Hey, cool—I was thinking of doing a review of the ol' *Epic* too, but (as usual) procrastinated too long.
I *have* done a big essay comparing *EoG* translations and the receptions thereof; maybe I ought to finally post it...
(Of course, there aren't really that many options from which to choose—at least, not modern ones, and in this case the scholarship moves quickly enough that you probably want a modern one—but maybe it'd be useful to someone anyway. 🤔)
As a total layman, I'd be super interested in the history of the translations and how our evolving understanding of the text influenced our opinions on its content and the Mesopotamian culture.
I think you've missed the point greatly. Gilgamesh ended up as one of the great tragic heroes of all time, with one of the most moving conclusions to an epic there is, and you glossed over it as an abrupt anticlimax?
This single fateful mistake is about as heartbreaking as, say, Orpheus and Eurydice, in a different way - Orpheus was consumed with worry about his love, while Gilgamesh was less than maximally paranoid about his luggage and lost his flower to uncaring nature. But Gilgamesh's tragic loss is broader because he lost eternal youth for all humanity (immortals can't die, the eternally young won't naturally die). I mean, if he just wanted to de-age himself, why didn't he just eat it, but instead immediately plan to use it on the elderly? Gilgamesh is clearly planning to cultivate this flower.
But fate hates humanity, so instead all we can do is gaze forlornly on the walls of Uruk. They're very nice walls, it's true, but the walls look a little different in the springtime of your reign than they do when you've returned from your mythic quest defeated and quite mortal. (And that's why it ends here and the voluminous fanfic continuations are somewhat lesser works).
The follies of our youth are, in retrospect, glorious compared the follies of our old age.
At the risk of projecting modern storytelling orthodoxy on a tale by a people a long time ago and a long way away- if the loss of the flower was a tragedy intended to be a focal point of the tale, it would not have been disposed of so quickly so near the end.
I think abrupt is the key word of abrupt anticlimax. So much work over the small stuff like preparing a boat, and the falling action happens in like 4 lines. I’m sure the author would prefer a long section where Gilgamesh stood on the ramparts and made decrees and ruled for generations and thought back to the snake and his friend and tied everything together. Or maybe he dies as a great king after winning a war or something. Anything other than the snake stealing the plant and repeat the first line of the epic.
Along similar lines, the introduction to Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino:
"Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his. In the lives of emperors there is a moment which follows pride in the boundless extension of the territories we have conquered, and the melancholy and relief of knowing we shall soon give up any thought of knowing and understanding them. There is a sense of emptiness that comes over us at evening, with the odor of the elephants after the rain and the sandalwood growing cold in the braziers, a dizziness that makes rivers and mountains tremble on the fallow curves of the planispheres where they are portrayed, and rolls up, one after the other, the despatches announcing to us the collapse of the last enemy troops, from defeat to defeat, and flakes the wax of the seals of obscure kings who beseech our armies' protection, offering in exchange annual tributes of precious metals, tanned hides, and tortoise shell. It is the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin, that corruption's gangrene has spread too far to be healed by our scepter, that the triumph over enemy sovereigns has made us the heirs of their long undoing. Only in Marco Polo's accounts was Kublai Khan able to discern, through the walls and towers destined to crumble, the tracery of a pattern so subtle it could escape the termites' gnawing."
I like Shaw's (I think) take: "“Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.”
Developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik studies the "lantern consciousness" of young children. Says they are more conscious than adults, and that psychedelics, novelty & artistic or scientific exploration temporarily make adult consciousness more like a child's.
This was a stunning read, thank you. I'm deeply fascinated (albeit fairly uneducated) on Mesopotamia/the emergence of civilisation, and I found this truly enthralling.
To anyone whom the conclusion resonated with, if you haven't read Siddhartha (Herman Hesse), I think you'd greatly enjoy it.
I'll be carrying the words of the innkeeper with me on my adventures from today forward—a wise lady indeed!
There is an extended take on the innkeepers wisdom in the bible: Ecclesiastes
See: 9:7–9:
"Go, eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with a merry heart; for God has already approved what you do. Let your garments always be white; let not oil be lacking on your head. Enjoy life with the wife whom you love, all the days of your vain life that he has given you under the sun..."
