A short post - reflecting on Gilgamesh. It occurred to me to wonder why Sin-Leqe-Unninni edited and compiled the existing myths of Gilgamesh into the story we know today. We know he was Babylonian, so maybe it was a way to suggest that the Babylonians were the cultural heirs of the Sumerians? Was he comparing in some way Hammurabi to Gilgamesh, suggesting that both were giants among men (literally, in the case of Gilgamesh)?
Another question related to this, who was he writing for? I mean, I'm assuming that your average Babylonian wasn't literate. So he must have been writing for some kind of elite - the king, or the court, or the priesthood - or possibly in some way for posterity, if that concept even existed.
I would be interested to know if anyone has read anything about this.
Tuesday, 27 May 2008
Sunday, 25 May 2008
The Pentateuch - My Approach
If Gilgamesh was daunting, then attempting to read and review the first five books of the Bible is -- well -- formidable doesn't even express it. I therefore acknowledge at the start of this post that I am bound to make some fundamental errors and that many others know this subject much much better than I. This post represents only my first fumbling attempts to make sense of what I read. I had also better say at the outset that I am neither Jewish nor Christian nor Moslem, and I hope I don't give offense to those for whom this text is a holy text.
My approach therefore is a secular one, considering this work as an historical cultural text text. My mother, who converted to Catholicism, says that the Catholic Church suggests that works of religion are to be read on four levels (my paraphrase from our conversations - again, I'm not a theologian!):
Now alternatively, this article suggests an approach to reading philosophy which stresses evaluating it for the strength of its argument and its logical flaws. This approach would seem to me to suck the marrow right out of a really meaningful text, and I just can't believe it would really be appropriate with such a text. I mean, can I answer the question: What evidence does Moses bring to support the idea that the Jews deserve to live in Canaan and expel its original occupants without missing the point of this text? Well, maybe it would be fruitful, what do I know.
Still, I am going to consider the following:
My approach therefore is a secular one, considering this work as an historical cultural text text. My mother, who converted to Catholicism, says that the Catholic Church suggests that works of religion are to be read on four levels (my paraphrase from our conversations - again, I'm not a theologian!):
- literal - what happened, to whom, when, where etc.
- moral - what does the text teach us about how to live
- allegorical - what do the characters in the text and the way they behave represent in terms of spiritual life
- contemplative - a meditative reading in which the text is taken into the soul and its higher meaning revealed
Now alternatively, this article suggests an approach to reading philosophy which stresses evaluating it for the strength of its argument and its logical flaws. This approach would seem to me to suck the marrow right out of a really meaningful text, and I just can't believe it would really be appropriate with such a text. I mean, can I answer the question: What evidence does Moses bring to support the idea that the Jews deserve to live in Canaan and expel its original occupants without missing the point of this text? Well, maybe it would be fruitful, what do I know.
Still, I am going to consider the following:
- context - when was this text written and by whom (as far as we know)
- literal and moral messages of the text, main characters and events, etc
- reflection on the rhetorical purpose of the text
Saturday, 17 May 2008
Gilgamesh - of him who knew the most of all men know
This blog documents my reading of what appear to me to be the classics of literature, both of my own (Western) culture and of other cultures with which I would like to become more familiar. I’m not a specialist, a critic, or a literary theorist. I am interested in this project from a purely personal point of view. I expect it to take a long time. I want to write about what I am reading to focus my mind and force me to take stock of what has been written. You, my dear reader, are currently a figment of my imagination, and in that imagination I invite you to partake of the same literature and to share with me your interpretations.
To shape my reading, I have reviewed various lists of “classics” and they are, of course, chock full of amazing works. I’ve adopted the relatively simple approach of trying to read in chronological order, which has the advantage of each work building on the previous work. The disadvantage – major, at times, I can’t help feeling – is that the distant past is extremely foreign and you start off quite at sea, reading about things in very unfamiliar idioms in equally unfamiliar locales.
