More than 10 years ago, I walked into a local bookstore & found a new translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh. Browsing through its pages, I was seized by a desire to put the story into verse. At this point, of the epic’s eleven tablets, I have finished and copyrighted the first two, and have all but the last two in second draft. Amassunu contains a 100+ line extract from tablet IX.
The story’s roots go back to the beginnings of the world’s first urbanized culture, Sumer (now southern Iraq), more than 5,000 years ago. It survived, the oldest continuous long story, until the sack of Nineveh (612 B.C.), and was forgotten until the palace of Ashurbanipal was excavated in the 1840s and 50s. About 60 percent of the story has been recovered, although (literal) pieces of it are turning up all the time.
Why is this ancient & presumably primitive story important?
1) The story, even in fragmentary form, is superb. Its narrative is a tour-de-force, including material that ranges from elegy to high drama to burlesque. The epic contains set pieces, such as Ninsun’s petition of the sun-god in tablet III, that are written in poetry of the first order, as intense and beautiful as any composed since.
2) Gilgamesh takes us back to a civilization and landscape that both disappeared thousands of years ago. The climate of the Middle East was not always as dry and harsh as it is today. At that time, it was a grassland rather like the savannah of eastern Africa today; lions, Indian elephants, and ostriches roamed in large numbers. The river valleys were also lusher, and along the banks of the Euphrates sprang up the world’s first cities, the most powerful of which was Uruk, the city that Gilgamesh ruled.
3) The writer(s) of the oldest parts of the Hebrew Bible knew Gilgamesh. In fact, the oldest version of Noah’s Flood is clearly written in response to the Sumerian Flood at the end of Gilgamesh. But there are other correspondences, including two versions of the Eden story.
4) Gilgamesh records the struggle between men and women for power in the world’s first civilization, and the transfer of power from the goddess to the gods. The goddess Inanna is a character in the story, and tablet VI contains the story of her struggle with Gilgamesh for supremacy.
5) The story contains the first great portrayal of Hell and the first search for eternal life. After Gilgamesh rejects Inanna’s love, she unleashes the Bull of Heaven on Uruk in revenge. But Gilgamesh and his partner/intimate companion Endidu, kill the bull; the Council of Gods, partly to punish the death of the bull, condemns Enkidu to death. Before he dies, Enkidu receives a vision of the underworld, which he reports to Gilgamesh (the poetry in this vision is some of the finest in the epic). After his death, Gilgamesh laments his companion (more outstanding poetry) and then goes on his quest for eternal life. During this quest, we are introduced to an imaginary landscape quite different from those to be found in later writing.
6) The Sumerian Flood, which predates Noah’s Flood by many centuries. When the first people to read the tablets in the 19th century reported that they had found an earlier version of the Flood, it caused a sensation in London, and enough money was raised to send the explorers back to Nineveh to retrieve more tablets. Though the details of the two versions of the Flood share many details (even down to wording), they each reflect quite different theologies.
7) My version is different from others already in print. The originals of the story are recorded on clay tablets that were subsequently broken into many pieces large and small. As I mention above, about 60 percent of the story has been recovered. In my version, I fill in the missing material from the logic of the surrounding material and my imagination. Other versions eliminate lines that are fragmentary. My goal has been to make the entire epic read continuously, and in a formal (but never unintelligible 
), sometimes rhymed, verse.
The passage from the story in Amassunu concerns Gilgamesh’s encounter with the Scorpion Gods.
I’ll say no more, but will provide (for the last time, at least for a while) a link to Lulu where you can buy the book.
So, come on, give it a try–a story 5,000 years in the making has got to be worth checking out!
Image: The Annunaki, impression fr/ cylinder seal, University of Louvains. Src: WikiCommons
I suppose, if you can’t be happy, then at least you can be crassly commercial.
