Instruct: Given a question, retrieve passages that answer the question.
Query: When was the Epic of Gilgamesh discovered?
The Epic of Gilgamesh was discovered by Austen Henry Layard, Hormuzd Rassam, and W. K. Loftus in 1853.[12] The central character of Gilgamesh was initially reintroduced to the world as "Izdubar", before the cuneiform logographs in his name could be pronounced accurately. The first modern translation was published in the early 1870s by George Smith.[13] Smith then made further discoveries of texts on his later expeditions, which culminated in his final translation which is given in his book The Chaldaean Account of Genesis (1880).
The Epic of Gilgamesh is an epic poem from ancient Mesopotamia.
Although the 18th century BC copy of the Atrahasis (Atra-Hasis) epic post-dates the early Gilgamesh epic, we do not know whether the Old-Akkadian Gilgamesh tablets included the flood story, because of the fragmentary nature of surviving tablets. Some scholars argue that they did not. Tigay, for example, maintains that three major additions to the Gilgamesh epic, namely the prologue, the flood story (tablet XI), and tablet XII, were added by an editor or editors, possibly by Sin-leqi-unninni, to whom the entire epic was later attributed. According to this view, the flood story in tablet XI was based on a late version of the Atrahasis story.
The "Epic of Gilgamesh" has directly inspired many manifestations of literature, art, music, and popular culture, as identified by Theodore Ziolkowski in the book "Gilgamesh Among Us: Modern Encounters With the Ancient Epic" (2011). It was only during and after the First World War that the first reliable translations of the epic appeared that reached a wide audience, and it was only after the Second World War that the epic of Gilgamesh began to make itself felt more broadly in a variety of genres.
The oldest epic recognized is the "Epic of Gilgamesh" (), which was recorded In ancient Sumer during the Neo-Sumerian Empire. The poem details the exploits of Gilgamesh, the king of Uruk. Although recognized as a historical figure, Gilgamesh, as represented in the epic, is a largely legendary or mythical figure.
The novel is told from the point of view of Gilgamesh, and is primarily ambivalent about the supernatural elements of the epic. But the events are portrayed in a fairly realistic manner.
Gilgamesh is a giant among men and an amazing warrior, even since he was very young. When the king of Uruk (his father) dies, Gilgamesh is exiled by the recently crowned Dumuzi, jealous of his skills and power. When in time Dumuzi dies, Gilgamesh comes back to the kingdom to be proclaimed.
Epic of Gilgamesh may also refer to:
The Epic of Gilgamesh has inspired many works of literature, art, and music, as Theodore Ziolkowski points out in his book Gilgamesh Among Us: Modern Encounters With the Ancient Epic (2011).[36][37] It was only after World War I that the Gilgamesh epic reached a modern audience, and only after World War II that it was featured in a variety of genres.[37]
The Epic of Gilgamesh, or This Unnameable Little Broom (aka Little Songs of the Chief Officer of Hunar Louse) is a 1985 stop motion short film by The Brothers Quay. The film is loosely based on the first tablet of "Epic of Gilgamesh". Boasting the longest title in the Quays' entire output, this 1985 film is generally known as "This Unnameable Little Broom". The short began life as a proposed hour-long program Channel 4 exploring aspects of the ancient Babylonian "Epic of Gilgamesh", one of the oldest known surviving works of literature, which would combine puppet animation, dance sequences, and live-action documentary elements. However, Channel Four were unsure about the project, and only agreed to fund a short animated sequence as a pilot - which is all that was ultimately made.
Eventually, according to Kramer, "Gilgamesh became the hero par excellence of the ancient world—an adventurous, brave, but tragic figure symbolizing man's vain but endless drive for fame, glory, and immortality". By the Old Babylonian Period ( 1830 – 1531 BC), stories of Gilgamesh's legendary exploits had been woven into one or several long epics. The "Epic of Gilgamesh", the most complete account of Gilgamesh's adventures, was composed in Akkadian during the Middle Babylonian Period ( 1600 — 1155 BC) by a scribe named Sîn-lēqi-unninni. The most complete surviving version of the "Epic of Gilgamesh" is recorded on a set of twelve clay tablets dating to the seventh century BC, found in the Library of Ashurbanipal in the Assyrian capital of Nineveh. The epic survives only in a fragmentary form, with many pieces of it missing or damaged. Some scholars and translators choose to supplement the missing parts of the epic with material from the earlier Sumerian poems or from other versions of the "Epic of Gilgamesh" found at other sites throughout the Near East.
