Gilgamesh (17 page)

p. 3,
Austen Henry Layard:
“The French were first in the field in 1842 at Nineveh and, from 1843, at Khorsabad, the eighth-century-
BC
capital of the Assyrian king Sargon II. But they were soon outshone and outmaneuvered by a young British traveler and adventurer, Austen Henry Layard. En route to Ceylon, the twenty-eight-year-old Layard became intrigued with stories of buried remains in the mounds near present-day Mosul which turned out to be ancient Nineveh and Nimrud, the two most fabled capitals of the Assyrians.

“Within days of starting the digging at Nimrud, Layard hit upon the first of eight palaces of the Assyrian kings dating from the ninth to seventh centuries
BC,
which he and his assistant eventually uncovered there and at Nineveh. In amazement they found room after room lined with carved stone bas-reliefs of demons and deities, scenes of battle, royal hunts and ceremonies; doorways flanked by enormous winged bulls and lions; and, inside some of the chambers, tens of thousands of clay tablets inscribed with the curious, and then undeciphered, cuneiform (‘wedge-shaped') script-the remains, as we now know, of scholarly libraries assembled by the Assyrian kings Sennacherib and Ashurbanipal. By later standards it was treasure-hunting rather than archaeology, but after a few years of excavation in difficult political and financial circumstances,
Layard had succeeded in resurrecting for the first time one of the great early cultures of Mesopotamia. He never made it to Ceylon.

“The most spectacular finds were shipped back to the British Museum, where the Victorian fascination with the Bible assured these illustrations of Old Testament history a rapturous reception. By the early 1850s, progress in reading the Assyrian-Babylonian script had allowed names and events to be attached to the images, among them Jehu, the ninth-century-
BC
king of Israel (shown paying obeisance to King Shalmanesser III), and the siege of Lachish in Judah by Sen-nacherib. Layard's account of his discoveries,
Nineveh and Its Remains
(1849), soon had a huge success: ‘the greatest achievement of our time,' according to Lord Ellesmere, president of the Royal Asiatic Society. ‘No man living has done so much or told it so well.' An abridged edition (1852) prepared for the series ‘Murray's Reading for the Rail' became an instant best seller: the first year's sales of eight thousand (as Layard remarked in a letter) ‘will place it side by side with
Mrs. Rundell's Cookery.'

“Work on the decipherment of the language of the Assyrian inscriptions was making good progress while Layard was in the field, partly owing to his discoveries. But the key to cracking the cuneiform script lay elsewhere-in a trilingual inscription of the Persian king Darius carved on the face of a cliff at Behistun in western Iran around 520
BC.
(In all, the cuneiform script was used for over 3,500 years.) One of the three versions of the text used a much simpler cuneiform script with only around forty characters, which scholars soon realized must be alphabetic. Even before Layard's excavations, by making some inspired guesses about likely titles and names, they had deciphered this script and shown the language to be Old Persian, thus of the Indo-Iranian language family (a close relative of Indo-European). Having determined
the general meaning of the three texts, scholars now confirmed that the second version, written in the much more complex cuneiform script (some three hundred characters) of the tablets from Assyria, was, as many had suspected, a Semitic language (i.e., cognate with Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic)-what we now know as Babylonian. Many texts could be read reasonably well by the time Layard's finds started arriving in England, but the decipherment was not officially declared to have been achieved until 1857, when four of the leading experts (including W. H. Fox-Talbot, one of the inventors of photography) submitted independent translations of a new inscription and all were shown to be in broad agreement. After two and a half millennia, the Assyrians had again found their voice” (Timothy Potts, “Buried between the Rivers,”
New York Review of Books,
September 25, 2003). See also Sir E. A. Wallis Budge,
The Rise and Progress of Assyriology,
Martin Hopkinson, 1925, pp. 68 ff.

p. 4,
Akkadian:
The name “Akkadian” is derived from the city-state of Akkad (near present-day Baghdad), founded in the middle of the third millennium
BCE
and capital of one of the first great empires in human history. By 2000
BCE
Akkadian had supplanted Sumerian as the major spoken language of Mesopotamia, and around this time it split into two dialects: Babylonian, which was spoken in southern Mesopotamia, and Assyrian, which was spoken in the north.

