The basic work of S. N. Kramer has been consulted extensively, particularly his brilliant study Sumerian Mythology (Philadelphia, 1944; revised edition, New York, 1961). His “Sumerian Literature, a General Survey,” in G. Ernest Wright’s The Bible and the Ancient Near East, Essays in Honor of William Foxwell Albright (New York, 1961), pp. 249–266, is to be recommended as an excellent survey of the extant work and genres of Sumerian literature.
I am indebted to the thought and work of Thorkild Jacobsen, particularly to his essay “Mesopotamia,” available in Henri Frankfort’s Before Philosophy(Chicago, 1946), for the pictures he gives of deities, institutions, and human attitudes in the Mesopotamia of Gilgamesh’s time.
An Autobiographical Postscript
The Gilgamesh story first came to my attention in 1954 when I was a junior at Harvard taking a course in Oral Epic Tradition given by Dr. Albert Lord. Lord, a student of the late Milman Parry, had followed his very original teacher in pursuing the sources of oral tradition through its surviving practitioners among the Yugoslav epic folk singers. He had constructed at Harvard a sound theory and a sound course on epic transmission and form, working back from recordings of living Yugoslav epics, which permitted close analysis of theme and structural repetition, to Anglo-Saxon, Germanic, Scandinavian, Russian, the Greek epics of Homer and his contemporaries, the Iranian and the ancient Near Eastern creation epics, and the Epic of Gilgamesh. We did not work chronologically, but rather from the more primitive to the more sophisticated forms, sophisticated being a term Lord applied especially to the Gilgamesh epic because of its central emphasis on the human experience (which German scholars call “the becoming human”) of the hero and the peripheral emphasis on the gods.
I had never heard of this epic before and, though I had read both major Homeric poems previously, as well as the non-oral epics of Virgil, Dante, Milton and, if Faust qualifies, Goethe, I had only the slightest knowledge of the epic experience, structure, and dimension, and even less knowledge of the more strictly oral and the more primitive forms.
When I read E. A. Speiser’s translation of Gilgamesh, I felt a very special affinity with this epic. I knew it on a psychological and spiritual level. I lost interest in the other epics, stopped going to Dr. Lord’s fine lectures, not because they lacked interest for me, but because I was audaciously secluding myself in an empty room in Emerson Hall writing an “Epic of Gilgamesh” in longhand and in my style, saying what I had (and needed) to say.
Of course, solitude without spiritual guidance can be very perilous; mine was academically disastrous as well as literarily futile, except for the fact that Gilgamesh entered my consciousness and my memory deeply and even methodically through this failure. His experience became a headlight to my own, and this headlight had its way of leading me to other persons, here and abroad, who had been similarly secluded.
In Cambridge the widow of Henry Ware Eliot, T. S. Eliot’s brother, showed me her husband’s research and her remarkable line drawings of Mesopotamian seals and artifacts of Gilgamesh’s time, which they had worked on together following his retirement from business. A solitary scholar in Paris, Madeleine David, showed me her published interpretations of Gilgamesh, which followed closely those of certain German scholars who tended to identify Gilgamesh’s exploits with those of Siegfried, an interpretation I tended to shy from. Albert Lord had held the notion that Gilgamesh, rather than being a superhero with only one minor flaw, was a kind of antihero whose only heroism consisted in his continuing his journey, not from any feat of strength, godlike invulnerability, moral foresight or circumspection, or spiritual wisdom within himself.
Further, my vision of Gilgamesh was influenced by English literary traditions of naturalism, tragic irony, and compassion. I also met a scholar at the Institut Catholique in Paris, Père Henri Cazelles, who retold the Epic of Gilgamesh as his first lecture each year to his biblical students and seminarians. I sat with him one day in the solitude of his second-floor study in that old institution, realizing his seclusion resembled my own, though, indeed, he had found his outlet. It is, after all, a story that is understood immediately by anyone who has suffered loss, a loss one has yearned to restore and finally has had to accept.
