Where did the story the epic of gilgamesh originate

Analytical Response Gilgamesh Paper

THE EPIC OF GILGAMESH

A NEW TRANSLATION

TRANSLATED WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ANDREW GEORGE

WIth tb •• ar!i." fr.gm.n" dating t...ok O,'et four thou.and yea .. , Gi/ga"""h unqu

gr • ., work of li'''31ure' (I"dtPt"d.",),

Anticipating epi.oo .. from Horn" and ,h< Bihle, ,he Epic of Gilga~,h contain. nuny " .. nge .d,'enture, and intriguing incid.n". Among the un i .. ",,1 them .. the porm If.,,, ore

fri.nd.hip, family .nd the duti .. of_i"S', Above .11. it is the "le of on. m.n~ muggl. with the f.ar of death, •• he

",eks immona lity through gloriou. deed •• nd the ddu.ive promis< of rtrrn.l li!r.

Th. ".od.rd &tbyloni.n version ha ' been known for Over. ccnrury, bu, lingu;' ...... "'i ll disco"c,i ng .nd Mdp",,;ng new

frogmen" of long· bu,i«l cI.y "bl«. in An ,di,n .nd Sum"i.", And .. ", Gcorgo', s'ipping uc'" ".n,Io,;on b, illi.",ly bring.

'''II<,h« all rhe v:"i.m 'radi,ion. and tran,farm. " damag«l m'''''pi

[he d.fini,;," English Gilg~m.,h.

n..~ '"'-' . ........... R"" ........ "" ..... kW • ...,.. ,~ _ I ""--...... ............ "'- ,-. n......;...~" '" M[ " ... CoI'o._.

I'£NGIJIN

~-'-

U, K. .. ... ~u, 111," u, .... . ....

PENGUIN @ CLASSICS THE EPIC OF GILGAMESH

'Humankind's first literary achievement ... Gilgamesh should compel us as the well-spring of which we are inheritors ... Andrew George provides an excellent critical' and historical

introduction' Paul Binding, Independent on Sunday

'This volume will endure as. one of the milestone markers ... [Andrew George] expertly and easily conducts his readers on a

delightful and moving epic journey' Samuel A. Meier, The Times Literary Supplement

'Appealingly presented and very readably translated ... it still comes as an exhilarating surprise to find the actions and emotions of the Sumerian superhero coming to us with absolute immediacy

over 30-odd centuries' Scotsman

'Andrew George has formed an English text from the best of the tablets, differentiating his complex sources but allowing the

general reader a clear run at one of the first enduring stories ever told' Peter Stothard, The Times

'An exemplary combination of scholarship and lucidity ... very impressive ... invaluable as a convenient guide to all the different

strands which came together to produce the work we now call Gilgamesh' Alan Wall, Literary Review

WINNER OF THE BRITISH-KUWAIT FRIENDSHIP SOCIETY PRIZE

IN MIDDLE EASTERN STUDIES

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The Epic of Gilgamesh is best known from a version called 'He who saw the Deep', which circulated in Babylonia and Assyria in the first millennium BC. The Babylonians believed this poem to have been the responsibility of a man called Sin-liqe-unninni, a learned scholar of Uruk whom modern scholars consider to have lived some time between 1300-1000 BC. However, we now know that 'He who saw the Deep' is a revision of one or more earlier versions of the epic. The oldest surviving fragments of the epic are the work of an anonymous Babylonian poet writing more than 3700 years ago. The Babylonian epic was composed in Akkadian, but its literary origins lie in five Sumerian poems of even greater antiquity. The Sumerian texts gained their final form probably as court entertainments sung for King Shulgi of Ur of the Chaldees, who reigned in the 21st century BC.

ANDREW GEORGE was born in 1955 in Haslemere, Surrey. He was educated at Christ's Hospital, Horsham, and the University of Birmingham, where he studied Assyriology. For a while he kept a public house in Darlaston. He began teaching Akkadian and Sumerian language in 1983 at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies, where he is now Professor of Babylonian. He is also an Honorary Lecturer at the university's Institute of Archaeology.

His research has taken him many times to Iraq to visit Babylon and other ancient sites, and to museums in Baghdad, Europe and North America to read the original clay tablets on which the scribes of ancient Iraq wrote. He has published extensively on Babylonian literature and religion.

THE EPIC OF

GILGAMESH The Babylonian Epic Poem and Other Texts

in Akkadian and Sumerian

Translated and with an introduction by ANDREW GEORGE

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

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First published in Great Britain by AlIen Lane The Penguin Press 1999 Published in Penguin Books 2.000

2.

