How to Read “Gilgamesh” (2019)

The Mahabharata has its share of misogyny, but it has a couple of fantastic characters - Karna and Bheeshma. It’s worth reading for these two alone.

“The only thing worth reading about is the human heart in conflict with itself”. These two exemplify that principle, whereas I found it absent in the Ramayana.

The popular English translation written by white people are often a bastardization of the classics from a Woke lens. Others are outright further-fictionalizing accounts to suit a narrative flow as if this was a Steve Jobs biography.

The more faithful english translations are written by scholars who won't consider English to be their first language. So the quality of prose is lacking and epics reads more like textbooks. Hindi and other native language works are pretty good, but my proficiency in them is restricted to speech.

I am still on a search for a book that strikes the right balance. A few hindu historians & intellectuals have started writing incredible English language books. I would count Sanjeev Sanyal, Vikram Sampath and Tharoor as institutionally important writers who want to tell the story of India & Indic traditions by looking past the Delhi-focused view of our rather shoddy academic institutions.

I hope to read more works that conduct primary research instead of regurgitating a few 200 yr. works by british historians that can often veer on outright propaganda. It is the age of much needed revisionism in Indian scholarship. I am glad to see it be rooted in evidence, and not counter propaganda. That being said, I hope they get to continue contributing before the academic establishment decides to fully sideline them for being counter narrative.

Another factor in my naming it the probably #2, after Gilgamesh, though, is that everything else is just that bad to a modern reader, so the OT looks pretty damn good compared to all that, even if you're stuck with the King James Version. My favorite story from ancient Egypt[0], I wouldn't recommend to many readers, because damn, it's a slog, and it's still an easier read than some of the others, or than anything I've seen in Sumerian or Akkadian (Gilgamesh excepted). It probably tells better, as a joke (it's a comedic story), than it reads, if you had someone really talented telling it.

That's typical for other Near Eastern literatures, too. Lots and lots of repetition, is the main problem for a modern reader, as far as the prose goes. Much of it also doesn't really relate a story, exactly, and the cultural and religious references are obscure at best. You don't even get mythology, really, for the most part. Prayers or incantations, sure, but there's no Hesiod or Ovid of Sumerian religion. There's a little of that, sure, but it's very fragmentary and you have to bring a lot of context from outside of it to make much sense of what you're reading.

For the millennia(!) of texts we have from Egypt, for instance, there are only a few short (and often fragmentary) works that we'd recognize as stories. You have to settle for reading a variety of non-fiction or semi-fictional genres to get much more out of it—"mirrors for princes" and scribal didactic texts, which are probably the most interesting of the lot, plus endless formulaic and not-especially-illuminating funerary texts, and a good deal of historical propaganda about military victories, mostly from monumental inscriptions, almost all of which are intensely boring even if you're really into military history. And that's probably the richest literature we have from that region in the pre-classical period, at least as far as what's available in English translation.

[0] The Eloquent Peasant

Looks like some people think it is complete, in which case, it's just not particularly good.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tale_of_the_Doomed_Prince

There are a few complete ones that are OK, relatively speaking. They're all pretty short and there aren't that many stories from pre-classical Egypt, so if you're interested, I'd say track them down and give them a try, but don't expect easy reads. I guess part of why I favor those two, especially the latter, is that I can imagine they might become great, when whole.

Mitchell's careful to (accurately) frame his as a new version, not a new translation, though, because he does not read the original language and is leaning on several existing translations to assemble his version. You probably don't want it for, say, deep scholarly purposes.

My copy of Mitchel's version has what's effectively a 60 page retelling at the beginning—which I've not read, so maybe it sucks, I dunno—as the Introduction, then a brief author's note about the book (in which he explains that it is not a new translation, among other things), and ~140 pages of Gilgamesh itself, in largish type. It's very long for a (mostly) surviving pre-classical near eastern story, but it's still pretty short. The rest of the volume is notes.