For those who want to share this story with their kids, I have enjoyed the appropriately abridged and beautifully illustrated version by Ludmila Zevan. It's broken into three books and is good for ages 7-10ish IMO.
While the idea is interesting, the Neanderthals in the Near East probably died out 40+ thousand years before Gilgamesh. That would have been a helluva long memory.
I'd wager more on a human child reared by actual animals, that happened occassionally within written memory. Would fit with Enkidu being clearly one-of-a-kind.
Children reared by animals never develop language (at least, Russian children raised by wolves don't), so that seems unlikely. He might just have been a bit unkempt.
> "you could put your brain in a new body, or upload your consciousness to the cloud, and in some sense that thing would still be you. If so, that means you are the information in your brain"
Perhaps this thought experiment is already cliché, and I am unaware of that...
...but what would happen if someone committed a terrible crime, which remained undiscovered until after The Uploading? If the new instance of the brain/information/consciousness is "still that person," would the new instance deserve punishment after the crime is discovered?
Greg Egan has a take on this in "Dust" [correction: "Permutation City"], except the question isn't one of legal guilt, but a character's own feelings of guilt about something he once did. He has himself (non-destructively) uploaded to the virtual world, hoping that at least his double there will be free of the guilt that torments him. It doesn't work, though—his double is simply another copy of him and feels exactly the same way about his past as the original did.
Depends on the purpose of punishment. If the goal is to reduce recidivism or isolate criminals from society, maybe the "Uploading" already accomplishes this. If the goal is to enact justice by harming those who have harmed others, or provide satisfaction to victims/family of victims (revenge), then plausibly their new instance should be punished.
It's so interesting to reread one of these and only realize halfway through that you did, in fact, read the story once in the past. Must've been under a different link though, that one came up as never-visited for me, and I don't ever "redact" browsing history.
Still find it a vexing plothole that people wouldn't just continually reset in smaller increments. There's plenty of ways to leave digestible information for Future You, even moreso with advanced technology...and in terms of resource consumption, it ought to cost less to redact a year 60 times than to redact 60 years once, since state divergence like e.g. mutational load is nonlinearly cumulative. Even if that weren't the case, there's no good explanation for why people culturally anchor on the Schelling of "die for real before redaction" and not just when they feel they're too old. Who cares if you redact Grandma's cancer back to being benign instead of nonexistent? We'll just have to try again tomorrow night, and it's still an improvement. (The fact that people start eventually "redacting early" because reasons also negates this supposed norm anyway...)
There's also the whole conceit that original states are, uh, fixed in linear time, so you must become the 21 year old you of 2021 rather than the newly 21 year old you of 2081...there's probably a physics/information theory explanation for that, but it's load-bearing, and not immediately obvious as a layperson why this has to be the case.
> Humans talk first and then learn how to read; large language models read so much they learn how to talk
Wouldn't it be more accurate to say they read so much they learn how to write, and listen so much they learn how to talk? English spelling is notoriously disconnected from pronunciation, Chinese even moreso.
> There are some detailed pictures of the Pennsylvania tablet here.
No, that link goes to http://penns/ which isn't a valid url.
Hmmm -- in a tangent from the woman tavern keeper, I am thinking of Kubaba, the woman tavern-keeper, who made firm the foundations of Kish, when she was king.
Possibly legendary. The century-long reign is, of course, legendary. But Mesopotamia may have a tradition of woman tavern-keepers being important figures.
> It may not have a singular definitive text, like the Odyssey, but neither is it a vaguely-similar body of tellings and re-tellings, like Robin Hood or Batman.
True, but I think it’s a bit further toward the latter end of the spectrum than this implies. Some major differences between versions:
- the importance of Enkidu. In early versions he’s just Gilgamesh’s servant/henchman, but by the Standard Babylonian Version he’s Gilgamesh’s closest companion and his death is a key turning-point in the narrative.
- how Humbaba is defeated. In some Sumerian versions, Humbaba has seven magical auras that make him invincible, and Gilgamesh must trick him into taking them off one after another (https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/etcsl.cgi?text=t.1.8.1.5#, https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/etcsl.cgi?text=t.1.8.1.5.1#). The omission of this scene in the Standard Babylonian Version reflects that the later version of Gilgamesh is unambiguously a warrior-hero characterised by reckless belligerence, not a trickster-hero who wins by cunning.