Copyright © Andrew George, 1999 All rights reserved

Map on pp. lviii-lix by Nigel Andrews

Illustrations on pp. iii, 2.6,45, 53, 60,72.,92., 103, 110, 117, 12.1, 12.5, 130, 146, 160, 175, 185 and 200 by Joanna Richards

nlustrations on pp. 2.6, 117 and 160 after drawings by Tessa Rickards from Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia by Jeremy Black and Anthony Green

© the British Museum, British Museum Press

nlustrations on pp. xxix, 3, 13, 3 I, 64, 87, 12.8, 134, 2.13 and 2.16 by Andrew George

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Printed in England by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,

re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher'S prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in

which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

Contents

List of Figures Vl1

Preface x Introduction X111

A Note on the Translation Iiii Further Reading Ivii Map of the Ancient Near East Iviii Time Chart Ix Dramatis Personae Ixii

I. The Standard Version of the BabyIonian GiIgamesh Epic: I 'He who saw the Deep' Tablet I. The Coming of Enkidu I

Tablet 11. The Taming of Enkidu 12

Tablet I I I. Preparations for the Expedition to the Forest of Cedar 22

Tablet IV. The Journey to the Forest of Cedar 30

Tablet V. The Combat with Humbaba 39 Tablet VI. Ishtar and the Bull of Heaven 47 Tablet VII. The Death of Enkidu 54 Tablet VIII. The Funeral of Enkidu 62

Tablet IX. The Wanderings of Gilgamesh 7 0

Tablet X. At the Edge of the World 75 Tablet XI. Immortality Denied 88 Tablet XI I. Appendix 100

2. BabyIonian Texts of the Early Second Millennium BC 101 T he Pennsylvania tablet: 'Surpassing all other kings' Tablet I I 101

The Yale tablet: 'Surpassing all other kings' Tablet III 107 Another fragment in Philadelphia 115

The Nippur school tablet 116

VI

The Tell Harmal tablets

The Ishchali tablet

A tablet in Baghdad, of unknown provenance

A tablet reportedly from Sippar

Contents

118 119 122

122

3. Babylonian Texts of the Late Second Millennium BC, from 127 Sites in Babylonia The Nippur exercise tablet 127

The Ur tablet 127

4. Babylonian Texts of the Late Second Millennium BC, from 132 outside Babylonia The fragments from Hattusa 132

T he fragments from Emar 135 The Megiddo tablet 138 The Ugarit tablet 139

5. The Sumerian Poems of Gilgamesh 141 Bilgames and Akka: 'The envoys of Akka~ 143

Bilgames and Huwawa: 'The lord to the Living One's Mountain~ 149

and 'Ho, hurrah!'

Bilgames and the Bull of Heaven: 'Hero in battle~ 166

Bilgames and the Netherworld: 'In those days, in those far-off days' 175

The Death of Bilgames: 'The great wild bull is lying down~ 195

Appendix: From Tablet to Translation 209 Glossary of Proper Nouns 222 Publication of the Sources of the Babylonian Texts 226

List of Figures

I Cuneiform text, seventh century BC, Ashur. The left third of the tablet is in the Vorderasiatisches Museum, Berlin (tablet V AT 9667); the right part, reconstructed from fifteen pieces, is in the Archaeo- logical Museum, Istanbul (tablet A 122+123). Line drawing by the author. 2 Cuneiform text, late first millennium BC, Babylon. British Museum

tablet fragment WARm 785+Rm 1017+34248+34357. Line drawing by the author. 3 Cuneiform text, late first millennium BC, Uruk. Oriental Institute Museum, University of Chicago, tablet fragment A 3444. Line drawing by the author. 4 The Sun God enthroned in his temple. Detail from the limestone tablet of King Nabu-apla-iddina, ninth century BC, Sippar. British Museum W A 91000. Line drawing by Joanna Richards. 5 Cuneiform text, late first millennium BC, Babylonia. British Museum tablet fragment W A 93052. Line drawing by the author. 6 Gilgamesh and Enkidu slay Humbaba. Engraving on a bronze situla, early first millennium BC, Babylonia? Line drawing by Joanna Richards (after E. Strommenger-Nagel). 7 Gilgamesh and Enkidu despatch the Bull of Heaven with Ishtar looking on. Cylinder seal impression, early first millennium BC, Baby- lonia. British Museum seal WA 89435. Line drawing by Joanna Richards. 8 Ishtar, the goddess of sex and war, standing on a recumbent lion. Detail from cylinder seal impression, early first millennium BC, Assyria. British Museum seal W A 89769. Line drawing by Joanna Richards. 9 Cuneiform text, eighth century BC, Sultantepe, near Urfa. Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, Ankara, tablet SU 51/7. Line drawing by the author.