When I first read the epic I felt I had received a wound, or rather, I felt that a wound in me had been exposed. My own father had died when I was seven. This had been a very shattering loss for me, and I did not really free myself from my preoccupation with death until I was in my teens.
The wound was reopened deeply when I reached Harvard, by two events of that third year. The first was the discovery of Gilgamesh, the second was the discovery that a very-close friend, a young man a little older than I, had Hodgkin’s disease of which he was to die within two years.
Jack Kotteman was a Teaching Fellow in English at Harvard, a splendid mimic, a memorizer and reciter of English poetry’s greatest and worst lines, an enthusiastic wanderer-companion when he had his energy and a very melancholy thinning figure when he did not. The last two years of life for him were wasting ones which he spent in and out of the Boston hospitals undergoing debilitating tests and transfusions and during which he tried to gain some strength from friends. There were those who were closer to him than I—especially his roommate, now Professor David Hart of Arkansas University, and the novelist Ilona Karmel, who was with him just before he died—but he reopened fully for me my particular sense of gratuitous loss and led me once again into solitude from my own helplessness in the face of death.
Deaths due to war or other acts involving human morality in some discernible way must be opposed and to some extent can be and are; but a death which has no apparent relation to morality leaves the survivor, if he loved the one who died, helpless and half-crazed, trying to explain, understand, protest, reverse the gratuitous, or reenter the real world with some trace of the old normalcy that has been lost. To be sure, the lonely frustration of the survivors is the same after every death, immorally or otherwise caused. And everyone is wise in saying, There is nothing you can do; but such wisdom does not reconcile any of us really to loss, for we knew the other as a person in himself not as an abstraction we could do without. We lost the one who we didn’t realize enabled us to live in other people’s worlds; now we have only our own private world and the almost herculean task of constructing a human reentry. What we finally do, out of desperation to recover the sense of the “outside,” is to go on an impossible, or even forbidden, journey or pilgrimage, which from a rational point of view is futile: to find the one wise man, whomever or wherever he may be (and we all have it engrained in our metaphysical consciousness, no matter in what age we live, that such a wise man exists or should exist as witness to Wisdom); and to find from him the secret of eternal life or the secret of adjusting to this life as best we can.
Though not versed exactly in such Gilgameshian terms then, that was the motive in my going abroad back in the mid-1950s. I simply had to break out of my self-enclosure of loss to find a way to translate my experience into wisdom. As belief is born from desire, I believed in Wisdom. Two friends in Paris helped me to understand two essential ingredients of Wisdom, the third ingredient being acceptance, referred to before, which one can only come by within oneself on one’s return.
The first of these friends was an Orientalist of the Collège de France, Louis Massignon. Massignon was well known in France, not only among scholars, writers, and other intellectuals, but also among ordinary newspaper readers who found his name associated with nonviolent street demonstrations against the Algerian war. He was especially known among Muslims, to whom his home was a virtual sanctuary.
By many in the field of Oriental studies he was regarded as the most original and, if you will, “selfless” Western student of Islam of the twentieth century. Many other celebrated Orientalists of his time have on occasion been unable to conceal either their admiration for or their jealousy of him. He was decidedly controversial all his life. And at his death not a few regarded him as a saint or
a genius or a foolish old man. Outside the fields of Oriental studies, comparative religion, religious psychology, and sociology (the latter being the field in which he held his chair at the Collège), he is still known only relatively well, especially in the United States, though he did lecture, at Chicago and Harvard universities. His name is often linked with those of Gandhi, Maritain, Claudel, Valéry, Teilhard de Chardin, Huysmans, Charles de Foucauld, or Jung, all of whom were his personal friends; and members of scientific academies in Moscow, Cairo, London, Delhi, and Tokyo still recall anecdotes about him at conferences. No one who met him has forgotten him, as if he were still alive and the encounter is now. He wrote me once, in 1959, from his summer home in Brittany:
51 years ago I built my new life of Faith in urging our Lord to take out of death (of sin) the friend who had led me (indirectly) through his sin to eternal love: teaching me in a crooked way that Love was to surrender, to be wrung from our inmost heart, so as to have only in mind His will, not mine.