> some of its themes (eg ‘what makes a good king’ or ‘how best to serve the gods’) aren’t very accessible in the 21st century
If you reframe ‘good king’ as ‘good leader’, then the first question is just as relevant as ever. Admittedly, the story’s answer -- ‘a good leader should make a minimum effort to fulfil their responsibilities rather than pursuing harebrained schemes for personal glory’ -- is pretty simplistic, but it’s still relevant to the modern world.
On the second theme, I don’t think that the Epic is really asking this question -- none of the main characters (except Uta-napishti) are particularly trying to serve the gods well. To the extent that the story has any philosophical point to make about the gods, it’s that picking a fight with them is a losing strategy even for semi-divine superheroes -- which is basically just a restatement of the Epic’s main theme of accepting mortality.
> Akkadian - a predecessor of modern Arabic and Hebrew -
True, but misleading. Akkadian is the oldest member of the Semitic language family, which includes Arabic and Hebrew, but it isn’t their direct ancestor (note, e.g., the lack of the West Semitic active perfective suffix conjugation).
> Two ‘scorpion-men’ try to stop him going further. After a lacuna, he seems to have persuaded them to let him continue.
IMO it’s not clear if they’re actually trying to stop him, or just to warn him that the path is dangerous.
> Gilgamesh meets a woman called Shiduri, who is inexplicably running a tavern at the end of the world
In fairness, Shiduri is a goddess (her name is marked with the divine determinative), so her business is presumably immune to mortal constraints like ‘customers’ or ‘income’.
> A dog entered a tavern and said, 'I can’t see anything. I’ll open this one.'”
This is great! In the same vein, I’m fond of this Sumerian riddle: “A house on a foundation like the sky, a house veiled like a treasure-chest, a house on a base like a goose. One goes in blind, one goes out seeing.” The answer is (rot13) fpubby.
> We don’t remember Gilgamesh in the 21st century because of the walls of Uruk, which are dust now, or for his great kingship, over an impressive-for-its-time Bronze Age slave state. We remember Gilgamesh because what he did was meaningful to people.
I don’t think these things are really separable. It would be misleading (at best) to say ‘We don’t remember Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan because of their conquests, but because what they did was meaningful to people.’
> “A house on a foundation like the sky, a house veiled like a treasure-chest, a house on a base like a goose. One goes in blind, one goes out seeing.”
Maybe you can explain what you like about this one. To me it feels like the answer doesn't have much to do with the riddle, except the blind -> seeing part.
What I like about it is that, like the bar joke, it's so shorn of its cultural context that it reads like absurdist humour. Sorry if I didn't make that clear.
Isn't the bar joke just not being read literally enough? The only necessary cultural context is the ability to understand the language the joke was written in.
At least, there was a twitter thread years ago by an Assyriologist who pointed out that (a) the dog's setup line has been translated into English as "I can't see a thing", because this is what the grammar of English requires, but (b) in the original, the subject of the verb "see" is not 𝗜 but instead 𝗺𝘆 𝗲𝘆𝗲𝘀. (Compare something like "my stomach troubles me" versus "I'm hungry".)
He then gave a more direct translation of the joke:
In the second line, the noun in the absolutive case (Sumerian is an ergative/absolutive language) is indeed ‘eye’ (igi). My reading of the verb (nu-mu-un-du8) is that nu- is the negative modal prefix (‘not’), -mu- is the ventive prefix, and the -n- of -un- is the perfective (ḫamṭu) 3rd person singular personal/animate ergative prefix, presumably referring to the dog. The verbal root is du8, which as a transitive verb means ‘to open’, and in combination with igi means ‘to see’. There is no speech marker or verb meaning ‘say’ in this line. So I think it would be fair to read the second line as something like “He did not see anything”, with the understanding that one of the standard idioms for ‘seeing’ includes the word for ‘eye’.
The verb in the third line looks like an imperfective (“I will open this”) and ends with the quotative enclitic -e-še. Note also that ĝal2 (which is usually interpreted here as part of the verb) can also be read as ‘door’ (ig); this leads to the “I will open the door” readings, which unfortunately struggle to explain ne-en ‘this’, which is a strictly independent demonstrative (as opposed to an enclitic demonstrative, which attaches to a noun).