There are five extant Gilgamesh stories in the form of older poems in Sumerian.[7]:141–208 These probably circulated independently, rather than being in the form of a unified epic. Some of the names of the main characters in these poems differ slightly from later Akkadian names; for example, "Bilgamesh" is written instead of "Gilgamesh", and there are some differences in the underlying stories such as the fact that Enkidu is Gilgamesh's servant in the Sumerian version:
In "Gilgamesh and the Bull of Heaven", Gilgamesh and Enkidu slay the Bull of Heaven, who has been sent to attack them by the goddess Inanna. The plot of this poem differs substantially from the corresponding scene in the later Akkadian "Epic of Gilgamesh". In the Sumerian poem, Inanna does not seem to ask Gilgamesh to become her consort as she does in the later Akkadian epic. Furthermore, while she is coercing her father An to give her the Bull of Heaven, rather than threatening to raise the dead to eat the living as she does in the later epic, she merely threatens to let out a "cry" that will reach the earth. A poem known as the "Death of Gilgamesh" is very poorly preserved, but appears to describe a major state funeral followed by the arrival of the deceased in the Underworld. It is possible that the modern scholars who gave the poem its title may have misinterpreted it, and the poem may actually be about the death of Enkidu.
A prime example of cuneiform writing would be a lengthy poem that was discovered in the ruins of Uruk. "The Epic of Gilgamesh" was written in the standard Sumerian cuneiform. It tells of a king from the early Dynastic II period named Gilgamesh or "Bilgamesh" in Sumerian. The story is based around the fictional adventures of Gilgamesh and his companion, Enkidu. It was laid out on several clay tablets and is claimed to be the earliest example of a fictional, written piece of literature discovered so far.
The first modern literary adaptation of the "Epic of Gilgamesh" was "Ishtar and Izdubar" (1884) by Leonidas Le Cenci Hamilton, an American lawyer and businessman. Hamilton had rudimentary knowledge of Akkadian, which he had learned from Archibald Sayce's 1872 "Assyrian Grammar for Comparative Purposes". Hamilton's book relied heavily on Smith's translation of the "Epic of Gilgamesh", but also made major changes. For instance, Hamilton omitted the famous flood story entirely and instead focused on the romantic relationship between Ishtar and Gilgamesh. "Ishtar and Izdubar" expanded the original roughly 3,000 lines of the "Epic of Gilgamesh" to roughly 6,000 lines of rhyming couplets grouped into forty-eight cantos. Hamilton significantly altered most of the characters and introduced entirely new episodes not found in the original epic. Significantly influenced by Edward FitzGerald's "Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam" and Edwin Arnold's "The Light of Asia", Hamilton's characters dress more like nineteenth-century Turks than ancient Babylonians. Hamilton also changed the tone of the epic from the "grim realism" and "ironic tragedy" of the original to a "cheery optimism" filled with "the sweet strains of love and harmony".
The "Epic of Gilgamesh" exerted substantial influence on the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey", two epic poems written in ancient Greek during the eighth century BC. According to Barry B. Powell, an American classical scholar, early Greeks were probably exposed to Mesopotamian oral traditions through their extensive connections to the civilizations of the ancient Near East and this exposure resulted in the similarities that are seen between the "Epic of Gilgamesh" and the Homeric epics. Walter Burkert, a German classicist, observes that the scene in Tablet VI of the "Epic of Gilgamesh" in which Gilgamesh rejects Ishtar's advances and she complains before her mother Antu, but is mildly rebuked by her father Anu, is directly paralleled in Book V of the "Iliad". In this scene, Aphrodite, the later Greek adaptation of Ishtar, is wounded by the hero Diomedes and flees to Mount Olympus, where she cries to her mother Dione and is mildly rebuked by her father Zeus.
The oldest surviving speculative fiction poem is the "Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor", written in "Hieratic" and ascribed a date around 2500 B.C.E. Other sources ascribe the earliest written poetry to the "Epic of Gilgamesh" written in "cuneiform"; however, it is most likely that "The Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor" predates "Gilgamesh" by half a millennium. The oldest epic poetry besides the "Epic of Gilgamesh" are the Greek epics "Iliad" and "Odyssey" and the Indian Sanskrit epics "Ramayana" and "Mahabharata". Some scholars believe that either the "Mahabharata" or the Tibetan "Epic of King Gesar" is the longest example of epic poetry in history.
Royal Epics of Uruk a series in Sumerian Literature Enmerkar of Uruk Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta Enmerkar and En-suhgir-ana Lugalbanda of Uruk Lugalbanda in the Mountain Cave Lugalbanda and the Anzud Bird Dumuzid and Gilgamesh of Uruk Dumuzid of Uruk tablets Epic of Gilgamesh tabletsvt
Starting in the late twentieth century, the "Epic of Gilgamesh" began to be read again in Iraq. Saddam Hussein, the former President of Iraq, had a lifelong fascination with Gilgamesh. Hussein's first novel "Zabibah and the King" (2000) is an allegory for the Gulf War set in ancient Assyria that blends elements of the "Epic of Gilgamesh" and the "One Thousand and One Nights". Like Gilgamesh, the king at the beginning of the novel is a brutal tyrant who misuses his power and oppresses his people, but, through the aid of a commoner woman named Zabibah, he grows into a more just ruler. When the United States pressured Hussein to step down in February 2003, Hussein gave a speech to a group of his generals posing the idea in a positive light by comparing himself to the epic hero.
