Gilgamesh

The Gilgamesh epic seems to present the most difficult challenge to the thesis of this chapter. It is attested in writing already at the end of the third millennium bce. It seems to be ‘‘literary’’ fTom the beginning and to be composed for the elite ofits day (Foster 2001: xiv; see also xxi for sophisticated intertextuality in this epic; on the epic generally see Chapter 15, by Noegel). A supposed ‘‘evolution’’ can be traced down to the text of the Standard Version (hereafter SV) found in the excavation of the library of Ashurbanipal (668-627 bce). In this teleological view, the earliest Sumerian sources are linked to the first Akkadian sources ( ca. 1800 bce), and these in turn to the formation of the SV at the end of the second millennium. To describe what motivates development conceived in this way, standard literary-historical explanations present themselves: social and political changes external to, and absorbed by, the epic; and changes internal to the text driven by authorial and editorial taste or by literary climate. Even a scholar taking this approach to the SV has to reckon, however, with ‘‘elements... borrowed from literary or even nonliterary sources which originally had nothing to do with Gilgamesh’’ (Tigay 1982: 21; cf. 247-8). Further, with increasing awareness of the comparative evidence of other oral literatures, it has become necessary to conceive of the interaction of oral and written traditions (Cooper 1992: 109; Alster 1995: 2318-19) and also of non-literate spheres of audience (Liverani 1995: 2354-5). In short, ‘‘the mind of the author and [of] subsequent editors of the epic’’ (Tigay 1982: 22) ceases to be the single driving force in the creation of the Gilgamesh epic, and a more complex model, taking account of divergent traditions, written or not, emerges.

In the flood story, different elements in the story are attested in different sources: the Old Babylonian Atrahasis, the Middle Babylonian fragment from Ras Shamra in Syria, and also later versions (Tigay 1982: 217). Although the recasting of the flood story as a first-person narrative on the part of Utanapishtim makes aesthetic sense, the author or editor of the SV did not bother to reconcile his sources with the rest of his narrative. A glaring example is the name Atrahasis in Tablet 11 for the person elsewhere called Utanapishtim. It is, then, more difficult to imagine the author or editor of the SV as attempting a redaction of various texts on the desk in front of him, as it were, than it is to hypothesize the same kind of inconsistent response on his part to variant synchronic traditions to be observed in the Iliad and the Odyssey and even in the Aeneid. Further, it is unnecessary to assume that these traditions were all derived from the Atrahasis epic. It would be more appropriate, given the diffusion of the flood story in ancient western Asia, to speak of parallel, interdependent traditions (Schmidt 1995: 2348-9; see also Chapter 20, by Burkert).

The flood story in Tablet 11 also contains a notable heterogeneous element: the plant of rejuvenation. It is a folktale motif (Thompson 1955-8: D1346.5, H1333.2.1), attested in a somewhat different form in Etana, a poem about one of the rulers of Kish who, because he was childless, flew to heaven on an eagle’s back to find the plant of life or of birth (texts in ANET 114-18). When this motif became part of the Gilgamesh epic is unknown; it appears in the story of GUgamesh for the first time in the SV. The author or editor has skillfully adapted the motif: it is now the plant of rejuvenation and, as such, a second-best acquisition after Gilgamesh has failed in his quest for immortality. (He shows his ineligibility immediately by failing the test of wakefulness, another folktale motif: Thompson 1955-8: C735.1.2, H1247.) In fact, the plant is no longer the object of a quest but comes to the hero as a parting gift from Utanapishtim, who tells him where to find it. Though heroic effort is required (he has to dive into the depths of the sea in order to get possession of it), the gift is assured. The careless loss of the plant to a snake overdetermines the futility of Gilgamesh’s hopes: no immortality and now no rejuvenation, either. No matter how skillful the adaptation, the fact remains that it is a non-essential element that has come, at whatever date, from outside a specifically literary tradition of the Gilgamesh story. (In another folktale, which Sir James G. Frazer called ‘‘The story of the cast skin,’’ the power to cast the skin, which humans once had but lost to certain animals, in particular the snake, stood for immortality; see Frazer 1923: 26-31.)

The best evidence for the SV as a whole as the variant of a tradition is Tablet 12. The author or editor has tacked it onto a poem that was thematically and formally complete at the end of Tablet 11. Further, from all the texts presumably at his disposal, he has chosen an Akkadian translation of lines 172-301 of the Sumerian poem ‘‘Bilgames and the Netherworld’’ (‘‘In those days, in those far-off days’’). From the aesthetic or literary-critical point of view, the anomaly is obvious (cf. Tigay 1982: 27, 105-7, 138). From another point of view, the one taken by the present writer, Tablet 12 illustrates the interference, typical even of epics that have achieved a monumental status in their own time, of synchronic tradition. In this case, while it is a tradition that demonstrably, because textual, goes back to the third millennium, it was still compelling to the mind of whoever added Tablet 12, who believed that the story should end with the death of Gilgamesh. A story concerning the birth of Gilgamesh must also have been part of the Gilgamesh legend. This story, a multiform of the one about the birth of Sargon (ANET119) but not preserved in any Sumerian or Akkadian text, somehow made its way into Aelian (165/70-230/5 ce; NA 12.21).

By the end of the second millennium, the Gilgamesh epic had been translated into Hurrian and Hittite (a prose abridgement). If its undoubted influence on the Iliad and the Odyssey also occurred in this period, when various kinds of Near Eastern influence on Greece can be demonstrated, the transmission would have to have been oral. (For East-West influence, see West 1997b: ch. 1; for the influence of the Gilgamesh epic on Homer, chs. 7-8.) If the influence took place, or took place again, later, in the early archaic period (ca. 750-650 bce), when the Greek alphabet was in use and, some would say, written texts of Homer were in existence, then it could have been in the mode of reading and writing (Burkert 1983: 51-3; 1992: 93-6; Chapter 20). The mode of transmission is a difficult problem that cannot be solved here and may be insoluble. The kinds of reflexes of the Gilgamesh epic in the Iliad seem, with few exceptions, sufficiently inexact not to require a Greek bard’s consultation of Akkadian cuneiform texts. Audition of the Gilga-mesh poem would have sufficed - in Akkadian, if he knew Akkadian, or in a Greek translation. (The same points can be made concerning the transmission of the Gilgamesh poem into Hurrian and Hittite.)