Epic of Gilgamesh



         


The Epic of Gilgamesh is from Babylonia, dating from long after the time that king Gilgamesh was supposed to have ruled. It was based on earlier Sumerian legends of Gilgamesh. The most complete version of the epic was preserved in the collection of the 7th century BC Assyrian king Ashurbanipal.

Based on a summary of the Epic (available online ), the contents of the eleven clay tablets are:

  1. Introducing Gilgamesh of Uruk, the greatest king on earth, two-thirds god and one-third human, the strongest super-human who ever existed. But his people complain that he is too harsh, so the sky-god Anu creates the wild-man Enkidu. Enkidu is tamed by the temple prostitute Shamhat.
  2. Enkidu fights Gilgamesh but loses, they become friends. Gilgamesh proposes the adventure of the cedar forest.
  3. Preparation for the adventure of the cedar forest; many give support, including the sun-god Shamash.
  4. Journey of Gilgamesh and Enkidu to the cedar forest.
  5. Gilgamesh and Enkidu, with help from Shamash, kill Humbaba, the demon guardian of the trees, then cut down the trees which they float as a raft back to Uruk.
  6. Gilgamesh rejects the sexual advances of the goddess Ishtar. Ishtar gets her father, the sky-god Anu, to send the "Bull of Heaven" to avenge Gilgamesh and his city. Gilgamesh and Enkidu kill the bull.
  7. The gods decide that somebody has to be punished for killing Humbaba and the Bull of Heaven, and it is Enkidu. Enkidu becomes ill and describes hell as he is dying.
  8. Lament of Gilgamesh for Enkidu.
  9. Gilgamesh fears death, decides to seek eternal life by making a perilous journey to visit Utnapishtim and his wife, the only immortal humans, alive since before the Great Flood.
  10. Completion of the journey, by punting across the Waters of Death with Urshanabi, the ferryman.
  11. Gilgamesh meets Utnapishtim, who tells him about the great flood and gives him two chances for immortality. Gilgamesh blunders both chances and returns to Uruk, where the sight of its massive walls provoke Gilgamesh to praise this enduring work of mortal men.

A twelfth tablet is known to exist, although an intact copy has never been found. A fragment believed to be from the twelfth tablet describes a brief scene wherein the spirit of Enkidu appears to Gilgamesh to console him. An untranslated tablet which may have contained the lost segments of the epic may have been lost in 2003 during looting in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad.

Although the epic itself was lost for millennia, Hittite versions of it existed. Some people think that it has had an indirect impact on Western literature through the Biblical story of Noah and the flood, a suspected retelling of a portion of the Gilgamesh epic.

The Epic of Gilgamesh is more widely known today. The first modern translation of the epic was in the 1870s by George Smith. More recent translations include one undertaken with the assistance of the American novelist John Gardner, and published in 1984.

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Main Differences in the Story of the Flood as found in the Gilgamesh Epic and Biblical accounts

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The cause

According to the Gilgamesh Epic, an assembly of gods resolved to destroy mankind by means of a flood. Though the decision was to be kept secret, the god Ea (in the Sumerian account "Enki") warned his favorite, Utnapishtim, about it.

The older Babylonian Atrahasis Epic states that Enlil felt disturbed in his sleep due to noise made by humans. He turned for help to the divine assembly of "great gods" who then sent a famine for some six years, but without bringing the desired quietness. When the gods decided to send a flood, Ea disclosed the plan to Atrahasis, who built a survival vessel according to divinely given measurement.

According to the Biblical account, God resolved to destroy mankind by means of a flood because the "earth came to be ruined" and "filled with violence" due to the actions of mankind. God gave Noah forewarning of the pending flood (-Gen. 6:5, 11-13) and instructed him to build a survival vessel.

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The shape and size of the vessel

Biblical accounts describe a vessel about 133.5 meters long, with a length-to-height ratio of 10 to 1 and a length-to-width ratio of 6 to 1. (Genesis 6:15) There is no account of the exact length of time spent on construction, however a time period of 50 or 60 years is allowed for. (Genesis 5:32; 7:6)

The epic of Gilgamesh, on the other hand, describes a cube shaped vessel some 60 meters long on each side that was built in only seven days.

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Sumerian legends of Gilgamesh

Translations for several legends of Gilgamesh in the Sumerian language can be found in Black, J.A., Cunningham, G., Fluckiger-Hawker, E, Robson, E., and Zólyomi, G., The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (), Oxford 1998-.

Some versions of the texts date from as early as the third dynasty of Ur, 2100-2000 BC.

The earlier Akkadian version of the epic is known as Surpassing all other kings and dates back to the first half of the second millennium B.C. The "standard" version, He who saw the deep, was composed by Sin-liqe-unninni sometime between 1300 B.C. and 1000 B.C.






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