Just before he died at seventy-nine in 1962, he asked his colleague Louis Gardet to be sure that as many people as possible came to know about Hallaj—the great Muslim mystic executed by caliphal court edict in Baghdad in 922 A.D. for “heresy” (as Massignon used to say, “crucified for love”)—the study of whom had been his lifework. It was typical of Louis Massignon that on his deathbed he would ask someone nearby to pass on the knowledge of someone other than himself. Wisdom from him was a life given selflessly in hospitality to others.
The other friend was the Italian painter Dino Cavallarri. I met Dino in 1959 when I happened by chance onto an exhibition of his paintings and illustrations in the little Salon du Thé gallery on the He de la Cité in Paris. I was sufficiently impressed by his work to seek out his whereabouts and go to his studio to see more of it. When I returned to the United States a year later, I brought several of his paintings with me.
We kept in close touch; I learned of his successes in one-man shows in Paris and of his work in theater designs and book illustration. In January 1967, on my way to Istanbul, I stopped for a few days and spent my evenings with him and his family. He showed me his splendid illustrations for a new French edition of Don Quixote, and one evening I recounted for him in French the Gilgamesh epic, of which he had never heard. I told him he might try to pick up Contenau’s translation. In May of that year he sent me, without any forewarning, three packages of color illustrations of the Gilgamesh story. He said they had given him more pleasure than any other illustrations he had made; I hope that one day they may appear in an exhibition all their own. I was deeply touched by his fraternity. I hadn’t realized it, but it was so, that I never would have been able to extract Gilgamesh from my seclusion without the vision, the illustration, of a friend.
Massignon, with whom I talked many times about Gilgamesh, said to me once that it was enough for one who knew loss to have given love. “You must decide the end. You must finish your Gilgamesh.”
My ambitions are considerably less at thirty-eight than they were at twenty-two, or, at least my presumptions are less. I have worked in academic life sufficiently long to be cautious and skeptical as well as patient, and I have familiarized myself with my solitude repeatedly enough to know the limitations of my gifts for extracting something that must have been, in its ancient form, of transcendent beauty. I have also learned from lecturing on Gilgamesh that oral presentation is more moving than printed narrative, for the audience helps draw out and enlarge the work from the one who has been secluded with it. I know why Henri Cazelles delivered, rather than assigned as “outside reading,” his Gilgamesh.
The present verse narrative, made only after years of inward companionship and meditation, of trying to forget and of being unable to forget, and based on literal scholarly translations, is intended as a subjective evocation that may bring the story and its principal characters more intimately to others than literal translations can do. I have not tried to “write an epic,” as we have come to define it, which would be impossible for my non-Miltonic gifts. I have tried to retell an old story simply and to infuse it with as much passion, immediacy, and specific wisdom as I have known. At times my line of narration is very prosy indeed, at times I hope I achieve poetry in the evocation.
My cavalier view of the gods will arouse criticism among scholars of the ancient Near East, but it is one I suspect they themselves share and, I hope, will be forgiven if the overall evocation of the life and mood conveys the spirit of the ancient story itself. The monotheism of Utnapishtim in this narration will have to be accepted by these scholars as part of any modern retelling, though some may even argue that it had its roots in the original.
Finally, I wish to mention the name of John Anson Kittredge. John was a young writer who died prematurely and in whose name his parents established a memorial scholarship for young writers and scholars. On the recommendation of my friend Walter Muir Whitehill, director of the Boston Athenaeum Library, I was awarded the first of these scholarships, back in 1957, to help support my work on Gilgamesh.
All told it has been fifteen years since I began working on “my Gilgamesh,” with time out for other writing, teaching, and a doctorate in Near Eastern Languages and Literatures at Harvard. Now I am only sorry that the Kittredges themselves, before their deaths, did not receive this expression from me of my gratitude for their gift in memory of their only son. This narrative is, in one important sense, for those who have known loss.