Vlll List of Figur.es

10 Scorpion-men. Detail of cylinder seal impression, early first millen- nium BC, Assyria. Line drawing by Joanna Richards. I I Cuneiform text, third century BC, Babylon. British Museum tablet

fragment WA Rm 751+34853+35546. Line drawing by the author. 12 Detail of wall relief from the North Palace at Nineveh, seventh century BC. British Museum slab W A 124931. Line drawing by Joanna Richards. 13 Naked couple embracing. Clay plaque, early second millennium BC, Susa. Musee du Louvre. Line drawing by Joanna Richards. 14 Huwawa. Clay plaque, early second millennium BC, Babylonia. Musee du Louvre. Line drawing by Joanna Richards. 15 The Thunderbird (Anzu). Detail of carved stone relief, late third millennium BC, Girsu. Musee du Louvre. Line drawing by Joanna Richards. 16 Gilgamesh and Enkidu slay Huwawa amid the cedars. Composite of clay plaques from Larsa, early second millenniunl BC. Line drawing by J oanna Richards. 17 The Sun God crossing the ocean at the end of the world. Detail of cylinder seal impression, late third millennium BC, Eshnunna. Line drawing by Joanna Richards (after Tessa Rickards). 18 Cuneiform text, fourteenth-thirteenth century BC, Nippur. Orien- tal Institute Museum, University of Chicago, tablet A 29934. Line drawing by the author. 19 Detail of ivory panel of Phoenician workmanship depicting the 'Woman at the Window', thought to be a prostitute soliciting custom. First millennium BC, Assyria. British Museum, W A 118159. Line dra wing ,by J oanna Richards. 20 Cuneiform text, early fourteenth century BC, Bogazkoy. Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, Ankara, tablet fragment Bo 83/625. Line drawing by the author. 21 Detail from the limestone victory stele of Eannatum, an early ruler of Lagash, twenty-fifth century BC, Girsu. Musee du Louvre. Line dra wing by J oanna Richards. 22 Bilgames and Enkidu slay Huwawa. Clay plaque, early second millennium BC, Babylonia. Vorderasiatisches Museum, Berlin, V A 7246. Line drawing by Joanna Richards. 23 Bilgames and Enkidu despatch the Bull of Heaven. Clay plaque, early second millennium BC, Babylonia. Vorderasiatisches Museum, Berlin. Line drawing by J oanna Richards.

IX List of Figures

24 Detail from a mosaic panel known as the 'Royal Standard', twenty-

seventh century BC, Ur. British Museum, W A I2I20I. Line drawing

by J oanna Richards. 25 Limestone plaque depicting wrestlers, middle of third millennium

BC, Tutub. Iraq Museum, Baghdad. Line drawing by J oanna Richards.

Appendix

26 British Museum tablet fragments W A K 3423+Sm 2097+Rm 579,

K 8589+Sm I68I and Rm 75I+34853+35546. Photograph copyright the British Museum.

27 Cuneiform text, fourth century BC, Uruk. Iraq Museum, Baghdad,

IM 76873. Line drawing by the author. 28 Details of British Museum tablet fragments W A K 3423+Sm

2097+Rm 579, K 8589+Sm I68I and Rm 75I+34853+35546. Line drawings by the author.

Preface

My first encounter with the magic of Gilgamesh came as a boy when I read this book's predecessor in the Penguin Classics series, Nancy Sandars's prose synthesis of the ancient poems (The Epic ofGilgamesh, 1960). At university I was given the happy opportunity of reading some of the cuneiform text of the epic under the guidance of the foremost expert in Babylonian literature, W. G. Lambert. The work of recovering the text of Gilgamesh from the original clay tablets and preparing what will be only the third scholarly edition of the Babylonian epic has been my principal object of research for the past dozen years. During this time I am lucky to have benefited from the advice and encouragement of many of Gilgamesh's latter-day devotees. Among them I single out for special mention David Hawkins, my colleague at the School of Oriental and African Studies, who has also contributed the translation of a Hittite fragment on p. 55, and Aage Westenholz of the University of Copenhagen, who in the course of making an independent translation of the epic into Danish travelled with me the long and arduous road to Uta-napishti and back. To Antoine Cavigneaux of the University of Geneva and Farouk N. H. AI-Rawi of the University of Baghdad I am indebted for the use of their unpublished book on the Sumerian composition we know as the Death of Bilgames. Douglas Frayne of the University of Toronto has shared with me his work in progress on the Sumerian Gilgamesh poems. On several obscure points of Sumerian Mark Geller of Univer- sity College London and Steve Tinney of the University of Pennsylvania have come to my aid.

