A search for recommendations on ancient literature will often lead you to tomes such as The Odyssey, Iliad, and other ancient religious texts. While they are each wonderful in their own right, rarely will you get recommended The Epic of Gilgamesh: often considered to be the oldest surviving work of literature in the world.
First etched onto clay almost four thousand years ago, the text deals with issues yet pertinent over much of the world today. It is a lamentation of sorts by the people of a kingdom who fraught by the hubris of its demigod king, a reckoning thrown onto the people in the form the first recorded great flood, and a deep fear of mortality that launches Gilgamesh into a search for immortality.
It may come as a surprise that in these poems composed almost four thousand years ago, people were already contemplating the conflict between man and nature. Gilgamesh and his dear friend Enkidu have to battle a monster that protects the trees on the hills on the outskirts of Uruk. The Epic of Gilgamesh is a timeless piece laden with lessons of much use to humanity.
The epic is often read as a poem composed by a kingdom to lament a ruler consumed by his recklessness, wreaking havoc upon life in Uruk. From this perspective, this poem is the first in an unending tradition of using literature to express what cannot be said in the face of unrelenting power. It served as a criticism of the extant ruler, while also functioning as a plea for those to come.
Even with its status as one of the oldest surviving literary texts in the world, The Epic of Gilgamesh is a work that remains in constant flux. Composed and accumulated over two thousand years, the epic began to take shape in the form of poems in Sumerian. It soon progressed into cuneiform etchings in Old Babylonian, then again on clay in Akkadian. It developed for thousands of years until finally resting in one of its most complete forms in the library of Ashurbanipal, the King of the Neo-Assyrian empire in the 6th century BC. Ashurbanipal, realizing the power of the written word early on, was trained in the art of scribing and reading (a skill often reserved for the scribal classes). His collection of thousands of clay tablets contained one of the most comprehensive versions of the epic.
George Smith, a stellar self-taught linguist, took on the task of translating this story when he first became intrigued by a depiction of a flood on one of the tablets on display at The British Museum. He accomplished this in 1872, a quarter of a century after the tablets were found in the library of Ashurbanipal by Austin Henry Layard. The story was reborn, once more to be translated, read, and interpreted.
Although a will to discover the history behind biblical myths initially drove this project, it has added to our understanding of some of the oldest empires on earth. Given their age, several tablets were often incomplete or fragmented. While this hinders translation efforts, it also lends to the dynamism of the epic. The process of filling in the blanks translators have often engaged in keeps coloring the epic with new contexts. It gives us a view into a world and story that would have been lost to dust otherwise.
If you are interested in the historical discovery and translation of the epic, you might want to read The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of The Great Epic of Gilgamesh by David Damrosch.
Section Editor: Anisha Joshi
Section: Literature & Art
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