So overall, it seems like the third line, not the second, should be taken as direct speech. But I’m not really good enough at Sumerian to have a strong opinion.
> I think what we're seeing is an odd case of vowel harmony in which the /i/ of the conjugation prefix has assimilated to the /e/ of the following syllables.
> en-e-še stands for /i3-n-eš-e/.
> "He [imperative] open them."
I have no training and can't have an opinion of my own, except to note that this reading is sufficient to explain why this is in a list of jokes.
I believe that Sumerian vowel harmony is only found in Old Sumerian texts, so it would be unusual to find it as late as the second millennium; but I’m not well-versed in this.
As to the context, I wouldn’t feel totally confident describing it as a list of jokes; while some of them definitely seem humorous, others seem more like idioms, proverbs, or aphorisms. For example:
Joke-like:
> Nine wolves having caught ten sheep, there was one too many and they did not know how to share out the portions. A fox came along and said: "Let me allocate the portions for you! The nine of you take one sheep. I by myself shall take nine -- this shall be my share!"
> The dog understands "Take it!", but does not understand "Put it down!"
Proverb-like:
> No one will give away even a barren cow for nothing.
> No-one walks for a second time at the place where a lion has eaten a man.
"I wonder if we can expand our definition of making it." -- well, we better. "Making it" in many capacities has empowered things that clearly should not have the power and existence that they do, to continue to survive. The pressures of the 21st century are eroding what isn't timeless, let's say, whether from 20th century or many more centuries ago.
The author can’t answer until after the contest voting closes, but I imagine the risk is that Gilgamesh in particular is not easily approachable, for the reasons outlined. Starting with it, before building up experience with similar but more approachable works, would scare some people off.
In that case, unapproachable lists of gifts notwithstanding, I wonder if the problem is that starting with great works of literature from a culture so different from your own, where seemingly-minor differences in meaning can hint at nuances of the original culture which can vastly change the interpretation of a passage, can train you to look for similar subtleties of meaning even when a person’s culture is much more similar to your own, possibly to the point where you wilfully misunderstand them.
One motivation people have for a chronological reading is that you can see how each text makes references to the ones that come before it. But the problem is that you inevitably have to start in the middle, without some of the earlier texts that the first one you start with is referencing. And in practice, in terms of reading comprehension and artistic experience, by starting early, you're starting with the ones from the most distant cultural background from your own, that you'll be least prepared to understand.
A reverse chronological reading has the advantage of starting with the familiar, and then gradually moving you to more and more distant settings and background assumptions, in ways that you'll be better-prepared to follow.
This was great. It reminded me of The Buried Book by David Damrosch which is a history of the epic told backwards - effectively excavating down from the discovery of the palace, the working out how to read the text and so on. And on the way taking in the British invasion of Ethiopia where a key character has been taken hostage. It is absolutely one of my favourite books of all time.
It is also one of the great regrets of my podcasting 'career'. I asked Damrosch to come on the podcast to talk about it an he agreed. I was so excited! But after that I could never get him to reply to another email. I don't know whether he had just thought better of it or was ill or what. Regardless, it is an absolutely fantastic read - can't recommend it enough.
On repetitions, sometimes customs outlive their original purpose and then get used for something else. One example is the way the whole thing is book-ended by the paean to the glory of Uruk.
Another (I believe) is at the end of Tablet II. Gilgamesh has proposed to Enkidu the quest to kill Humbaba. Enkidu tells him this is a bad idea, but Gilgamesh brushes aside his objections. So Enkidu tells the elders of Uruk about what a bad idea it is. Then the elders go to Gilgamesh and tell him what a bad idea it is, repeating several of Enkidu's lines exactly. And then:
"When Gilgamesh heard the speech of his counselors,
He looked at his friend and laughed"
It's like he's saying, "You've been talking to them, haven't you, I can tell."
Then Enkidu joins him on the quest, 'cos a man's got to stand by his friend.
The philosophy lecturer Michael Sugrue has a video that introduces a thesis of epic poetry as the World Encyclopedia of its generating culture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKOoVMg9x1M.
