"Gilgamesh" (Or, What Is Left of My Dream)

 

We were a small group of aspiring new Orientalists gathered around a round table at the university cafeteria, waiting to be introduced to it all by a student who had been around longer than us. 

It was my dream to become a Sumerologist, and now I was getting there.

One of the fellow newbies, a 17 year old kid with thick glasses, wearing a suit and tie (so defying the current and previous generation's student attires) told us others: "I have put everything on one card." Skipping classes, he had already got deep into Classical Arabic and who knows how many other ancient languages. With my gap years spent working, I realised I had no chance of competing for the few Orientalist jobs there might be and that he aimed at becoming the professor and head of the department (which he, of course, happened).

This was the start of my drifting away from my original dream to study cuneiform which represented the dawn of civilization and writing. Realism made me gravitate towards languages with more certainty of bread and butter. As an Italian comedian joked: “We had to study Latin and Ancient Greek at school so we could get a job in the past.” 

 

The oldest story in the world

While it is too late to get into Sumerian, at least I can read Gilgamesh, the oldest literary work in the world, as a translation. In the bookshelf, I have Stephen Mitchell's Gilgamesh which I bought at an Oxfam charity shop in England fifteen years ago. I like its reader-friendliness but by Mitchell’s own words it not a translation but "a version", based on seven translations. Therefore I ordered a more recent one (2022) from Bertrand (which *The Guinness World Records aptly claims to be the oldest bookshop in the world) in Portugal. It is translated from Akkadian by Sophus Helle, the leading expert in Babylonian literature. The English translation was preceded by the Danish translation which Helle published with his father, the Danish poet Morten Søndergaard. New fragments of Gilgamesh were since Mitchell's work added to the official version and are included in Helle's translation.

Gilgamesh

Gilgamesh was a semi-historical person who governed the city of Uruk ca. 2750 BCE. His story was found in 1840 in accidental diggings in current Mosul by Austen Henry Layard who discovered the ruins of the ancient Assyrian capital Ninive and among other ancient treasures, cuneiform tablets in Akkadian. Later were also found tablets in Sumerian which is not related to any known language. These were gradually translated and the story of Gilgamesh found out. This caused quite a stir in then scholarly world.

The story

Gilgamesh is very strong, beautiful and exceptionally tall king of Uruk, two-thirds god and one-third human, and also a tyrant. There is no match to him among his people but as response to their desperate prayers, the gods send to him an equally strong, beautiful and exceptionally tall man, Enkidu. 

In his earlier life, Enkidu was living naked and long-haired in the wild but a priestess seduced him, taming and civilising him. 

So Enkidu meets Gilgamesh and the two love each other. 

Gilgamesh gets an idea to start a fame-seeking journey to kill Humbaba, a monster guarding the Cedar Forest, which he regards as evil. Enkidu advises against this but ultimately agrees to follow the adamant Gilgamesh.

Before leaving, Gilgamesh and Enkidu go hand in hand to see Gilgamesh's mother goddess Ninsun to ask for her blessing for their mission. Ninsun prays Shamash (the Sun god) to protect and help Gilgamesh and accepts Enkidu as her son and Gilgamesh’s brother, giving her blessing.

Gilgamesh and Enkidu travel to the Cedar Forest where things work well thanks to the prearranged divine help. Humbaba is not particularly evil but just guards the Cedar Forest like he has been told. He tries to plead for mercy but Gilgamesh is encouraged by Enkidu to kill him, so he does it. Before Humbaba dies, he curses them both. Gilgamesh and Enkidu chop down the whole Cedar Forest.

When they get back home, the goddess Ishtar makes a marriage offer to Gilgamesh but he just mocks it listing her earlier lovers. Raged, Ishtar sends the Bull of Heaven to fight Gilgamesh and Enkidu but they kill that too. 

However, killing the Bull of Heaven has shaken the divine ecosystem and Enkidu has to die. This happens and Gilgamesh is distraught with grief. He roams the wilderness with a matted hair and wearing an animal skin, and in his despair travels to the end of the world to meet his ancestor Uta-napishti to hear how to become immortal. 

Uta-napishti is not sympathetic but starts telling in detail how Shamash (the Sun god) told him to build an ark and collect in it examples of all living creatures for a coming flood and how the rain and flood drowned all mankind and animals, and how he after the rain sent out birds to see if they would return. 

Uta-napishti is not telling Gilgamesh how he can become immortal but he gives him instructions on how to find a plant that can return his youth. However, Gilgamesh ruins even this chance. 

Reflections

Gilgamesh is described as a story on love, loss and death which it of course is. Yet there is more to it. 

You can also find the still surviving myths of the power of status, size, muscles and beauty. More so, the reason-defying and fame hungry heroism under which a journey to kill Humbaba is started, justified by the false assumption of its evilness, familiar from current dichotomies. Gilgamesh has been called the world's first action hero. The words describing the mission to the Cedar Forest appear in the motto of Start Trek: “where no man has gone before”.

Gilgamesh feels more familiar now than what it did 15 years ago when I previously read the book. It is like our world had taken a huge leap backwards and is closer to that of Gilgamesh where killing and violence are idolised. 

Yet unlike current dictators, Gilgamesh is close to his feelings which enables him to evolve and learn from his mistakes. However, the gained wisdom does not come up from the story itself (or maybe something is still missing from the end). It is only stated in Tablet 1 in which the narrator introduces Gilgamesh and his adventures:

He sought out rulers everywhere

and came to grasp all wisdom of the world.

He discovered a secret, revealed a hidden matter;

and brought home a story from before the Flood. 

He came back from far roads, exhausted but at peace

As for Mitchell’s version and Helle’s translation, I can see that some parts in the latter are longer and more elaborated. Helle says that he has included new fragments that have been included since 2003 when the previous actual translation came out. Helle's work also contains fragments that give hints on what might be missing. 

Helle says that the story of Gilgamesh is updated with any new information when found and that there is a huge amount of cuneiform fragments that are waiting to be translated because there are not enough people who can do it. 

Maybe I should have gone for Sumerology after all.

 

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*The Guinness Book of Records (now Guinness World Records) was created by the managing director of Guinness Breweries (in Dublin) who got into an argument about two birds' speed and realised there was no book in which you could check these things and other questions over which people debate. The job to create a record book was allocated to the twin brothers Norris and Ross McWhirter, and the book was distributed to pubs in Ireland and England where it became highly popular among the customers and later spread worldwide.