The oldest story ever written - 1 views
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David Damrosch’s artful, engrossing new history, “The Buried Book,” relates how “The Epic of Gilgamesh” was lost and found — or rather how it was found and lost, since he tells the story backward, from the present to the past, in an archaeological fashion.
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Think of it: He asks you to be excited about what the characters in his story are discovering even before you know quite how important it is.
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The recovery of the “The Epic of Gilgamesh” was less dramatic, mostly because it was drawn out over decades, but the prize was even more fabulous than the treasures of King Tut’s tomb: the oldest story ever told — or, at least, the oldest one told in writing.
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It is the tale of a king, and full of sex, violence, love, thievery, defiance, grief and divine retribution. It’s the first buddy picture, the first depiction of the Underworld, the precursor to the legend of Noah and his ark.
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If it were like hundreds of other great and ancient stories — the death and resurrection of Osirus, the quest of Orpheus, Sigurd’s slaying of the dragon Fafnir — it would have reached us through countless retellings, gradually morphing and splitting and fusing with other stories over the years.
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Those stories come to us like the DNA of our ancestors, still present within us, but reshaped by generations of mutations and ultimately as familiar as our own faces.
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Instead, “The Epic of Gilgamesh,” preserved on 12 clay tablets, fell into a kind of time capsule in the fabled cradle of civilization.
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much of the epic feels both fresh and alien, a piece of the past all Westerners (and many Asians) share, unsmoothed by the passage of the centuries.
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The announcement that some of those old, broken slabs of clay seemed to confirm the biblical story of the flood and Noah’s Ark made headlines and instantly catapulted the brand-new discipline of Assyriology to public attention.
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Smith, too, seized upon the scenes of the flood as validation of the Old Testament account; many early archaeologists were obsessed with biblical verification. Not everyone agreed, however.
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The New York Times suggested that the inscription “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.” (In fact, stories of global floods crop up in all sorts of disconnected mythologies.)
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Certainly, the epic didn’t point to human sinfulness as the cause of the flood, as the Bible does. According to Uta-napishtim, the gods wiped out humanity because the exploding population was making too much noise and disturbing their sleep.
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The story of the story, though, is something else again. Luck most definitely played a role. Had a roof beam or a column fallen a different way during the sacking and destruction of Ashurbanipal’s palace in 612 B.C., the tablets might not have been left broken but largely intact.
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Had “The Epic of Gilgamesh” been taken to another library, the tablets might have been worn out by use and discarded or lost in other disasters like the burning of the great Library at Alexandria
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Damrosch reminds us that only seven of Aeschylus’ 90 tragedies have survived to modern times. Without the work of dedicated Assyriologists we might have the tablets but be unable to read them.
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To the ancient Mesopotamians, it probably seemed impossible that one day Gilgamesh would be forgotten — for us, that would be like forgetting Heracles or Superman or Little Red Riding Hood. After a while, people stopped telling his story, and if it weren’t for those buried tablets and the men who dug them up, his name would have vanished forever. In a way, Gilgamesh got his immortality after all.
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I purposely didn't highlight the stories. You have to *read those* on the page to truly appreciate them. The Epic of Gilgamesh was one of those stories that I learned about during my difficult recovery from adolescent Fundy-Xtianity. In youthful, rebellious glee, I enjoyed that I could dismiss The Flood. With age, though, I see both - and many other heavily borrowed from stories - as part of a continuum of folklore and wisdom. Quite fascinating.
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"There's no better illustration of the fragility and the power of literature than the history of 'The Epic of Gilgamesh,' the oldest known literary work, composed in Babylonia more than 3,000 years ago. About 400 years later, after one of the ruthless, bloody sieges typical of that time, the epic was buried in the ruins of a Mesopotamian palace. There it lay, utterly forgotten along with the name of the king who once reigned in that palace, until a British archaeologist and his Iraqi assistant unearthed it not far from the modern city of Mosul in 1840." Hat tip to George Station (originally from Hsiao-yun Chan), both on Google+