In they video above, he explicitly looks at The Epic of Gilgamesh through this lens, posing the idea that this time period marks an emergence of the recognition of individual human experience as subjective. I.e. for some reason, Mesopotamean culture found it important to make Gilgamesh recognizing his own death through that of Enkidu a central subject worthy of retelling for centuries.
I greatly enjoyed this review. I feel like I learned a lot (I vaguely knew that genesis was based on other works including the flood, but that’s it). I had no knowledge of the origin of writing, clay tablets and how they are studied, or even hearing of this outside of the Star Trek reference. It was written entertainingly with LOTS of micro humor and asides and references. Just the right amount! It even relates it to AI. This is a perfectly tailored post to this audience, so much so that it almost feels like Scott himself wrote it, though I don’t think he did. Not enough kaballah related jokes for Scott. Thank you for writing.
As a slight aside, I’ve noticed, perhaps by interacting on reddit and other platforms where this is common, that I am now vaguely triggered by phrases that sound like AI. If a comment or post has one, I immediately stop and ask myself if something is AI written. It’s difficult to ever know for sure and I don’t want to witch hunt accuse people of doing so (I have, incorrectly, in the past. There were 3-4 such phrases in the final two sections of this post. I find myself pausing to think - was this edited by AI? Written by AI and then transcribed to remove the lame bits? Did an author need an analogy and turn to AI for just one sentence? Usually my rule of thumb is to consider the rest of the work. If there are 4 ai triggers in a 4 sentence comment, it’s probably AI. (‘It’s just just x, it’s y’, flowery metaphors that don’t make as much sense in close proximity to each other, labeling an opposing argument in quotes [if you want to argue for the “let’s go to breakfast” side, then you don’t value sleep”], etc). In this work, I noticed 3-4 things that made me question in a work that’s very long, so I find it unlikely to have being used AI.
I write this aside to say, I don’t like that my mind does this. Why do I care? We’re all online anyway. I use spell check. But somehow, knowing it’s another human brain on the other side of the text, not a mostly automatic reply, is why I’m here. I wouldn’t like to be the only human on Moltbook. I proportionately enjoy the internet less the more proportionately it becomes moltbook. There’s two alternatives - we witch-hunt and overcorrect and people get annoyed but AI usage gets semi-banned/downvoted, or people that agree with me just use the internet less. Probably not a bad thing.
As a further aside, at my work, they highly encourage us to use copilot to write emails. They say it makes us more efficient. There’s something so viscerally different about using copilot to write someone’s annual review than taking the time to do it yourself. I’m not sure why but it has something to do with the above, and sincerity, even when both people know.
Anyway, good review, better than any I read last year so likely has my vote.
Stylistically, this one did not ping my personal AI detectors. But it was in the same neighborhood while still feeling recognizably human. I wonder if the author corresponds with AIs often enough to pick up some of their stylistic tics, the way one often does after reading a lot of a particular human author.
There were definitely a couple moments here and there that triggered my "AI spidey-sense", but it wasn't consistent enough that I felt comfortable bringing it up as a possible false positive. The Sword of Pangram unfortunately hangs over all writing, these days.
I did however notice that the Conclusion section takes a rather different tone from the rest, in addition to being almost bereft of links and footnotes. Felt sort of The Bottom Line-y. Epecially:
>Gilgamesh contains multitudes, and the clearest example is in the Old Babylonian version giving us an alternative perspective to the Standard - a perspective delivered by a woman running a tavern: [block quote]
...which is nearly a straight copy-paste from earlier, that we didn't really need explicit reminding of? Previous review had this same thing, where some later sections would seem to "forget" a passage or concept was already used prior, and reintroduce them as if they were novel. It's strange.
In some ways in this review of this text, it’s more of a reference to the text repeating itself. I’d personally chalk this up to an editing choice. I enjoyed the conclusion repeating the body some. Gave me a sense of closure.
I loved the review but in the beginning and end I also felt like there was some AI stuff going on. I almost stopped reading at the beginning because of that, but very glad I kept going.
The tricky thing about AI prose is that we are all linguistic sponges, and inevitably pick up some of the style of language we see and hear a lot. And kids pick it up way faster than we do. Seems inevitable to me that over time we are going to speak more like AI's.
