, which is to say, to some magical far-off land, another popular trope in plenty of stories.
The mechanics of oral poetic storytelling are super interesting. Stock tags like “darkness covered his eyes” are chosen by the poet because they have the correct number of syllables to finish the line. The poet would have a number of alternative phrases ready to fit the meter as needed.
There’s even a theory that this mode of extemporaneous oral composition actually requires that the poet be illiterate. The thinking is that it’s a completely different, sound-first approach to language that literacy totally breaks. In order to compose fluently (not recite, the way we understand today), the poet has to understand a phrase like “darkness covered his eyes” as a discrete unit of meaning made up of syllables, not a composition of independent words.
It is almost like this kind of oral poetry is its own separate kind of "literacy" separate from being able to write and being able to speak conversationally. Definitely a different set of words and skills.
Yeah, that’s a really good way to put it. I don’t ha e the background to speak on whether the “illiterate bard” theory is actually true, but I find the idea that some kinds of literacy could be mutually exclusive totally fascinating.
Many of the pre-Christian European peoples did not have written languages or used them extremely sparingly - oral tradition poetry was how information was stored and communicated. Notice how all of Europe uses mostly Roman letters (the Christians also unfortunately burned most of the existing culture when they converted a population which is also why the Norse legends come mostly from Icelandic, one of the last places to really convert because of its remote location)
Not to mention literacy wasn’t even particularly common in Europe until relatively recently. The work on Homer I’m thinking of (Parry and Lord) is based on oral traditions that were still alive in prewar Yugoslavia.
I heard good things about it from a sibling, but besides changing the traditionally translated pronouns of the master I don't know much about it TBH. The original Chinese used ambiguous pronouns due to the language itself, most English translations have traditionally made the master male, Mitchell alternates between male and female pronouns, and I think Le Guin is supposed to use either feminine or ambiguous pronouns (I'm forgetting which).
I loved Norse Mythology by Gaiman, but there are others readable versions of norse epics.
For example, Children of Odin[0] is in the public domain, there are free english audiobooks, and is very enjoyable. There is some version with very nice drawings too :)
Personally, I enjoyed Gilgamesh' epic a lot through its analysis in a mythology class[1]. It is a fantastic story anyway.
Yes. I’ve been (very slowly) reading Myths from Mesopotamia, by Stephanie Dalley, which contains literal translations of the tablets, gaps and all. Its not an easy read at all. The thing about these ancient Sumerian texts is that, probably due to their nature of being told verbally by storytellers, tablets from different regions or times had slightly different tellings, so one tablet cannot be directly used to fill in the gaps of another. The book tells the same sections from multiple tablets and leaves it up to the reader to fill in the gaps.
Here’s a random excerpt, for anybody interested in seeing what its like to read:
The Scorpion-man made his voice heard and spoke,
‘It is impossible, Gilgamesh, [ ]
Nobody has passed through the mountain’s inaccessible tract.
For even after twelve leagues [ ]
The darkness is too dense, there is no [light.]
To the dawn [ ]
To the dusk [ ]
To the dusk [ ]
The sent out [ ]
(5 lines fragmentary, then 16 lines missing)
(gap of about 18 lines)
In grief [ ]
Yeah. Not easy! But I like the idea that I’m reading a translation that wasn’t in any way interpreted or embellished.
Have you tried this [1] English reading by George Guidall? It's incomplete but I think it is possible to start anywhere and the performance is very enticing, at least to me.
> The Epic of Gilgamesh, in its tablet form, is both fragmentary and rather wooden in translation. It is very difficult to derive meaning from it when read in isolation: you practically have to be an Ancient Near Eastern scholar to fully grasp the context in which it was written and appreciate it.
I think this basic point is true of all literature. Here's an example of some quite effective non-wooden prose from a nineteenth-century translation of the Iliad:
> the seer spoke boldly. "The god," he said, "is angry neither about vow nor hecatomb [a sacrifice], but for his priest's sake, whom Agamemnon has dishonoured, in that he would not free his daughter nor take a ransom for her; therefore has he sent these evils upon us, and will yet send others. He will not deliver the Danaans from this pestilence till Agamemnon has restored the girl without fee or ransom to her father, and has sent a holy hecatomb to Chryse. Thus we may perhaps appease him."