The modern translator of Gilgamesh has the advantage of standing on the shoulders of those editors and translators who have gone before him. The list of scholars who during the last century and a half have contributed materially to the recovery of the ancient sources is long

Xl Preface

indeed, but among them one should not fail to honour George Smith, who was the first to decipher much of the Babylonian epic and whose pioneering translations of 1875 and 1876 gave the world a first glimpse of its majesty; Paul Haupt, who in 1891 first collected the cuneiform text of the epic; Peter J ensen, whose transliterations of 1900 were the first comprehensive modern edition; R. Campbell Thompson, who in 1930 brought up to date the work of both Haupt and Jensen; and Samuel N oah Kramer, who in the 1930S and' 40S first pieced together the Sumerian poems of Gilgamesh. In the often unsung task of adding to our know ledge of the text of the epic no contemporary Assyriologists can match the achievements of Irving Finkel of the British Museum, Egbert von Weiher of the University of Cologne and, especially, W. G. Lambert of the University of Birmingham.

New pieces of Gilgamesh continue to appear. This paperback edition differs from its hardback predecessor in being able to use on p. 90 a fragment of Tablet XI that came to light only in June 1999. My thanks go to its discoverer, Stefan M. Maul of the University of Heidelberg, and to the Vorderasiatisches Museum, Berlin, and the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft for permission to quote it.

London,

June 1999

A.R.G.

Introduction

Ever since the first modern translations were published more than one hundred years ago, the Gilgamesh epic has been recognized as one of the great masterpieces of world literature. One of the early translations, by the German Assyriologist Arthur Ungnad, so inspired the poet Rainer Maria Rilke in 1916 that he became almost intoxicated with pleasure and wonder, and repeated the story to all he met. 'Gilgamesh,' he declared, 'is stupendous!' For him the epic was first and foremost 'das Epos der Todesfurcht', the epic about the fear of death. This universal theme does indeed unite the poem, for in examining the human longing for life eternal, it tells of one man's heroic struggle against death - first for immortal renown through glorious deeds, then for eternal life itself; of his despair when confronted with inevit- able failure, and of his eventual realization that the only immortality he may expect is the enduring name afforded by leaving behind some lasting achievement.

The fear of death may be one of the epic's principal themes but the poem deals with so much more. As a story of one man's 'path to wisdom', of how he is formed by his successes and failures, it offers many profound insights into the human condition, into life and death and the truths that touch us all. The subject that most held the attention of the royal courts of Babylonia and Assyria was perhaps another topic that underlies much of the poem: the debate on the proper duties of kingship, what a good king should do and should not do. The epic's didactic side is also evident in the exposition of a man's responsibilities to his family. The eternal conflict of nurture and nature - articulated as the benefits of civilization over savagery - is also examined, as too are the rewards of friendship, the nobility of heroic enterprise and the immortality of fame. Artfully woven into Gilgamesh's own story are the traditional tale of the Deluge, the great

XIV Introduction

flood by which early in human history the gods sought to destroy mankind, and a long description of the gloomy realm of the dead. From all this Gilgamesh emerges as a kind of cultural hero. The wisdom he received at the ends of the earth from the survivor of the Deluge, Uta-napishti, enabled him to restore the temples of the land and their rituals to their ideal state of antediluvian perfection. In the course of his heroic adventures it seems Gilgamesh was the first to dig oases in the desert, the first to fell cedars on Mount Lebanon, the first to discover the techniques of killing wild bulls, of sailing ocean-going craft and of diving for coral.

Amid the momentous themes, the epic is full of absorbing moments, often just minor, incidental details which serve every so often to catch the imagination or to lighten the mood. The text explains in passing why temples take in orphans, how there came to be two New Year's Days in the Babylonian calendar, how the Levantine Rift Valley was riven, how dwarfs came about, why nomads live in tents, why some prostitutes eke out a living on the cruel fringes of society and others enjoy a life of attentive luxury, how it is that doves and swallows cleave to human company but ravens do not, why snakes shed their skins, and so on.