Also, and this is an intuition that is harder to defend: We are going to *think* more like AI's, partly because more of our thinking is done by AI, partly because we will absorb some of the AI thinking style as we do speaking style. Net result is that we are going to become less conscious. (Except for little things like that, though, man are those suckers going to be great for us.)
"[S]ome days I dream of a big-budget Hollywood adaptation or a prestige TV series to bring it into the popular imagination on the same level as the Odyssey. (Other days, I think I should be careful what I wish for.)
Oh indeed. Just imagine:
This Fall only on Amazon Prime! From the creators of "Rings of Power" we bring you Payne and McKay's "Humbaba: The Untold Story"!
The blockbuster of 2027! Coming to an IMAX near you! Christopher Nolan's "Gilgamesh"! Starring Zendaya as Aruru and Elliot Page as Enkidu!
Gilgamesh to Urshanabi: "We were the Akkadians all along. Our Sumerian Age is collapsing".
The reviewer says the ending is an "effing weird" anticlimax, but it seems quite fitting and instructive, and modern in a way, that the hero ends up back where he started, a sadder but wiser man.
It reminds me of a quote from a T S Eliot poem [quick Google to get my facts and the quote straight! ..] called Little Gidding:
"We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time."
This was delightful, and thank you for this. One reason I’m such a Terror Management Theory Maximalist is that the further we go back in time, the more directly the ur-conflicts seem to approximate the great dread of oblivion, the trumpeting finality of erasure. Gilgamesh just lays it out, a story of a dude emoting fecklessly, such behavior a proxy for the conflict and the thesis. That’s why, I think, the ending is so great: it’s above all a *reorientation*, something like a coming-to.
Anyway this was awesome; thank you for penning this.
There is a particular tradition of poorly-founded guesses that Scott submitted a review to his own contest (because one time he actually did), so your top-level comment is going to read to a lot of people here like an overconfident, off-the-cuff assertion that he wrote it, regardless of what you meant.
If, like me, you haven't our reviewer's patience and persistence to read the original with all of its quirks, you might enjoy Robert Silverberg's retelling, "Gilgamesh the King". It's been a while since I read it, but seems to capture the core of the story.
I would 100% recommend reading there are rivers in the sky by Elif Shafak if this epic really interested you. A character in the book explores the epic and it’s cultural and geographical significance of the time
The best thing here is Shiduri: the tavern-keeper gets the wisest lines in the poem and the later editor cuts them. But the ending wants two things at once, since her point is that you die and that’s fine, while yours is that in some sense you don’t. Maybe I remember wrong but Akkadian isn’t an ancestor of Hebrew and Arabic. It’s East Semitic, they’re Central Semitic, so the relation is collateral rather than lineal.
I may not be the first in the comments, but not only the deluge made it into the bible, the wise bartender's advice to Gilgamesh did, too: Ecclesiastes 9:7–9:
"Go, eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with a merry heart; for God has already approved what you do. Let your garments always be white; let not oil be lacking on your head. Enjoy life with the wife whom you love, all the days of your vain life that he has given you under the sun..."
I may not be the first in the comments, but not only the deluge made it into the bible, the wise bartender's advice to Gilgamesh did, too: Ecclesiastes 9:7–9:
"Go, eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with a merry heart; for God has already approved what you do. Let your garments always be white; let not oil be lacking on your head. Enjoy life with the wife whom you love, all the days of your vain life that he has given you under the sun..."
And the whole of Ecclesiastes aka Qohelet is about a great king, bored to death and in fear of it, trying different stuff to find a way out of mortality, but finds they are all 'vain'.
Damn, and here I was hoping we could get through just one Review Contest with no shoehorned mentions of AI. Although this one's less of a stretch than some previous offenders, to be sure.
Tone was weird throughout, I found this somewhat irritating to read in a way that felt disconnected from the actual content. Think it's partly due to the constant external links and copious footnotes, some of which clarify, others of which are just for the lulz. Sort of reminded me of The Sequences in this regard: I couldn't just gloss over the links/footnotes, because they might contain really important relevant information, but also they might just be shitposting filler. Ultimately this amounts to distraction from the review itself...which already doesn't have "a lot of ruin" to spare formatting-wise, due to the unfortunate decision to regularly break up the Tablets with longish interludes. I kind of just want to read the story, then analyze later? It's already largely a disjointed tale of random episodes to begin with, don't make it harder! Not even saying the historical context is superfluous, just that it takes up roughly as many words here as the Tablets themselves.
