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Literary Archaeology

Writer's picture: Irene BanksIrene Banks

Updated: 6 days ago


	Aurochs from the 3rd building phase of the Ishtar Gate of Babylon. From Babylon, reign of Nebuchadnezzar II, 6th century BCE. Pergamon Museum, Berlin, Germany. Photo by Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP(Glasg)
Aurochs from the 3rd building phase of the Ishtar Gate of Babylon. From Babylon, reign of Nebuchadnezzar II, 6th century BCE. Pergamon Museum, Berlin, Germany. Photo by Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP(Glasg)

Book Information

Gilgamesh: A New Rendering in English Verse

David Ferry

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York

Copyright 1992

ISBN: 978-0-374-52383-1


I’ve been thinking about materiality and how it relates to The Epic of Gilgamesh, which is unlike any other literary work in the Western Canon because it comes to us in the form of clay baked tablets. One cannot help but equate the epic with its archaeology because archaeology is how it was discovered by modern people. It would be a mistake to equate the lively human culture that produced the epic story with the earthen remnants that are left. Imagine, if centuries from now, archaeologists ‘discover’ the digital remains of our contemporary literary works and equate us with the server farms that host the literature we produce. They would assume that we were a bunch of computers rather than human beings.

 

Archaeology, by its very nature, implies layers or, more specifically, digging through them. Gordon Childe describes this process as it relates to the Sumerians in a fascinating passage in his book Man Makes Himself.

 

“At Warka, the biblical Erech, the Germans recently explored the centre of such a tell by means of a deep shaft. The top of the shaft is the floor-level of a temple that is itself prehistoric and about 5500 years old. From this level, you may descend by a winding path cut in the walls of the shaft for a depth of over 60 feet! At every stage of the dizzy descent, you can pick from the shaft’s sides bits of pottery, mud bricks, or stone implements. The shaft is actually cutting through a mound, 60 feet high, composed entirely of the débris of successive settlements in which men had lived. The mound has grown up in the manner described above, but even the latest of the component settlements traversed in descending the shaft is more than five millennia old! At the bottom we reach virgin soil – the soil of a marsh that had just emerged from the Persian Gulf. The lowest settlement represents the remote beginnings of human life in Southern Mesopotamia. But when we have descended to it, we are as far as ever from the beginning of human progress. To reach that we must plunge into geological time. But now figures become almost meaningless (and mainly guest-work). To grasp man’s antiquity we must consider the vast changes in the earth’s surface that our species had witnessed before ever the first settlers reached the site of Erech.” (Childe 40-41)

 

The Epic of Gilgamesh is the perfect representation of the archaeological concept in literary form. The version upon which I have been commenting in this series of blog posts is a modern rendering that builds upon five thousand years of renderings, translations, and interpretations. When one analyzes the Epic of Gilgamesh, one is engaging in a form of literary archaeology. There is the modern rendering and the story’s meaning to the present-day reader. There is the Standard Version compiled in Babylonia some 1,600 years after the life of the supposedly ‘real’ king Gilgamesh. And then there are the original five mythic Sumerian stories about a king called Gilgamesh written some six centuries after the real king died. Prior to the written myths, there were oral poems that mythologized the life of the king.

 

Gilgamesh is a very different type of king in the earliest preserved stories about him compared to the much later Standard Version of the epic about him. In the earliest stories, he characterizes the leadership values of his day and age. He values military and political power, fairness and mercy, fame and glory, and sacrifice to the gods. Not all his decisions are wise, however he is depicted as a powerful adult ruler making adult decisions. In her book, Babylon, University of Cambridge archaeologist Joan Oates describes the evolution of kingship in early Sumer.

 

“Ultimately the lugal came to be the most powerful person in the city-state, and although his position may at first have been elective, a diagnostic system of royal succession soon developed. Whether or not it reflected the origin of his position, the king‘s role as war-leader grew increasingly important during Early Dynastic times, and by the end of this period the king regularly led his troops to war (though ‘wars’ were often little more than minor skirmishes and standing armies were unknown). The lugal also came to perform the role of ‘judge’ in the Old Testament sense, a ‘righter of wrongs’, and later he assumed the en’s responsibility for fertility and abundant harvest. Thus magic and ritual duties were added to his military and judicial functions to form the combination so characteristic of later Mesopotamian kingship. As kingship became hereditary, with all the prerogatives of royalty, the palace began to rival the city temple in wealth and influence.” (Oates 26-27)

 