The spell of Gilgamesh has captured many since Rilke, so that over the years the story has been variously reworked into plays, novels and at least two operas. Translations have now appeared in at least sixteen languages and more appear year by year, so that the last decade has added ten to the dozens already published. Among the ten are two in English. Why so many, and why another? There are two replies that answer both these questions. First, a great masterpiece will always attract new renditions and will go on doing so while its worth is still recognized. This goes for Homer and Euripides, Virgil and Horace, Voltaire and Goethe - indeed any classic text, ancient or modern - as well as for Gilgamesh. But the difference with Gilgamesh, as also with the other works of ancient Mesopotamian literature, is that we keep finding more of it. Seventy years ago we possessed fewer than forty manuscripts from which to reconstruct the text and there were large gaps in the story. Now we have more than twice that number of manuscripts and fewer gaps. As the years pass the number of available sources will assuredly go on rising. Slowly our knowledge of the text will become better and better, so that one day the epic will again be complete, as it last was more than two thousand years ago.

xv Introduction

Sooner or later, as new manuscripts are discovered, this translation, like all others, will be superseded. For the moment, based as it is on first-hand study of very nearly all the available sources, unpublished as well as published, the present rendering offers the epic in its most complete form yet. However, gaps still remain and many preserved lines are still fragmentary; the epic is indeed riddled with holes. In many places the reader must set aside any comparison with the more complete masterpieces of Greek and Latin literature and accept those parts of text that are still incomplete and incoherent as skeletal remains that one day will live again.

The manuscripts of Gilgamesh are cuneiform tablets - smooth, cushion-shaped rectangles of clay inscribed on both sides with wedge- shaped cuneiform writing - and they come from the ancient cities of Mesopotamia, the Levant and Anatolia. Especially in the land that is now Iraq, there are few ancient sites that have not yielded clay tablets. Cuneiform writing was invented in the city-states of lower Mesopotamia in about 3000 BC, when the administration of the great urban institutions, the palace and the temple, became too complex for the human memory to cope with. It developed, with painful slowness, from an accountant's aide-memoire into a system of writing which could express not just simple words and numbers, but all the creativity of the literate mind. And because clay does not easily perish when thrown away or when buried in the ruins of buildings, archaeologists provide us with enormous quantities of clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform characters. These documents range in date across three thousand years of history and in content from the merest chit to the most sophisticated works of science and literature.

Literary compositions that tell the story of Gilgamesh come down t() us from several different periods and in several different languages. Some modern renderings disregard the enormous diversity of the material, so that the reader forms a mistaken impression of the epic's contents and state of preservation. In the translations given in this book the texts are segregated according to time, place and language, allowing the reader to appreciate each body of material for itself. The texts fall into five different chapters. To summarize, Chapter I presents the version of the epic in the Akkadian language that was standard in the first-millennium Babylonia and Assyria, with some of its gaps filled with older material. This, if you like, is the classical Epic of Gilgamesh. It was known to the Babylonians and Assyrians as 'He

XVI 1 ntroduction

who saw the Deep'. In this book it is referred to as the standard version. Chapters 2-4 give the full text of older material in Akkadian, including earlier, more fragmentary versions of the epic, such as that known in antiquity as 'Surpassing all other kings', and isolated extracts of text on school practice tablets. Chapter 2 presents texts from the first half of the second millennium (the Old Babylonian period), Chapter 3 material from Babylonia of the second half of the second millenni urn (the Middle Ba by Ionian period) and Chapter 4 texts of the same period from the ancient West - the Levant and Anatolia. Chapter 5 contains the five narrative poems in the Sumerian language, best known from copies made by Babylonian apprentice scribes in the eighteenth century BC, but certainly older. In order to understand how the different texts and fragments of Gilgamesh relate to each other it may help to place them in the context of the long history of ancient Mesopotamian literature.

Gilgamesh and ancient Mesopotamian literature

Literature was already being written down in Mesopotamia by 2600 BC, though because the script did not yet express language fully, these early tablets remain extremely difficult to read. From at least this time, and probably much earlier, lower Mesopotamia was inhabited by people who spoke two very different languages. One was Sumerian, a language without affinities with any known tongue, and this appears to be the medium of the earliest writing. The other was Akkadian, which is a member of the Semitic family of languages and thus related to Hebrew and Arabic. The two languages, Sumerian and Akkadian, had long been used side by side by the people of lower Mesopotamia, though Sumerian predominated in the urban south and Akkadian in the more provincial north. This geographical division was enshrined in the terminology of later tradition, according to which the homeland of 'the black-headed ones', as these people called themselves, com- prised two regions, Sumer, the southern part of lower Mesopotamia, and Akkad, the northern part. The bilingualism of the urban civiliz- ation of lower Mesopotamia in the third millennium BC perhaps resembled the division between French and Flemish in modern-day Belgium.