(It was also my understanding that one of the interpretations for the ending of the poem is that the narrative is supposed to be circular in nature - it doesn't actually end, just starts over again at the beginning, an endless synecdochal cycle of death and rebirth. Is this a hallucination?)
It's also funny to run into subculture boundaries...Gilgamesh might not be as well-known as some other heroes of myth, but you absolutely could not escape knowledge of That Shiny Golden Bastard and his bullshit Gate of Babylon if you were a weeb of a certain era. That particular interpretation of the OG King makes me want to grade this review on a curve and mash the "like" button automatically (or, hell, even his foppish FF5 appearance)...but it wouldn't be an honest review of the actual review of the actual Epic of Gilgamesh. I wanted to like it, but could not. Look upon my review, ye mighty, and despair. As another gold-loving king once said, "Sad!"
Most of this wasn't news to me, I knew Gilgamesh well already. But I have one passage to address.
> But for some reason, when inventing writing from scratch, this simple recipe [alphabets] seems unavailable.
I have a pretty good guess why they didn't think of an alphabet. In these days of universal literacy, our writing strongly influences how we think of speech, even though a linguist would tell you speech is primary. There are people who think there is a "p" sound in "psychology", until you put a candle in front of them and show them the flame does not flicker as they say the word. People are not aware that they have a merger like cot-caught until you show them.
Imagine you're an English person trying to invent alphabetical writing from scratch, unburdened by the legacy of Latin. Good for you! You will be able to write "little" with a 1:1 correspondence to the IPA symbols transcribing the sound of the word, /ˈlɪtᵊl/, though your symbols will be different in shape as you won't base them off the Latin alphabet.
But that is the broad transcription. Your mind, not used to writing and standardized language, will in fact hear something more like [ˈɫɪɾɫ̩] or [ˈlɪʔo] depending on who says it. The sounds assimilate and meld into each other, there is no discrete boundary, something that is called "n" in the Latin-based English orthography is different depending on its context and the person who says it and how fast they're talking right now.
By the way, you mention in the footnotes that tones can be denoted by diacritics. I'd argue that this is a product of modern thinking too. Linguistics knows that e.g. in Modern Chinese, tones are orthogonal to other vowel qualities, so it makes sense to use an orthogonal notation for them. Something similar, encoding the individual factors of pronunciation into writing rather than making an arbitrary letter for every combination of them, was done by King Sejong or Jan Hus (for Czech), but they too already had millenia of experience with writing to build on.
For an ancient it might not be so obvious. Did you know that Old Chinese didn't have tones, but had more complicated syllable structure, and gradually some of these letters in the syllables faded out but left an influence in the form of tones - so if you had something like Chinese in the middle of the transition, the tone of a vowel would be inextricable from the phonemes around it.
With concepts, it's a clearer than with sounds. Everyone, even people who speak a foreign dialect or language, agrees what a sheep is (with the possible exception of philosophers). So making a character for "sheep" and then borrowing it for a homonymous word might perhaps be more comprehensible to ancient readers.
I'm married to a woman from an evangelical background, and several years ago her family reunion was in Kentucky, where we all visited the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter. To their credit, rather than Victorian outrage, the museum openly addressed the similarities between the account of Noah and Gilgamesh, as well as discussed other early civilizations' accounts of a great deluge in pre-recorded history. Made for some great discussions between the family's biblical literalists and non-literalists at the bourbon tastings the next day.
One of the unfortunate consequences of America being so steeped in Protestant Biblical literalism (including atheists) is the gap between what “divinely inspired” means to the average person (like, I presume, the author) and the average well-read Christian. Assuming for the sake of argument that the flood narrative is taken directly from the Epic (and not drawn from a common oral tradition, which, conversely, would be evidence for the truth of the Biblical account) that would not preclude “divine inspiration.”
> It’s easy to think of the many versions of this text as a distraction or an annoyance, but we should resist the temptation to ignore anything except the ‘proper’ version. The Epic of Gilgamesh is best thought of as an evolving work of art, honed by generations over a thousand years. It may not have a singular definitive text, like the Odyssey, but neither is it a vaguely-similar body of tellings and re-tellings, like Robin Hood or Batman.