1,600 years later, by the time we reach Gilgamesh of epic fame, we meet a very different king. He is young, foolhardy, and vainglorious. Born of a goddess, he is partially divine, however, his birthright fails to provide him with the immortality he craves. His half-god, half-mortal state ties Gilgamesh to the historical evolution of kingship from the earliest Sumerian times to the advanced civilization of Babylonia. Joan Oates discusses this in her description of the Akkadian empire, which succeeded the Sumerian empire. “Perhaps the most significant innovation under the Agade king's, however, was their conception of kingship, …under Naram-Sin [2254-2218 BCE] a change took place so startling that it proved in the long run unacceptable. At some point during his reign Naram-Sin adopted a style previously the exclusive prerogative of the gods. On his own inscriptions his name appears preceded by the determinative for ‘divinity’.” (Oates 41) Some 400 years later, during the third Dynasty of Ur, the king Shulgi [2094-2047 BCE] took the innovation one step further. “His ‘coronation’ at Nippur was commemorated in a new literary genre, the so-called royal hymn, which was addressed not to the gods, but to the king himself ‘as a god’. …Shulgi, who not only continued his father’s administrative, architectural and literary interests, but went one step further in emulating the later Agade kings. Sometime early in his reign, he assumed divine status.” (Oates 49) Innovation led not to a permanent societal change, however, and the experiment of king-as-god never stuck. 1,000 years after the real king Gilgamesh, Hammurapi [1792-1750 BCE], did not consider himself to be divine. “Hammurapi never assumed the title of divinity in any form, and all subsequent kings were to follow Babylon in this respect.” (Oates 62)

 

By the time the Epic of Gilgamesh was standardized, Mesopotamian culture had long abandoned the idea of the king being a divine being. The quest for immortality, however, remained a consistent theme. It is no wonder then, that a half-divine and half-mortal king, who symbolizes the abandoned cultural innovation, would choose to seek out immortality. For the Babylonians, Gilgamesh, by now fully mythologized, represented the cultural concerns of the times. According to The Oxford Companion to World Mythology:

 

 “Unlike the Gilgamesh of the Sumerian fragments, the hero of the Babylonian Gilgamesh epic is distinctly human rather than divine. In fact, if there is an underlying theme to the whole epic, it is Gilgamesh's discovery of his mortality in his passage from arrogance to humility in a quest for immortality. William Moran suggests that Gilgamesh's passage reflects the ‘ideological developments of the period that to some extent demythologized kingship and rejected the divinity that kings had been claiming for five centuries or so”; the epic emphasizes the difference between humans and deities in general, based in the fact that even a hero, a goddess's son, ‘must perform the very human and undivine act of dying.’” (Leeming 150)

 

If we continue the journey of reverse literary archaeology we come to the modern day. Why does Gilgamesh still resonate with us? Ideas of leadership have changed however being human has not. It is Gilgamesh's humanity that bonds us to him. With each new translation or rendering, a new literary layer is formed, and we learn something new about Gilgamesh and ourselves. I have read several translations of the Epic of Gilgamesh, and while I found each to be intellectually stimulating, none captured my heart until I read a passage in David Ferry's rendering. During Gilgamesh's long passage through a pitch-black mountain tunnel, Ferry manages to humanize the heretofore unlikeable king. Gilgamesh, having lost his friend Enkidu, abandons his kingly responsibilities and seeks out Utnapishtim, the only human who can share with him the secret of immortality. The tunnel through which Gilgamesh must pass is twelve leagues long, about thirty-six miles. In the translated versions of the epic, he passes this long journey in silence. The stanzas are repetitive and emphasize the darkness and tediousness of the passage. In Ferry’s rendering, however, the monotony is broken up in a surprising and heart-rending way:

 

“Gilgamesh went to the entrance into the mountain

 

 and entered the darkness alone, without a companion.

 By the time he reached the end of the first league

 

 the darkness was total, nothing behind or before.

He made his way, companionless, to the end

 

of the second league. Utterly lightless, black.

There was nothing behind or before, nothing at all.

 

Only, the blackness pressed in upon his body.

He felt his blind way through the mountain tunnel,

 

struggling for breath, through the third league, alone,

and companionless through the fourth, making his way,

 

and struggling for every breath, to the end of the fifth,

in the absolute dark, nothing behind or before,

 

the weight of the blackness pressing in upon him.

Weeping and fearful he journeyed a sixth league,

 

and, blind, to the end of the seventh league, alone,

without a companion, seeing nothing at all,

 

 weeping and fearful, struggling to keep breathing.

At the end of the eighth league he cried aloud

 

and tried to cry out something against the pressure

of blackness: “Two people, who are companions, they…!”

 

There was nothing behind or before him in the darkness;

utterly lightless, the way of the sun's night journey.

 

He struggled to breathe, trying to breathe the darkness.

He was weeping and fearful, alone, without a companion.” (Ferry 51-52)

 

Our heart breaks for our dingy hero. David Ferry acknowledges that he added a new layer in his rendering. “From here to the end of the account of Gilgamesh's journey through the tunnel there is quite a lot of local invention on my part, in this case not so much because of fragmentation as because in the literal translation the lines are extremely repetitious.” (Ferry 98) Ferry's explanation is an understatement. I felt, for the first time, sympathy and compassion towards Gilgamesh because Ferry makes his grief palpable. His poetic license is an example of the layering that has been part of the evolution of the literary epic since its early beginning. Each layer adds something new and gives successive generations a reason to not only read the Epic of Gilgamesh, but to feel how it connects us to our ancestors of 5,000 years ago.


Bibliography

Childe, V. Gordon. Man Makes Himself. Nottingham: Spokesman, 2003.


Ferry, David. Gilgamesh: A New Rendering in English Verse. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1992.


Leeming, David. The Oxford Companion to World Mythology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.


Oates, Joan. Babylon. New York: Thames and Hudson Inc., 1986.

 

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