Take Gilgamesh. By all accounts this is the first piece of literature that we possess, written in ancient Sumeria and then adapted by a Babylonian scribe. But it doesn’t read like the first work of literature. It reminds you forcibly of coming in on a conversation halfway through – or listening to a conversation in a foreign language about some object, the name of which you are unable to translate.
For example, one part of the story reads as follows (all quotes from the rendition by David Ferry):
At which point I am thinking – Shuruppak? Anu? Enlil? Ninurta of the Silence? Ennugi? Ea? And also – there’s a god of canals? O Wikipedia, come to my rescue! And then - wait, do I have to become a Sumerian expert to read this?
So the first thing to get over is the feeling that there’s just no way you can understand what’s happening in this story. That’s probably true to a certain extent, but in order to progress, one must take it on faith that appreciating the ancient classics is possible.
And actually having taken that first doozy of a step, Gilgamesh seems to me to be a wonderful introduction.
Gilgamesh is the story:
In other words, it is the story of life and death. The basic plot is that for sorrow of the death of his friend Enkidu, and for fear of his own death Gilgamesh – “two-thirds a God, but one third mortal and grieving in his heart” (Tablet X:i) – seeks immortality. He braves many dangers to come at last to the only survivors of the Great Flood, Utnapishtim, a man who was warned by the god Ea and built an ark, and his wife. They know the secret of immortality. They give it to him but, while asleep, he loses it to a snake. He laments:
He returns – mortal like us all – to his kingdom Uruk, and demands that his ferryman study it, its walls and brickwork:
Uruk then is his immortality.
So the first piece of literature we have is the story of a man becoming a man: at first wonderful, strong, magical but very wild, he is tamed and civilised by making a friend. Ironically this friend is the wild man Enkidu, who in his turn is civilised by the temple prostitute Shamhat. Together Gilgamesh and Enkidu achieve many things and their exploits are the stuff of legend. But Enkidu sickens and dies, and Gilgamesh grieves, and is fearful, and strikes out, and even achieves more great things, and eventually emerges as man – one who knows his own place and who sees clearly how the world will judge him.
What an amazing little volume this is. It is both touching and lovely – and after 4,000 years we can still recognise our own longings in the story of Gilgamesh.
You may wish to look at another review of this book from Ploughshares magazine.
I also note that there is a new book - The Buried Book, by David Damrosch - reviewing how the Gilgamesh epic was preserved. It was reviewed in the Washington Post and also in the New York Times.
To shape my reading, I have reviewed various lists of “classics” and they are, of course, chock full of amazing works. I’ve adopted the relatively simple approach of trying to read in chronological order, which has the advantage of each work building on the previous work. The disadvantage – major, at times, I can’t help feeling – is that the distant past is extremely foreign and you start off quite at sea, reading about things in very unfamiliar idioms in equally unfamiliar locales.
Take Gilgamesh. By all accounts this is the first piece of literature that we possess, written in ancient Sumeria and then adapted by a Babylonian scribe. But it doesn’t read like the first work of literature. It reminds you forcibly of coming in on a conversation halfway through – or listening to a conversation in a foreign language about some object, the name of which you are unable to translate.
For example, one part of the story reads as follows (all quotes from the rendition by David Ferry):
“There was an ancient city, Shuruppak –
You know of it – most fortunate of cities,
God-favoured, on the banks of the Euphrates
The gods in heaven decided in their council
To bring the flood down on the fortunate city.
…
Anu was there, the councillor Enlil,
Nunurta of the Silence, and there also
Was the god Ennugi, monitor of canals
And there was Ea, cleverest of the gods.” (Tablet XI:i)
At which point I am thinking – Shuruppak? Anu? Enlil? Ninurta of the Silence? Ennugi? Ea? And also – there’s a god of canals? O Wikipedia, come to my rescue! And then - wait, do I have to become a Sumerian expert to read this?