Texts in Akkadian appear in quantity from about 2300 BC, when

XVll Introduction

the language became an administrative tool in the service of the first great Mesopotamian empire. This empire stretched at its height from the Gulf to Levantine Syria. It was built by Sargon and his successors, the kings of Akkade, a northern city which soon lent its name to the region round about and to the language spoken at the court of its kings. A legend describes how Sargon was a foundling like the infant Moses:

My mother, a priestess, conceived me and bore me in secret,

she put me in a basket of reeds, sealed its lid with pitch;

she cast me adrift on the river from which I could not arise,

the river bore me up and brought me to Aqqi, a drawer of water. 1

According to tradition, Sargon rose to power by winning the favour of the goddess Ishtar. For nearly a hundred years his dynasty exercised dominion over the city-states of lower Mesopotamia and much of northern Mesopotamia too. The early texts in Akkadian dating from this period include a very small body of literature. Much more, no doubt, was passed down in an oral tradition and was never written down, or only much later. Sumerian seems to have been losing ground to Akkadian as a spoken language from at least this time, but its function as the primary language of writing was bolstered by a Sumer- ian renaissance in the last century of the third millennium. For a short period much of Mesopotamia was again united, this time under the kings of the celebrated Third Dynasty of the southern city of Ur, most famously Shulgi (2094-2047 BC in the conventional chronology). The perfect prince was an intellectual as well as a warrior and an athlete, and among his many achievements King Shulgi was particularly proud o( his literacy and cultural accomplishments. He had rosy memories of his days at the scribal school, where he boasted that he was the most skilled student in his class. In later life he was an enthusiastic patron of the arts and claims to have founded special libraries at Ur and at Nippur, further north in central Babylonia, in which scribes and minstrels could consult master copies of, as it were, the Sumerian songbook. Thus he envisaged that hymns to his glory and other literature of his day would be preserved for posterity:

For all eternity the Tablet House is never to change,

for all eternity the House of Learning is never to cease functioning. 2

XVlll Introduction

In this enlightened atmosphere the courts of the kings of Ur and the succeeding dynasty of Isin were witness to the composition of much literature in Sumerian. This literature we know best not from tablets written at the time, though some survive (including a fragment of a Gilgamesh poem), but from the scribal curriculum of the Babylonians.

After the rise to power of the city of Babylon in the eighteenth century, under its most famous ruler, King Hammurapi (1792- 1750 BC), the land of Sumer and Akkad was ruled by Babylon. Though the people of Sumer and Akkad did not themselves refer to their homeland as Babylonia, which is a Greek term, it is customary to call them Babylonians from this time onwards. Sumerian had by then died out among the people as a spoken language, but it was still much in use as a written language. Mesopotamian culture was nothing if not conservative and since Sumerian had been the language of the first writing, more than a thousand years before, it remained the principal language of writing in the early second millennium. Much more was written in the Babylonian dialect of Akkadian, but Sumerian retained a particular prestige. Its primacy as the language of learning was enshrined in the curriculum that had to be mastered by the student scribe. In order to learn how to use the cuneiform script, even to write Akkadian, the student had to learn Sumerian, for, as the proverb said, 'A scribe who knows no Sumerian, what sort of scribe is he?,J None at all, for in this period the language of tuition was, at least in part, Sumerian. Falling foul of every regulation, one young student lamented,

The door monitor said, 'Why did you go out without my say-so?' and he

beat me.

The water monitor said, 'Why did you help yourself to water without my

say-so?' and he beat me.

The Sumerian monitor said, 'You spoke in Akkadian!' and he beat me.

My teacher said, 'Your handwriting is not at all good!' and he beat me.4

To prove he could write, the would-be scribe copied out, on dictation and from memory, texts in Sumerian. The most advanced Sumerian texts that he had to master were a prescribed corpus of traditional Sumerian literary compositions.

Nearly all the literature that we have in Sumerian derives from the tablets written by these young Babylonian scribal apprentices, many

XIX Introduction

of which were found in the remains of the houses of their teachers. The two largest such discoveries were made at Nippur, where the scribal quarter was abandoned at the end of the eighteenth century, and at Ur, where the houses in question are slightly older. More recently significant bodies of Sumerian literature from the same era have been discovered at Isin, a city just south of Nippur, and at Tell Haddad (ancient Me-Turan) by the river Diyala on the periphery of north-east Babylonia, but most of these tablets remain unpublished. The private dwelling-houses of Nippur and Ur were not the royal Tablet Houses inaugurated by King Shulgi but they amply fulfilled the purpose he envisaged, the preservation of Sumerian literature for future generations. That now we are reading the songs of Shulgi again, four thousand years later, would probably have exceeded even his expectations, and it would have surprised him too that his libraries of Sumerian lived anew, as it were, in the tablet collections of Philadel- phia, London, and other strange and far-away places.