> With these words he sat down, and Agamemnon rose in anger. His heart was black with rage, and his eyes flashed fire as he scowled on Calchas and said, "Seer of evil, you never yet prophesied smooth things concerning me, but have ever loved to foretell that which was evil. You have brought me neither comfort nor performance; and now you come seeing among Danaans, and saying that Apollo has plagued us because I would not take a ransom for this girl, the daughter of Chryses. I have set my heart on keeping her in my own house, for I love her better even than my own wife Clytemnestra, whose peer she is alike in form and feature, in understanding and accomplishments. Still I will give her up if I must, for I would have the people live, not die; but you must find me a prize instead, or I alone among the Argives shall be without one. This is not well; for you behold, all of you, that my prize is to go elsewhere."
The context within the Iliad itself is basically just this. Calchas divines that the Greeks are faring poorly in battle because Agamemnon has offended the gods by refusing to ransom the daughter of a priest. To make up for this error, Apollo requires Agamemnon to return the girl to her father without asking for a ransom at all.
The text also mentions that Calchas fears for his life when he delivers this message, and he makes Achilles swear to protect him before he's willing to interpret the will of the gods. As we see here, Agamemnon does indeed go wild with rage when he hears what Calchas says. Because of Achilles' oath to protect Calchas, he settles on picking a non-physical fight with Achilles instead, which is what leads Achilles to storm off in a huff and precipitates the rest of the events in the story.
From the text, this is a pretty staggering overreaction on Agamemnon's part. He was wrong, everyone knows it, and he's not losing all that much. But there's more context present in the mythological background that everyone in the intended audience would have been familiar with.
The army of the Greeks didn't have many seers. Calchas was responsible for divining the will of the gods across the entire expedition. And in particular, there had been a difficulty right at the outset, when unfavorable winds prevented the Greek ships from setting out to sea. This obviously divine phenomenon had to be dealt with, Calchas was called upon, and he provided the answer: the winds were sent by Artemis because Agamemnon had once offended her. Until he appeases Artemis, the army cannot set sail, and Artemis demands the sacrifice of the most valuable thing Agamemnon received in the year he committed the offense. Since Agamemnon is suffering under a curse, this turns out to be his now-adult daughter, Iphigenia.
That context makes it crystal clear why Agamemnon might be expected to simply jump up and murder Calchas after he produces a second prophecy saying that Agamemnon needs to make up for offending the gods. He's still sore over... being forced to sacrifice his own daughter! How could he not be?
And I think that background adds quite a bit to the scene. But we can't expect every text to include all the relevant cultural background. There's too much.
For folks interested in a modern reinterpretation of the Iliad, the "War Nerd Iliad" by John Dolan (aka the War Nerd from the Exile) takes an interesting approach - see review in https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/war-nerd-iliad/.
That passage rendered there looks like (roughly):
> Kalkys, reassured, takes a nervous gulp and blurts: “The real reason that Apollo’s shooting us down is that Agamemnon insulted his priest! The old man came to ask for his daughter Chryseis back. He asked nice and politely, in the name of the god, which he’s entitled to do as a priest! Brought the proper ransom, and a wreath!”
> All the men grunt and nod. They knew it!
> Kalkys feels their approval and goes on, more loudly and accusingly: “But Agamemnon purposely insulted him! Threatened him! Laughed at the poor old man! Wouldn’t give his daughter back even though he asked politely!”
> Everyone nods and tells each other, “I told you that was it! That damn Agamemnon! Gonna get us all killed!”
> Kalkys concludes, “So we have to give her back! To her father, the priest! Or Apollo will kill all of us! And not ask any ransom for her or anything!” More nodding and grunting from the crowd. They knew it’d come to this.
> Kalkys pushes his luck now, brave like nerds are when the crowd’s egging them on: “And we have to send a sacrifice with her! Treasure, and gold, and calves and sheep, ones with no spots or scars! Perfect specimens, the kind Apollo likes!”
> More grunts and nods. Kalkys is drunk on public approval now, delighted with his own courage—and then he turns and sees Agamemnon and sits down very suddenly.