"The Quest of Gilgamesh", a 1953 radio play by Douglas Geoffrey Bridson, helped popularize the epic in Britain. In the United States, Charles Olson praised the epic in his poems and essays and Gregory Corso believed that it contained ancient virtues capable of curing what he viewed as modern moral degeneracy. The 1966 postfigurative novel "Gilgamesch" by Guido Bachmann became a classic of German "queer literature" and set a decades-long international literary trend of portraying Gilgamesh and Enkidu as homosexual lovers. This trend proved so popular that the "Epic of Gilgamesh" itself is included in "The Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature" (1998) as a major early work of that genre. In the 1970s and 1980s, feminist literary critics analyzed the "Epic of Gilgamesh" as showing evidence for a transition from the original matriarchy of all humanity to modern patriarchy. As the Green Movement expanded in Europe, Gilgamesh's story began to be seen through an environmentalist lens, with Enkidu's death symbolizing man's separation from nature.
In later Babylonian times, these stories began to be woven into a connected narrative. The standard Akkadian "Epic of Gilgamesh" was composed by a scribe named Sîn-lēqi-unninni, probably during the Middle Babylonian Period ( 1600 – 1155 BC), based on much older source material. In the epic, Gilgamesh is a demigod of superhuman strength who befriends the wildman Enkidu. Together, they go on adventures, defeating Humbaba (the East Semitic name for Huwawa) and the Bull of Heaven, who, in the epic, is sent to attack them by Ishtar (the East Semitic equivalent of Inanna) after Gilgamesh rejects her offer for him to become her consort. After Enkidu dies of a disease sent as punishment from the gods, Gilgamesh becomes afraid of his own death, and visits the sage Utnapishtim, the survivor of the Great Flood, hoping to find immortality. Gilgamesh repeatedly fails the trials set before him and returns home to Uruk, realizing that immortality is beyond his reach.
The Akkadian text of the "Epic of Gilgamesh" was first discovered in 1849 AD by the English archaeologist Austen Henry Layard in the Library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh. Layard was seeking evidence to confirm the historicity of the events described in the Christian Old Testament, which, at the time, was believed to contain the oldest texts in the world. Instead, his excavations and those of others after him revealed the existence of much older Mesopotamian texts and showed that many of the stories in the Old Testament may actually be derived from earlier myths told throughout the ancient Near East. The first translation of the "Epic of Gilgamesh" was produced in the early 1870s by George Smith, a scholar at the British Museum, who published the Flood story from Tablet XI in 1880 under the title "The Chaldean Account of Genesis". Gilgamesh's name was originally misread as "Izdubar".
In the epic, Gilgamesh is introduced as "two thirds divine and one third mortal". At the beginning of the poem, Gilgamesh is described as a brutal, oppressive ruler. This is usually interpreted to mean either that he compels all his subjects to engage in forced labor or that he sexually oppresses all his subjects. As punishment for Gilgamesh's cruelty, the god Anu creates the wildman Enkidu. After being tamed by a prostitute named Shamhat, Enkidu travels to Uruk to confront Gilgamesh. In the second tablet, the two men wrestle and, although Gilgamesh wins the match in the end, he is so impressed by his opponent's strength and tenacity that they become close friends. In the earlier Sumerian texts, Enkidu is Gilgamesh's servant, but, in the "Epic of Gilgamesh", they are companions of equal standing.
Powell observes that the opening lines of the "Odyssey" seem to echo the opening lines of the "Epic of Gilgamesh". The storyline of the "Odyssey" likewise bears numerous similarities to that of the "Epic of Gilgamesh". Both Gilgamesh and Odysseus encounter a woman who can turn men into animals: Ishtar (for Gilgamesh) and Circe (for Odysseus). In the "Odyssey", Odysseus blinds a giant Cyclops named Polyphemus, an incident which bears similarities to Gilgamesh's slaying of Humbaba in the "Epic of Gilgamesh". Both Gilgamesh and Odysseus visit the Underworld and both find themselves unhappy whilst living in an otherworldly paradise in the presence of an attractive woman: Siduri (for Gilgamesh) and Calypso (for Odysseus). Finally, both heroes have an opportunity for immortality but miss it (Gilgamesh when he loses the plant, and Odysseus when he leaves Calypso's island).
The list of characters in "Epic of Gilgamesh" includes humans, demigods, giants, and gods who comprise an epic poem.
The cuneiform ta sign is a common, multi-use sign of the "Epic of Gilgamesh", the 1350 BC Amarna letters, and other cuneiform texts. It also has a sumerogrammic usage for TA, for example in the "Epic of Gilgamesh", for Akkadian language ""ultu"", English language for "from", or "since", but in only (1) location in the 12 tablet "Epic of Gilgamesh". Sumerogram "TA" is used elsewhere in the Epic, (7) more times.