So the first thing to get over is the feeling that there’s just no way you can understand what’s happening in this story. That’s probably true to a certain extent, but in order to progress, one must take it on faith that appreciating the ancient classics is possible.
And actually having taken that first doozy of a step, Gilgamesh seems to me to be a wonderful introduction.
Gilgamesh is the story:
“of him who knew the most of all men know;
who made the journey; heartbroken; reconciled;
who knew the way things were before the Flood,
the secret things, the mystery; who went
to the end of the earth, and over; who returned,
and wrote the story on a tablet of stone.” (Tablet I:i)
In other words, it is the story of life and death. The basic plot is that for sorrow of the death of his friend Enkidu, and for fear of his own death Gilgamesh – “two-thirds a God, but one third mortal and grieving in his heart” (Tablet X:i) – seeks immortality. He braves many dangers to come at last to the only survivors of the Great Flood, Utnapishtim, a man who was warned by the god Ea and built an ark, and his wife. They know the secret of immortality. They give it to him but, while asleep, he loses it to a snake. He laments:
“I descended into the waters to find the plant [which gives immortal life]
and what I found was a sign to
abandon the journey and what it was I sought for.” (Tablet XI:viii)
He returns – mortal like us all – to his kingdom Uruk, and demands that his ferryman study it, its walls and brickwork:
“Three leagues and the temple precinct of Ishtar
Measure Uruk, the city of Gilgamesh” (Tablet XI:ix)
Uruk then is his immortality.
So the first piece of literature we have is the story of a man becoming a man: at first wonderful, strong, magical but very wild, he is tamed and civilised by making a friend. Ironically this friend is the wild man Enkidu, who in his turn is civilised by the temple prostitute Shamhat. Together Gilgamesh and Enkidu achieve many things and their exploits are the stuff of legend. But Enkidu sickens and dies, and Gilgamesh grieves, and is fearful, and strikes out, and even achieves more great things, and eventually emerges as man – one who knows his own place and who sees clearly how the world will judge him.
What an amazing little volume this is. It is both touching and lovely – and after 4,000 years we can still recognise our own longings in the story of Gilgamesh.
You may wish to look at another review of this book from Ploughshares magazine.
I also note that there is a new book - The Buried Book, by David Damrosch - reviewing how the Gilgamesh epic was preserved. It was reviewed in the Washington Post and also in the New York Times.
Wednesday, 23 April 2008
Gilgamesh - the beginning of literature
Somewhere around 4000 years ago (between 2000 and 1800 BCE), a Babylonian named SIN-LEQE-UNNINNI took some fragments of the legendary story of the king of Uruk and fashioned them into the epic we now know as Gilgamesh, the name of the King.
The historical Gilgamesh was not Babylonian, but Sumerian. He is said to have been the King of Uruk, and possibly lived about 2700 BCE. The Sumerians were the first people to develop writing, using the script on clay tablets that we call cuneiform. Cuneiform was probably developed originally as a purely symbolic form, for numbers and accounting, but quickly developed into a complete script system, giving us the first writings. Among these were the records of Gilgamesh, already legendary when writing was developed.
Some fragments of the Sumerian Gilgamesh tales are still preserved on early tablets from about 2200-2000 BCE but Suni-Leqe-Unninni transformed them during the Old Babylonian period into a fresh story - a poetic piece of at least 1000 lines inscribed on clay tables and surviving fragmentarily but in a range of cuneiform sources. An analogy more familiar to modern readers might be the way in which Thomas Malory collected and wrote anew the tales of King Arthur into his Morte d'Arthur.
The epic had assumed standard for by around 1300 BCE, 500 years after Suni-Leqe-Unninni first transformed it.
