Week One

Sin-Leqi-Unninni, The Epic of Gilgamesh

How does the fear of death lead to wisdom?

Why are force and mercy incompatible?

How do sex, intimacy and friendship humanize? Do they suffice for human wholeness?

Once upon a time it was thought that Western Civilization had unprecedented literary fountainheads in Homer and the Hebrew Bible. Modern archaeological discoveries would re-contextualize what we knew. In particular, the discovery of the “epic” of Gilgamesh changed everything. Its account of a slate-cleaning universal flood clearly provides a model for the story of Noah. And there are manifold echoes of Gilgamesh in the Iliad and Odyssey: the semi-divine hero pursuing glory and confronting mortality, whose loss of the dearest of friends overwhelms him, who embarks on a fabulous journey across and under the world to find undying wisdom, who returns home to take up again his political responsibilities. Beneath the Indo-European and Israelite, there were older, Semitic cultures—and finally the Sumerian: whose language is unrelated to any that we know. Mesopotamian oral storytelling suffused the world along trade routes, and the fragrance of the mythic experience from the dawn of civilization continues within the humanistic enterprise.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, an English traveler excavated the royal library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh (near Mosul) which was destroyed when the Medes and Babylonians defeated the Assyrian Empire in 612 B.C. The fragmented clay tablets inscribed with Gilgamesh were in the rubble, amid thousands of other cuneiform documents. Written in Akkadian (a Semitic language, thus related to Hebrew and Arabic), this was the standard version of the poem, fashioned by a Babylonian poet-sage, Sˆın-l¯eqi-unninn¯ı (“the moon god accepts my prayer”), around the time of the Late Bronze Age collapse (1200 B.C.) There was already a narrative composed maybe 500 years before (the Old Babylonian version). And from before that, around 2100 B.C., we have five separate poems in Sumerian about Gilgamesh.

He appears to have been a Sumerian king who ruled Uruk perhaps around 2800 B.C. Uruk (biblical Erech, Genesis 10:10) had been the driver of Sumerian civilization, its urbanization and state formation involving military regularization, palace and temple bureaucratization, and social stratification. According to the poem, Gilgamesh was responsible for constructing the city’s walls. Not long after his death, he was considered a god, and became the ancient Near East’s legendary hero par excellence.

- David Franks