> Agamemnon stands up, with the hate pouring from him like heat from a rock on a hearth. The crowd goes quiet. It’s odd, how they fear Agamemnon. He isn’t all that tough in battle. And he’s nowhere near as big as Akilles, or as strong as Ajax, or clever like Odysseus. Doesn’t even fight in the front rank most of the time. But he is hands down the meanest man in the army, maybe the world. He never forgives, never forgets the tiniest slight to himself or his precious relatives.
> Him and his relatives! That’s what this whole army is doing here, avenging Agamemnon’s useless brother Menelaos, who married a woman way too beautiful for him—half goddess, in fact—and got dumped for a younger, hotter man. Who happened to be a Trojan prince.
> That’s why they’ve all been camping out here for nine slow, deadly years: Defending the nonexistent honor of Agamemnon’s blank of a brother, the fool Menelaos, Menelaos the cuckold.
> And now Kalkys has blurted out the one thing they’re all thinking: It’s Agamemnon’s fault we’re here! It’s his fault we’re dying under the magic virus arrows! And we didn’t even get any booty out of it!
> Agamemnon stands, sneering, letting the crowd vent a while, then drags out the silence so they can feel his hate. That’s where Agamemnon really shines—the best hater in a world where hate is much respected.
> When he’s made them all flinch away from his stare, he turns to poor old Kalkys: “You, Mister Science! You just love giving bad news, don’t you? You little coward, egghead. Did those entrails you claim to interpret ever once, even once, tell you anything good about me? Did those dead goat guts of yours ever tell, even one time, that I, your king, had made a good decision? No! No, because you only want to tell me what I’ve done wrong! Because you’re a cowardly little whiner!!”
There is a passage like that in the Iliad, but it isn't this one. This is a pretty liberal reinterpretation.
But, if you're interested:
> The rest now took their seats and kept to their own several places, but Thersites still went on wagging his unbridled tongue—a man of many words, and those unseemly; a monger of sedition, a railer against all who were in authority, who cared not what he said, so that he might set the Achaeans in a laugh. He was the ugliest man of all those that came before Troy—bandy-legged, lame of one foot, with his two shoulders rounded and hunched over his chest. His head ran up to a point, but there was little hair on the top of it. Achilles and Odysseus hated him worst of all, for it was with them that he was most wont to wrangle; now, however, with a shrill squeaky voice he began heaping his abuse on Agamemnon. The Achaeans were angry and disgusted, yet none the less he kept on bawling at the son of Atreus.
I kind of like seeing the morality of the day shine right through the text. No shades of grey here.
I first read about the Epic of Gilgamesh at the start of a history textbook, where it was told as the ultimate origin myth of our civilization, raging against the beast of nature itself to conquer it. Though, that seems less accurate from reading this account and the one on wikipedia.
But, Daniel Quinn’s reading of the Fall of Man in Genesis[1] is an antithetical account of the same story. Man did not seek to overcome nature, rather Man was banished from the garden (nature) by his own temptation to seek the knowledge to take care of himself—thus becoming captured and tortured by this original sin, accumulating into agrarian-fueled violence and expansion. All now rationalized[2] by our proclaimed knowledge of Good and Evil.
My favorite part of this interpretation is that this story was not told by our ancestors, because if it was, they would’ve sanctified this knowledge-seeking as the Ascent of Man, not the Fall. So it’s hypothesized that the story was told by the herders and hunter-gatherers trying to formulate a story to explain the violent and toilsome lifestyle of the agrarians.
Neat that there is also a mythic tree that Gilgamesh finds in the cave after hours of darkness. That he had returned to the garden somehow, and that he either wanted nothing to do with it or could find no answers there for him anymore.
[2] “The Creator? My mines run dry, my city withers, it must be fed. And what has he done? He cursed us to struggle by the sweat of our brow to survive. Damned if I don’t do everything it takes to do just that. Damned if I don’t take what I want.” —Tubal-Cain in Aronofsky’s Noah (2014)
'Gilgamesh, where are you hurrying to?
You will never find the life for which you are looking.
When the gods created man
they alloted to him death,
but life they retained in their own keeping.
As for you, Gilgamesh,
fill your belly with good things;
day and night, night and day, dance and be merry,
feast and rejoice.
Let your clothes be fresh,
bathe yourself in water,
cherish the little child that holds your hand,
and make your wife happy in your embrace;
for this too is the lot of man.'
I have the same thoughts on Gilgamesh as I do on Shakespeare's works: don't read them, experience them.