Sumeria was the great civilisation of ancient Mesopotamia, with a long flowering and many important cultural and technical contributions. It was replaced by the Babylonians who however wished to portray themselves as the rightful inheritors of Sumerian culture. The original tales were recordings of oral traditions about Gilgamesh. But Sini-Leqe-Unninni may have crafted his version as a kind of nostalgia for the old days or, potentially, as a way in which to portray the current Babylonian rulers as kings of the same stamp. Again it seems as though Sumerian was used in ancient Mesopotamia much as Latin was during the medieval period -- as a language of the literate and educated in which the most important tales were told. The transfer of the Gilgamesh story into Babylonian would have represented the incorporation of classical civilisation into modern life.
Other events which were taking place around the time of the historical Gilgamesh, ca 2750 BCE:
The historical Gilgamesh was not Babylonian, but Sumerian. He is said to have been the King of Uruk, and possibly lived about 2700 BCE. The Sumerians were the first people to develop writing, using the script on clay tablets that we call cuneiform. Cuneiform was probably developed originally as a purely symbolic form, for numbers and accounting, but quickly developed into a complete script system, giving us the first writings. Among these were the records of Gilgamesh, already legendary when writing was developed.
Some fragments of the Sumerian Gilgamesh tales are still preserved on early tablets from about 2200-2000 BCE but Suni-Leqe-Unninni transformed them during the Old Babylonian period into a fresh story - a poetic piece of at least 1000 lines inscribed on clay tables and surviving fragmentarily but in a range of cuneiform sources. An analogy more familiar to modern readers might be the way in which Thomas Malory collected and wrote anew the tales of King Arthur into his Morte d'Arthur.
The epic had assumed standard for by around 1300 BCE, 500 years after Suni-Leqe-Unninni first transformed it.
Sumeria was the great civilisation of ancient Mesopotamia, with a long flowering and many important cultural and technical contributions. It was replaced by the Babylonians who however wished to portray themselves as the rightful inheritors of Sumerian culture. The original tales were recordings of oral traditions about Gilgamesh. But Sini-Leqe-Unninni may have crafted his version as a kind of nostalgia for the old days or, potentially, as a way in which to portray the current Babylonian rulers as kings of the same stamp. Again it seems as though Sumerian was used in ancient Mesopotamia much as Latin was during the medieval period -- as a language of the literate and educated in which the most important tales were told. The transfer of the Gilgamesh story into Babylonian would have represented the incorporation of classical civilisation into modern life.
Other events which were taking place around the time of the historical Gilgamesh, ca 2750 BCE:
- In China, it was the time of the "Sage Kings"
- In Egypt, the 3rd to 6th Dynasties of the Old Kingdom were ruling (the time of Cheops)
- Also in Egypt, the 365 day calendar was introduced.
- In Sumeria, writing was beginning
- King Sargon of Akkad defeats Lugalzaggisi the Sumerian King
- In China, the Shun dynasty rules
- In Egypt, the Middle Kingdom begins
- In Mesopotamia, Abraham leaves Ur ca 2100 BCE
- In India, the Indus Valley civilisation flourishes
- In Crete, it is the Early Minoan period
- In Scandinavia, dolmens are being erected
- In Peru, the cultivation of cotton is beginning
- The Hittite kingdom attacks Babylon
- Hammurabi reunites the Babylonian Empire and writes the Code of Hammurabi
- The Greeks begin to move from the Caspian sea to the Mediterranean
- Stonehenge is a centre of English worship
- In China, the first period of Chinese literature begins
- In Crete, it is the late Minoan period
- The Mycenaean palaces are built
- Egyptian civilization is weakening; Ramses re-establishes the old religion after the changes made by Akhenaton and Tutankhamun
- The Israelites, led by Moses, reach Canaan
- The destruction of Troy
- In Mexico, the earliest known settlement
- In India, the Upanishads are written and the Ganges civilization flourishes
- In China, the first dictionary appears
- In Greece, Corinth is founded
- There is evidence of tin mining in England
- In Scandinavia and the Mediterranean there is advanced shipbuilding
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