p. 4,
“On looking down the third column:
George Smith,
The Chaldean Account of
Genesis,
Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, 1876, p. 4. “I then proceeded,” Smith's account continues, “to read through this document, and found it was in the form of a speech from the hero of the Deluge to a person whose name appeared to be Izdubar (=Gilgamesh; Smith was
guessing [mistakenly, as it turned out] that the three cuneiform signs that formed the name had their most common syllabic values). I recollected a legend belonging to the same hero Izdubar K. 231, which, on comparison, proved to belong to the same series, and I then commenced a search for any missing portions of the tablets. This search was a long and heavy work, for there were thousands of fragments to go over, and, while on the one side I had gained as yet only two fragments of the Izdubar legends to judge from, on the other hand, the unsorted fragments were so small, and contained so little of the subject, that it was extremely difficult to ascertain their meaning. My search, however, proved successful. I found a fragment of another copy of the Deluge, containing again the sending forth of the birds, and gradually collected several other portions of this tablet, fitting them in one after another until I had completed the greater part of the second column. Portions of a third copy next turned up, which, when joined together, completed a considerable part of the first and sixth columns. I now had the account of the Deluge in the state in which I published it at the meeting of the Society of Biblical Archaeology, December 3rd, 1872.”

p. 4,
according to a later account:
Budge,
The Rise and Progress of Assyriology,
p. 153.

p. 5,
caused a major stir:
“The London
Daily Telegraph
offered to fund an expedition to look for the missing part of the tablet. Smith duly set out, and on only his fifth day of searching through the spoil heaps of Nineveh-with luck that must have seemed divinely inspired-found a tablet fragment that filled most of the gap in the story” (Potts, “Buried between the Rivers”).

p. 5,
Though to a modern reader it seems quaint:
Here are two examples from Tablet I (the first passage in each example is a literal prose version, the second is Smith's translation):

(
The Chaldean Account of Genesis,
p. 202). A few pages later, Smith comments, “I have omitted some of the details in columns III. and IV. because they were on the one side obscure, and on the other hand hardly adapted for general reading.”

The second passage comes from later in Tablet I. Smith's translation is quite fragmentary:

p. 5,
here is the consensus:
In the following account, through p. 6, I rely heavily on Andrew George's judicious and informative introduction to
The Epic of Gilgamesh
(hereafter abbreviated as
EG
).

p. 5,
five separate and independent poems in Sumerian:
Translations of all five poems are posted on the Sumerian Literature site of the Oriental Institute, University of Oxford, at
http://www-etcsl.orient.ox.ac.uk
.

p. 5,
as distant from Akkadian:
“aussi loin de l'akkadien que le chinois peut l'être du français” (Bottéro, p. 19).

p. 6,
the eleven clay tablets dug up at Nineveh:
“The ‘series of Gilgamesh,' in fact, comprises twelve tablets, not just the eleven of the epic. Tablet XII, the last, is a line-by-line translation of the latter half of one of the Sumerian Gilgamesh poems … Most scholars would agree that it does not belong to the text but was attached to it because it was plainly related material” (George,
EG,
p. xxviii; for an extended discussion, see A. R. George,
The
Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic,
I, pp. 47 ff., hereafter abbreviated as
BGE
).

p.6,
the first
Epic of Gilgamesh: “The Akkadian epic was given its original shape in the Old Babylonian Period by an Akkadian author who took over, in greater or lesser degree, the plots and themes of three or four of the Sumerian tales … Either translating freely from Sumerian or working from available paraphrases, the author combined these plots and themes into a unified epic on a grand scale. As the central idea in this epic, the author seized upon a theme which was adumbrated in three of the Sumerian tales, Gilgamesh's concern with death and his futile desire to overcome it. The author advanced this theme to a central position in the story. To this end, Enkidu's death became the pivotal event which set Gilgamesh on a feverish search for the immortal flood hero (whose story existed in Sumerian, but had nothing to do with the tales about Gilgamesh), hoping to learn how he had overcome death. The author separated the themes of Enkidu's death and Gilgamesh's grief from their original context in the Sumerian ‘Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the Netherworld' and placed them after the friends' victory over Huwawa (and possibly over the Bull of Heaven). To increase the emotional impact that
Enkidu's death had on Gilgamesh, and perhaps to make the depth of Gilgamesh's grief more plausible, the author seized upon one or two references to Enkidu in the Sumerian sources as Gilgamesh's friend, rather than servant, and treated him consistently as Gilgamesh's friend and equal. He even went so far as to compose accounts of Gilgamesh's oppression of Uruk, and Enkidu's creation and early life, in order to explain why Enkidu was created and how he became Gilgamesh's friend” (Tigay, pp. 242 ff.).