Gilgamesheposet författare
Lennart Warring, Taina Kantola. The literary history of Gilgamesh begins with five Sumerian poems about Gilgamesh formerly read as Sumerian "Bilgames" [ 3 ] , king of Uruk , some of which may date back to the Third Dynasty of Ur c. The first surviving version of this combined epic, known as the "Old Babylonian" version, dates back to the 18th century BC and is titled after its incipit , Shūtur eli sharrī "Surpassing All Other Kings".
Only a few tablets of it have survived. The later Standard Babylonian version compiled by Sîn-lēqi-unninni dates to somewhere between the 13th to the 10th centuries BC and bears the incipit Sha naqba īmuru [ note 1 ] "He who Saw the Deep s ", lit. Approximately two-thirds of this longer, twelve-tablet version have been recovered. Some of the best copies were discovered in the library ruins of the 7th-century BC Assyrian king Ashurbanipal.
The first half of the story discusses Gilgamesh who was king of Uruk and Enkidu , a wild man created by the gods to stop Gilgamesh from oppressing the people of Uruk. After Enkidu becomes civilized through sexual initiation with Shamhat , he travels to Uruk, where he challenges Gilgamesh to a test of strength. Gilgamesh wins the contest; nonetheless, the two become friends.
Together, they make a six-day journey to the legendary Cedar Forest , where they ultimately slay its Guardian, Humbaba , and cut down the sacred Cedar. Gilgamesh and Enkidu kill the Bull of Heaven, insulting Ishtar in the process, after which the gods decide to sentence Enkidu to death and kill him by giving him a fatal illness. In the second half of the epic, distress over Enkidu's death causes Gilgamesh to undertake a long and perilous journey to discover the secret of eternal life.
He eventually learns that "Life, which you look for, you will never find. For when the gods created man, they let death be his share, and life withheld in their own hands".
Gilgamesheposet
The epic is regarded as a foundational work in religion and the tradition of heroic sagas, with Gilgamesh forming the prototype for later heroes like Heracles Hercules and the epic itself serving as an influence for Homeric epics. For the present the orthodox people are in great delight, and are very much prepossessed by the corroboration which it affords to Biblical history. It is possible, however, as has been pointed out, that the Chaldean inscription, if genuine, may be regarded as a confirmation of the statement that there are various traditions of the deluge apart from the Biblical one, which is perhaps legendary like the rest.
The New York Times , front page, [ 9 ]. Loftus in the early s. Campbell Thompson updated both of their work in Over the next two decades, Samuel Noah Kramer reassembled the Sumerian poems. In , American Assyriologist Theodore Kwasman discovered a piece believed to have contained the first lines of the epic in the storeroom of the British Museum; the fragment, found in and dated to between BC and BC, had remained unexamined by experts for more than a century since its recovery.
According to the United States Department of Justice , the tablet was encrusted with dirt and unreadable when it was purchased by a US antiquities dealer in The tablet was sold by an unnamed antiques dealer in with a letter falsely stating that it had been inside a box of ancient bronze fragments purchased in a auction. Recent developments in the use of Artificial Intelligence software have vastly accelerated the process of uncovering new fragments of the epic dispersed, and often unread, in museums around the world.
Distinct sources exist from over a year timeframe. The earliest Sumerian poems are now generally considered to be distinct stories, rather than parts of a single epic.
Utdrag ur böckerna - inanna-och-gilgamesh
Although several revised versions based on new discoveries have been published, the epic remains incomplete. From the diverse sources found, two main versions of the epic have been partially reconstructed: the Standard Babylonian version, or He who saw the deep , and the Old Babylonian version, or Surpassing all other kings. Five earlier Sumerian poems about Gilgamesh have been partially recovered, some with primitive versions of specific episodes in the Babylonian version, others with unrelated stories.
This version was compiled by Sin-leqi-unninni sometime between and BC from earlier texts. The Standard Babylonian version has different opening words, or incipit , from the older version. The older version begins with the words "Surpassing all other kings", while the Standard Babylonian version has "He who saw the deep" ša naqba īmuru , "deep" referring to the mysteries of the information brought back by Gilgamesh from his meeting with Uta-Napishti Utnapishtim about Ea , the fountain of wisdom.
The story of Utnapishtim, the hero of the flood myth , can also be found in the Babylonian epic of Atra-Hasis. The 12th tablet is a sequel to the original 11, and was probably appended at a later date. Tablet 12 is a near copy of an earlier Sumerian tale, a prequel, in which Gilgamesh sends Enkidu to retrieve some objects of his from the Underworld, and he returns in the form of a spirit to relate the nature of the Underworld to Gilgamesh.
In terms of form, the poetic conventions followed in the Standard Babylonian version appear to be inconsistent and are still controversial among scholars. There is, however, extensive use of parallelism across sets of two or three adjacent lines, much like in the Hebrew Psalms. When it was discovered in the 19th century, the story of Gilgamesh was classified as a Greek epic, a genre known in Europe, even though it predates the Greek culture that spawned epics, [ 36 ] specifically, when Herodotus referred to the works of Homer in this way.
Although the relationship to Nimrod was dropped, the view of "Greek epic" was retained.
Considering how the text would be viewed from the standpoint of its time is tricky, as George Smith acknowledges that there is no "Sumerian or Akkadian word for myth or heroic narrative, just as there is no ancient recognition of poetic narrative as a genre. Such an interpretation is an unhelpful contemporary take on Mesopotamia's polytheistic religion and on polytheistic systems more generally , in which the gods may be helpful or harmful in diverse situations.
It is also made explicit that Gilgamesh rose to the rank of an "ancient wise man" antediluvian. This summary is based on Andrew George 's translation.