But for the stories of Israel, ANE literature died two millennia ago, largely disappearing from public knowledge, victimized by the suppression of polytheistic creeds and a casualty of scripts no longer decipherable. When this literature returned to public attention, ironically enough it was largely because it was linked it to the Bible. Some of this linkage was wed motivated, for example Hermann Gunkel’s recovery of the Bible’s pre-literate stage though comparison with Near Eastern literature. Others had sinister goals, for example Friedrich Delitzsch’s distortion of Assyriology to prove the Bible (in fact, Judaism) ‘‘a great deception’’ (Larsen 1995). However misguided, P. Jensen’s drive to center the Epic of Gilgamesh within world literature did bring it to wide notice (1906, 1929). At first intrigued mostly by the Epic’s flood segment, the public eventually took it to heart, resonating to its humanism, its existentialism, and its manifold transfigurations of desire. (It might not have fared as well had it surfaced a century earlier, when sensibility differed.) Segments of Gilgamesh are now featured readings in secondary school and oodles of Gilgamesh for kiddies can now be purchased. Aside from countless translations (see Chapter 12, by Armstrong), some more faithful or poetic than others, in dozens of languages, the epic has spawned: novels (Robert Silverberg, Gilgamesh the King, 1984), retellings (Stephan Grundy, Gilgamesh, 2000; Stephen Mitchell, Gilgamesh, 2004), avatars (Joan London, Gilgamesh, a Novel, 2001; Eduardo Garriques, West of Babylon,
2002) , poetry (Charles Olson; see Maier 1983), operas (Per Norgard, Gilgamesh, Voyages into the Golden Screen, 1974; Stephen Dickman, Gilgamesh, an Operatic Ritual, 2002), oratorio (BohuslavMartind, Epic of Gilgamesh, 1955), ballet (Augustyn Bloch, Gilgamesz, 1968), pantomime/dance (numerous, including one by Teresa Ludovico, Gilgamesh,
2003) , and videos, DVDs (Scott Noegel, Gilgamesh XI: An All Digital Film, 2000). A Hollywood dressing cannot be too distant in the future.
In itself this contemporary absorption in Gilgameshiana is interesting. The epic that has inspired us was far from the Mesopotamian scribe’s most copied composition (omens were) and hardly was the national epic that our great scholars want it to be. Moreover, for a substantial period of time, the epic was a composite that never existed in any single version, so was a vessel for compacted material with resulting contradictions and tensions that now strike us as appealingly contemporary. Nonetheless, Gilgamesh remains the sole example in our list of ANE compositions to have reached a discerning audience or to have provoked sustained comparison with classical parallels (Abusch 2001b). The Creation ‘‘epic’’ similarly serves biblical comparison, but not always for the best reasons; Sinuhe has inspired a novel that was turned into a movie and the ‘‘Birth of Sargon’’ is dragged into every Exodus commentary.
How will this literature, which scholars have so lovingly resurrected, fare in our cultural future? My sense about its prospects is not encouraging. To begin with, its fragmentary nature (tablets and papyri are full of inopportune breaks) and its grammatical density (Sumerian and Ugaritic are not yet exact sciences) compromise a full appreciation. But we also generate the hurdles against its acceptance. We are trained to focus on authors as vessels for genius and are unnerved by a literature that is anonymous even when assigned composers. We applaud narratives with a taut pace, minimal repetitions, a rich vocabulary, and scintillating dialogue, but often meet with opposite manifestations. We want literature to be a window to the ambitions and the anxieties of the past, and are annoyed when it is anchored in punctual or local context. As a result, beyond academia we analyze this literature’s repertoire of plots and characters with detachment, resist understanding its aims or point of view, and feel little urgency to incorporate its examples into the streams of modern culture. It seems to me that for a while longer this literature will remain alien to our larger public.
World History