The work of reconstructing the Sumerian literary corpus began before the Second World War and still continues. The pioneering task of identifying, joining and reading the thousands of fragments of clay tablets from Nippur, many of them tiny, was largely the work of the late Samuel Noah Kramer and his students at the University Museum in Philadelphia. His life was summed up by a teasing colleague as 'all work and no play', but there is nothing dull about being the first to read a tablet for nearly four millennia and Kramer certainly found much to be excited about. This was a completely new literature, the oldest large body of literature in human history, and its existence came as a total surprise to all but a tiny band of professional scholars. Many of these Sumerian literary texts are difficult and imperfectly understood, but it remains a serious failure of modern scholarship that their riches are not known more widely.

Among those Sumerian literary texts which have achieved some degree of publicity are the five poems of Gilgamesh (or Bilgames as he is known in older texts), translated in Chapter 5. These are not the same as the Babylonian Gilgamesh epic, which was written in Akkadian, but separate and individual tales without common themes. They were probably first committed to writing under the Third Dyn- asty ofUr, whose kings felt a special bond with Bilgames as a legendary hero whom they considered their predecessor and ancestor. It seems likely that much of the traditional Sumerian literary corpus goes back

xx Introduction

to lays sung by minstrels for the entertainment of the royal court of the Third Dynasty. The Sumerian poems of Bilgames are well suited for such amusement. The texts that we have, although known almost entirely from eighteenth-century copies, are very probably directly descended from master copies placed by King Shulgi in his Tablet Houses. Even so, it is entirely possible that the poems stem ultimately from an older, oral tradition. To some extent these Sumerian poems were source material for the Babylonian epic, but they can be enjoyed for their own sake too. Reading them takes us back four millennia to the courtly life of the Sumerian 'renaissance'.

Alongside the great mass of Sumerian literary tablets from the schools of eighteenth-century Babylonia, we have also recovered a little contemporaneous literature in Akkadian. This we calf Old Baby- Ionian literature. A few Old Babylonian literary tablets derive from the same schools as the literary tablets in Sumerian and also appear to be the work of apprentice scribes. These include a few scraps of Akkadian Gilgamesh, which are among the texts translated in Chap- ter 2. But though it seems that some literature in Akkadian was studied in the schools of this period, literary tablets in this language are so rare among the huge quantities of Sumerian tablets that it is clear they were not part of the prescribed curriculum. What narrative poems in Akkadian that we do have from the schools may instead have been copied down by students for fun, or even composed by them ad lib.

Other tablets of Akkadian literary works have been recovered from this period which are of less certain provenance than the school tablets. Some of them are finely written and were evidently kept, perhaps by individual scholars, as permanent library-copies. Among these are three Old Babylonian tablets of Gilgamesh which contribute signific- antly to our knowledge of the story: the Pennsylvania and Yale tablets and the fragment reportedly from Sippar. These are also translated in Chapter 2. Another masterpiece of Babylonian literature known from late in the Old Babylonian period is the great poem of Atram- hasis, 'When the gods were man', which recounts the history of mankind from the Creation to the Flood.5 It was this text's account of the Flood that the poet of Gilgamesh used as a source for his own version of the Deluge myth. It also provided a striking model for the story of Noah's Flood in the Bible. Other Akkadian literature begins to appear at this time, such as texts expounding the Babylonian

XXI Introduction

sciences, divination by extispicy, astrology and mathematics, and incantations in both Sumerian and Akkadian whose purpose was to ward off evil by magic means. So the Old Babylonian period was an era of great literary creativity in Akkadian, but the school curriculum, at least in the centres we know best, was evidently too hidebound to reflect this development.