With Shakespeare's works, they are plays. They are meant to be experienced in a playhouse, not read by high school students stumbling over the language. The beauty is in witnessing the interactions of the characters on stage, the patterns of their speech, the tone of the jokes, etc. that just don't really come across when you read the words on a page. Reading Shakespeare is kind of a disservice to the material.
Similarly, Gilgamesh is part of an ancient oral tradition of storytelling and was meant to be told by actual storytellers, in language that would resonate with the listeners. Trying to read it today is kind of a perversion of the original intent. I'd love to listen to a modern translation actually told by a good storyteller - basically the way it was meant to be experienced.
The way Shakespeare is taught in schools is cargo cult art and literature, all the more shameful because the people inflicting it on the population are so self righteous in their ignorant arrogance as they ruin great art.
Maybe I'm over-projecting due to reading it in modern times, but the version of "Gilgamesh" seems to be from after the end of Uruk and more bleak than other ancient works.
It begins and ends (while Gilgamesh is talking to the boatman) extolling the and power and seeming eternal of both Uruk and Gilgamesh,
"Climb Uruk's wall and walk back and forth!
Survey its foundations, examine the brickwork!...
"Who is there can rival his kingly standing,
and say like Gilgamesh, 'It is I am the king'?"
But despite his and the city's stature death eventually comes to both.
"The darkest day of mortal man has caught up with you,
the solitary place of mortal man has caught up with you,
the flood-wave that cannot be breasted has caught up with you,
the battle that cannot be fled has caught up with you,
the combat that cannot be matched has caught up with you,
the fight that shows no pity has caught up with you!"
To me it reads like trivializing the power and majesty of both Gilgamesh and Uruk and all mankind's achievements in the face of death.
That's a tad too nihilistic I think? Death is inevitable for even the most powerful person in the world, yet everyone still does their best and some are immortalized through their achievements. Gilgamesh's attitude is worth at least that much.
Not at all. At least not how I perceive it. I'd characterise it as existentialist rather than nihilistic thinking.
Knowing that death is inevitable for everyone, even god kings such as Gilgamesh, can serve is a constant reminder to try and create a legacy that transcends yourself.
Here [0] is a 45-minute radio show/podcast in which a presenter and three academic experts discuss The Epic of Gilgamesh. It moves fast and covers a lot of ground.
(I recommend this series, In Our Time, whenever I can. Many jewels in the back catalogue.)
So many blanket statements in this article it's hard to keep track. I love how the author makes it sound like everyone was completely stupid centuries before us:
> In 1859, Charles Darwin, in his “Origin of Species,” put forth a theory suggesting that human beings might be descended not from Adam and Eve but from lower animals, things with fur. Not surprisingly, such ideas encountered vigorous opposition. Many scientists and scholars redoubled their efforts to find evidence of the truth of the Bible.
Fundamentalists opposed Darwin but there was no position from the Church (officially) until 1950 or so. On top of that other scientists largely supported Darwin's central theme but debated the mechanisms of his theory. Yeah, not really what the author describes at all.
There are quite a few graphic novel adaptions of Gilgamesh.
I particularly suggest a very recent one from Jens Harder[1].
The aesthetic he uses is that of bas-reliefs of the Mesopotamian area at the time when the original epos was created.
It's unfortunately only available in German (original) and French for the time being.
Neglecting to mention that Gilgamesh didn't want to kill Humbaba, but Enkidu talked him into it. (Enkidu is the patron of poor decision making.) And after Dumuzi, I wouldn't marry Inanna either: http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/etcsl.cgi?text=t.1.4.1#
Then there's the whole thing about Gilgamesh sending Enkidu into the afterworld after his lost toy or game.
I have a Masters in Hebrew. Psalms and Proverbs is much the same way. Much of the meaning is implied and contextual for the the sake of the cadence in Hebrew. Translations don't represent the complex structure and word-play of the original even if the translations do make it sound like poetry.
Since most people don't have sufficient time on their hands to do that, I think the epic would greatly benefit from a rewrite into modern prose, not unlike the fantastic work that Neil Gaiman did not too long ago with his excellent Norse Mythology novel.[0]
[0]https://www.amazon.com/Norse-Mythology/dp/B01M1DYSHD/