It's probably not a coincidence, but rather by design, that Siduri (the alewife) runs an inn (inns were associated to prostitution in that era). Siduri's urging Gilgamesh to abandon his quest in favour of indulging in domestic pleasures is, in some sense, a mirror to the domesticating of Enkidu.* And both of these are linked to some of the broader themes of the value of civilization.

(* And interestingly, Siduri first sees Gilgamesh as a possible thief, because's he's so dirty from his voyage, similar to how Enkidu was first seen as a wild man.)

  > If you read the bible at face value it has pretty basic rules of society.

I think it's a pretty interesting take.

> Some people came to the chief with a conflict. He went into a special tent, "communed with the storm-god", and came out with some new rules for how to manage a tribe of herders that has grown beyond Dunbar's number.

Repeat that, mix in an origin story, some king lists, and tribal-unification propaganda and (modulo some path dependency) you'll have a book that people will be treating as the literal truth 2500 years later.

See https://github.com/gaigutherz/Akkademia which is a deep-learning based approach to OCR and word segmentation in Akkadian. Early days. I wish I knew enough ML (or Akkadian) to contribute.

A History of the Akkadian Language: https://brill.com/view/title/21744 was just published. It's monumental and eclectic. All sorts of topics related to Akkadian. Its internal history, changes, as well as recent history of its deciphering. I've been skimming that, using that as a sort of backgrounder. Some of it's over my head, and I took a few semesters of linguistics once upon a time.

The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary has been fully published and digitized: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Assyrian_Dictionary But it's like the OED and I think at the start you would want a wordbook or wordlist with your reading materials, that matches the dialect/era you're working with. A variety of those floating around.

The Oxford Handbook in Cuneiform Culture - more background reading in https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/978019...

While the written form was pretty fossilized (like Latin or English spelling) it was used for ~3000 years and changed a great deal over time like any language. Old Babylonian seems to be a common starting point. I think probably because it's well-attested, was some of the first material discovered, and because it's the language of (the most complete version of) Gilgamesh, and also Hammurabi's law codes.

It is very accessible. After having some basic knowledge, there are more complete grammars and dictionaries.

The reason for learning an ancient language is reading the original texts. There is no need to become an expert, because there are bilingual editions for most ancient texts.

In my experience, no matter how good the translator is, you can find much more interesting information in the original text, but using a bilingual edition spares you 99% of the time you would have needed to read unaided when that is not your base profession.

For Akkadian, the best text for beginners is the bilingual edition of the code of laws of Hammurabi, which is very clear and easy to read (There is a better modern edition by M. E. J. Richardson, "Hammurabi's Laws", but also an 1904 edition at archive.org, "The Code of Hammurabi").

After that, the bilingual edition of Gilgamesh is recommended, with both the Old Babylonian version and with the later versions.

Unfortunately, the bilingual edition of Gilgamesh (A. R. George, "The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic" in 2 volumes) is quite expensive (though there are pirated copies on the Web).

Akkadian is a Semitic language, quite distantly related to Arabic and Hebrew, etc. So we know what its siblings turned into, and we have a vague guess for what its unwritten ancestor was like. There are also some surviving bilingual and trilingual Akkadian texts especially in the later period. That includes with Ancient Egyptian, Ancient Greek, Old Persian, Aramaic, etc., which are all understood to varying degrees.

It's interesting to compare to Sumerian, the language of the people who the Akkadians learned writing from. It's not related to anything else known. We only know it through Akkadian bilingual texts, and texts teaching Akkadians how to read and write Sumerian. (Sumerian went extinct by around 2000 BC.) Now Sumerian is much more poorly understood.

Tablets is are sometimes found when cities fell or buildings were abandoned, basically frozen in context. In this case, the letters were excavated from one of the large homes in Sippur near the temple, which had three rooms full of clay archival tablets seemingly related to the life of an important, sometimes-wealthy priest-administrator, descended from a line of them. Chief dirge singer was indeed some priestly office related to public performances of ritual song.