I
AUTHOR: UNKNOWN
DATE: THIRD MILLENNIUM BC
Widely considered the world’s first known work of literary fiction, The Epic of Gilgamesh is a long poem telling the adventures of Gilgamesh, a king from the ancient Sumerian civilization centred around the modern-day region of Iraq and Syria. (Historical records suggest that there was indeed a king by that name who probably ruled in the early part of the third millennium BC.) Today, we have some 3,200 lines of the text, thought to be about 80–90 per cent of the original total. Authored in the latter part of the third millennium BC, Gilgamesh may justly be regarded as the first great leap forward in literary history – the original masterwork of imaginative thinking preserved in written form.
The story itself is quite the romp. Gilgamesh, described as one-third human and two-thirds deity (his mother, Ninsun, being a goddess and his father, a mere mortal), is King of Uruk, a sparkling walled city in southern Mesopotamia. Ginormous and strong, he is also rather wayward, lording it over the men of Uruk with his athletic prowess and exercising what he considers to be his right to engage with the city’s women, especially new brides. The citizens grow tired of his misconduct and complain to the gods, so the goddess Aruru fashions him a companion, a fellow giant called Enkidu, from a piece of clay. Enkidu, it is hoped, will keep him on the straight and narrow.
Enkidu is animalistic in nature, although imbued with human intelligence too. However, after he is tempted to engage in a prolonged sexual dalliance with a human (a temple prostitute called Shamhat; intercourse is said to have lasted for an entire week, or even two according to some interpretations), Enkidu is rejected by the animals and becomes fully human. He is effectively cast out of his old world and propelled into a new, often more complicated, one. His new morality causes him to challenge Gilgamesh on his behaviour and the pair wrestle in a ferocious contest. But at its end, they enter into a friendship that sends them on various adventures.
Some while after their battle, the duo go to the Forest of Cedar, where they scheme to take some of its sacred trees after killing their feared protector, a monster called Humbaba the Terrible. Later on, the goddess Ishtar expresses her desire for Gilgamesh but he rejects her, prompting the scorned goddess to send the ‘Bull of Heaven’ to take terrible vengeance on him if he continues to spurn her. But Gilgamesh and Enkidu succeed in slaying the beast. The deaths of Humbaba and the Bull inspire the wrath of the gods, who punish Enkidu with a long, drawn-out death over twelve bed-ridden days of illness.
Devastated by the loss of his friend and determined to escape a similar fate, Gilgamesh then seeks to learn the secret of eternal life from the only human survivors of a Great Flood. To reach them, he must undertake a long and dangerous journey. But it is to no avail, since he learns that death is unavoidable. Gilgamesh himself is dead, probably of old age (although it is not explicitly stated) before the story ends, the citizens of Uruk mourning the passing of their ruler.
Gilgamesh includes many of the tropes that became staples of classical heroic epics, perhaps most clearly serving as a template for Homer’s Iliad (not least the echoes of Enkidu in the character of Patroclus) and Odyssey. Many scholars also argue that Gilgamesh shares some common ground with the Bible.
The story of Enkidu – a man created divinely from the soil – and his ‘expulsion’ from his natural home after being ‘tempted’ by a woman (Shamhat) has obvious parallels with the story of Adam and Eve and their fall from Eden. But perhaps even more striking is Gilgamesh’s visit to Utnapishtim and his wife in pursuit of the secret to eternal life. In that episode, Utnapishtim relates how the god Enlil brought down a great flood upon the world as punishment for man’s failings. However, Utnapishtim was forewarned by another god, who told him to prepare a boat that could carry him, his family and the seeds of all living things to safety. When the flood comes, only those on board the vessel are saved among all humankind. Their boat is eventually grounded on the top of a mountain, at which point Utnapishtim released a series of birds (including a dove) to seek dry land. Save for a few name changes, it is an almost identical narrative to that of Noah and his ark as related in the biblical book of Genesis. Whether Gilgamesh was itself a source for the Noah story or both stories simply reflect a shared storytelling tradition is uncertain.
The literary history of Gilgamesh is almost as fascinating as the story the epic tells. Originally a series of Sumerian poems written in cuneiform script around 2100 BC, the fuller version that we know today comes from the Babylonians, who inscribed it in the Akkadian language on twelve stone tablets around 1200–1000 BC. But after about 600 BC, Gilgamesh became a largely lost classic. Then, in the 1850s, a large number of inscribed tablets were discovered by a British-led team of archaeologists on the site of an ancient library in Nineveh, close to modern-day Mosul in Iraq. The relics were duly sent to the British Museum. After several years, the museum called upon a volunteer – a banknote engraver called George Smith, who had left school when aged just fourteen (although already imbued with a fascination for Assyrian history and culture) – to help analyse the shards that had been sitting uninvestigated in a storeroom. Over ten years or so in the 1860s and 1870s he succeeded in translating a number of them and so reintroduced the epic back to the world. There was a certain elegant poetry in an eager amateur, as opposed to some noted man of letters, reconnecting the world with its first great work of literature.
BY GEORGE!
Quite whether George Smith fully realized the extent of his achievement is uncertain, given that he died on a study trip to Aleppo in 1876, aged just thirty-six. Much of his own excitement around the fragments that he decoded centres on his belief that they confirmed the truth of Genesis. When he read of a Great Flood that put paid to humankind save for one man and his family, he is said to have jumped out of his chair in glee and run elatedly around his room at the museum. When he addressed the Society of Biblical Archaeology on his discovery, the prime minister, William Gladstone, was in the audience and Smith’s discoveries made headlines across the globe.