Gilgamesh: An Afterword by John H. Marks
The most renowned of ancient Near Eastern heroes is Gilgamesh, who has been dubbed “the hero par excellence of the ancient world” and “the hero without peer of the entire ancient Near East.”1 This heroic figure has been known to the world since George Smith introduced the first fragments of the Gilgamesh Epic, discovered in the ruins of Nineveh about the middle of the last century, to the British Society of Biblical Archaeology on December 3, 1872. This present publication may thus be considered a centennial volume.
The first complete edition of the known cuneiform tablets was published in two volumes in 1884 and 1891 by Paul Haupt, and a two-volume transcription and translation into German was made by Peter Jensen in 1900 and 1901. Since then studies have so burgeoned that major publications concerned with the Gilgamesh story now number nearly three hundred, and Gilgamesh is finding his place in contemporary studies of world literature. The stories about him owe their appeal both to then: poetic imagery and to his adventurous drive and tragic search for an immortality that finally eluded him and left him, in the end, inspecting and rejoicing in the walls of his own city, Uruk (biblical Erech).
Stories about Gilgamesh were popular among the Sumerians in the third millennium B.C., where the hero was celebrated as an exemplary ruler, human being, and hunter. Hundreds of years later, Babylonian scribes of Hammurapi’s era (ca. 1750) repeated and revised these stories, and probably by Kassite times (ca. 1250) they were worked into the epic that was preserved in Assurbanipal’s library on twelve tablets, now fragmentary, which today rest in the British Museum. Copies of the epic have been discovered at Megiddo (Palestine), Ugarit (Syria), and Boghazköy (Turkey) where translations from Akkadian into Hittite and Human have also been found. Fragments dating from the NeoBabylonian era (ca. 550 B.C.) attest continuing Mesopotamian scribal interest in the epic. A history of oral traditions about Gilgamesh should probably be assumed, though little more than that can at the present time be suggested.2
It has been argued, nevertheless, that however widespread the interest in Gilgamesh elsewhere, the epic was little known in Mesopotamia proper.3 We do not yet know with certainty, for example, the complete Gilgamesh story, nor are we able to construct its textual history even provisionally. Passages from it that to us seem memorable were not quoted in other Mesopotamian texts, nor were the events it relates incorporated in any way into the other literature. Outside Mesopotamia, on the other hand, parallels are numerous. This argument, while it presents pertinent information, does not do justice
to the Mesopotamian texts that have been preserved, and one can conclude at best that the Mesopotamian literary tradition is still not so well known that one can assess with confidence the role of Gilgamesh in it.
The epic seems to be rooted in history, though its incidents are certainly legendary. The Sumerian King List,4 which names most of the Sumerian kings together with the lengths of their rule from the beginning “after kingship had descended from heaven” to the end of the third millennium, includes Gilgamesh as the fifth king of Uruk. The precise historical value of this King List is still not certainly known, though the historical framework it provides for Sumerian history is generally accepted. The reigns ascribed to the antediluvian kings (eight kings of five cities ruled a total of 241,200 years) and to the twenty-three kings of the first dynasty of Kish after the Flood (23 kings reigned 24,510 years, 3 months, 3½ days!) are even more fantastic than the lifetimes ascribed in the Bible to the first men before Abraham (Genesis 5). If one discounts the legendary lengths of rule, however, and assumes that some of those early rulers were contemporaries, one can discern in the List a conception of a time when some Sumerian political unity was probably achieved under the leadership of the city Kish. Gilgamesh of Uruk is assigned a reign of 126 years in the List, and in spite of its unrealistic length, now that archaeological discovery has confirmed the existence of his contemporary rulers in Kish and Ur, the fact of his reign cannot be doubted, though contemporary records of it are still to be found.5 Some have sought hidden significance in the number 126 itself.
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