The Old Babylonian Gilgamesh tablets reveal that there was already, at this time, an integrated Gilgamesh epic, which, as the Pennsylvania tablet reports, bore the title Shatur eli sharrf, 'Surpassing all other kings'. Works of ancient Mesopotamian literature were rarely created out of nothing and the origins of this epic probably also go back to an oral tradition. Certainly the Old Babylonian Gilgamesh tablets are far from being translations of the individual Sumerian poems of the scribal curriculum, though the two traditions hold in common several episodes and themes. The Old Babylonian texts bear witness to a wholesale revision of Gilgamesh material to form a connected story composed around the principal themes of kingship, fame and the fear of death. For this reason one suspects that the Old Babylonian epic was essentially the masterpiece of a single, anonymous poet. This epic, 'Surpassing all other kings', is only a fragment as it is now preserved, but many find the simple poetry and spare narrative of this poem and of the other Old Babylonian material more attractive than the more wordy standard version. Some stanzas of the Pennsylvania and Sippar tablets, especially, are unforgettable. To explain what is meant by the standard version of the Gilgamesh epic it is necessary to continue the story of Mesopotamian literature.

Some time after the eighteenth century BC the contents of scribal curricuLum changed radically. We next have large numbers of school tablets at our disposal from the sixth century on, but the best witnesses to the nature and contents of the late scribal tradition are the several first-millennium libraries that have been excavated in Babylonia, especially at Babylon, Uruk and Sippar, and in Assyria. Assyria is the Greek name for the Land of Ashur, a small country to the north of Babylonia on the middle reaches of the river Tigris that was home in the early first millennium BC to the greatest empire the Near East had yet seen. Foremost among these late libraries is the collection of clay tablets amassed at Nineveh by the last great king of Assyria, Ashurbanipal (668-627 BC).

Like Shulgi before him, King Ashurbanipal claimed to have been

XXll Introduction

trained in the scribal tradition and to have had a special talent for reading and writing. His education had been all-round, however, and had encouraged intellectual development and martial pursuits equally, as this summary reveals:

The god Nabu, scribe of all the universe, bestowed on me as a gift the

knowledge of his wisdom. The gods (of war and the hunt) Ninurta and

Nergal endowed my physique with manly hardness and matchless strength.6

This is clearly a. statement of the ideal schooling for a royal prince, the same then as in Shulgi's day and as now. Though we do not certainly possess any tablet actually written by Ashurbanipal, it is clear that he was an avid collector and, by good fortune, much of his collection is still extant today. The royal libraries, housed in at least two separate buildings on the citadel of Nineveh, had at their core a small nucleus of tablets that had been written more than four hundred years earlier in the reign of King Tiglath-pileser I (1115-1°77 BC). To these were added the collections of at least one distinguished Assyrian scholar and, in due course, the libraries of many Babylonian scholars that were apparently appropriated as part of the reparations that followed the bitter hostilities of the great Babylonian revolt (652- 648 BC). By royal command scholars in such cities as Babylon and nearby Borsippa were set to work copying out texts from their own collections and from the libraries of the great temples. They did not risk incurring Ashurbanipal's wrath: 'We shall not neglect the king's command,' they told him. 'Day and night we shall strain and toil to execute the instruction of our lord the king! ,7 This they did on wooden writing-boards surfaced with wax, as well as on clay tablets. The scriptorium of Nineveh was also engaged on the task of copying out texts. Some of the copyists were prisoners-of-war or political hostages and worked in chains.

Among the texts that were copied out by Ashurbanipal's scribes was the Gilgamesh epic, of which the library may have possessed as many as four complete copies on clay tablets. Whatever was inscribed on wax has perished, of course. After the sack of Nineveh by the Median and Babylonian alliance in 612 BC, Ashurbanipal's copies of the epic, like his other tablets, lay in pieces on the floors of the royal palaces, not to be disturbed for nearly 2,500 years. The royal libraries of Nineveh were the first great find of cuneiform tablets to be dis-

XXll1 Introduction

covered, in 1850 and 1853, and are the nucleus of the collection of clay tablets amassed in the British Museum. They are also the founda- tion stone upon which the discipline of Assyriology was built and for much research they remain the most important source of primary material. The first to find these tablets were the young Austen Henry Layard and his assistant, an Assyrian Christian called Hormuzd Ras- sam, as they tunnelled in search of Assyrian sculpture through the remains of the 'Palace without Rival', a royal residence built by Sennacherib, Ashurbanipal's grandfather. Three years later Rassam returned on behalf of the British Museum and uncovered a second trove in Ashurbanipal's own North Palace. Rassam is something of an unsung hero in Assyriology. Much later, in 1879-82, his efforts provided the British Museum with tens of thousands of Babylonian tablets from such southern sites as Babylon and Sippar. Neither Layard nor Rassam was able to read the tablets they sent back from Assyria, but of the find he made in what he called the Chamber of Records Layard wrote, 'We cannot overrate their value.' His words remain tr~e to this day, not least for the Gilgamesh epic.