I don't understand what the author is trying to say here. Every single one of the mentioned examples is identical in this regard. All of them are the vaguely-similar body of tellings and retellings that he says they aren't. That's how mythology works. People tell stories, and versions diverge, and sometimes people compile several stories into anthologies.
Considering the Odyssey:
>> Zenodotus curated an edition of the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey that differed significantly, in both form and content, from a later edition curated by Aristarchus of Samothrace, director of the Library in the second century BCE, whose reputation as an editor—not only of Homer but also of other Classics—eventually overshadowed the earlier editorial efforts of Zenodotus.
>> Aristarchus frequently questioned the edition of Zenodotus, whose Homeric text featured a wealth of alternative wordings—ordinarily described as variants—where the form and the meaning of such variants differed, sometimes radically, from the corresponding forms preferred by Aristarchus.
How exactly is that supposed to be different from the Epic of Gilgamesh, or from Batman?
We have a standard recension of Robin Hood that comes to us from Howard Pyle, who compiled his version just five short centuries after the earliest Robin Hood stories we know of. How is that different?
> while the Old Babylonian represents Babylonia in ascendance, the Standard Babylonian is likely from a time of its decline, as the Assyrian empire gradually eclipsed it. This version has a feel of a culture looking backwards more than forwards; the scribal tradition of the day was focussed heavily around preserving classics in the form of ‘definitive editions’, which is probably why this version is edited so carefully and bears such scholarly skill.
Again, this is exactly the same phenomenon already known for Odysseus, Robin Hood, and Batman. With no differences!
> If you’d like to hear it in the original Akkadian while you read, the internet can provide
Funny to think that in 4000 years, the last speaker of English may be some dedicated linguist posting whatever the 6000AD-equivalent-of-a-YouTube-video-is with a title like "Twilight, read in its original English"
One note on the similarity of the flood narratives in the Epic of Gilgamesh and Genesis: the review says this is "seemingly clear-cut evidence that one of the foundational texts of Christianity had not been divinely narrated, but recycled from an earlier myth," but think about this evidence in Bayesian terms. Are similar flood narratives what we would expect to see if Genesis borrows from Sumerian mythical traditions? Yes. Are similar flood narratives what we would expect if Genesis is true and the flood actually happened? Also yes. Since this evidence fits both hypotheses (and is often used by Christians as evidence that the Bible is true), we shouldn't assume that Victorian Christians (or modern Christians) would be outraged at the discovery of the Epic of Gilgamesh.
I think the third option was the most parsimonious one: these creation myths were in the zeitgeist. Today, almost everyone knows that the Earth is round and orbits the Sun and is orbited by the Moon etc.; back then, everyone knew that the Earth was flat and at one point it was all flooded by the gods who saved one righteous man etc. The ancient people who eventually became Jewish believed that too; it was an obvious fact of life to them. But they also honestly believed that they figured out the right answer to who the god was, who the righteous man was, what really happened, and what lesson is to be taken from it all.
"I keep wondering how common it was for men in particular to want to run off and live wild,"
I doubt this was common. but like other near east societies (and far east for that matter), the steppe was an endless source of people who were already living wild, who could be tempted to assimilate.
Sometimes the assimilation would be peaceful-- you might hire them as auxiliaries to patrol the borders. Sometimes less so-- they might conquer the city and replace the ruling class. Hammurabi, for example, had been a nomad of a tribe called the Amorites before ruling Babylon. But regardless of how they come to the city, the city civilizes them.
Fascinating stuff. Parts of the commentary remind me of Terra Ignota, in a good way. Not sure what I took away from it but maybe that's as it should be. (For some obscure reason I've recently started to wonder if trying to impose modern notions of "theme" and "message" onto ancient epics is a mistake!)
If I had a nickel for every dictator who also wrote a terrible romance novel I'd have three nickels, which isn't a lot but it's still weird that it happened thrice.
(The other two, if anyone cares, are Napoleon Bonaparte and Benito Mussolini.)
> All the people who loved them, and the people who loved their lovers, and the people who loved their lovers’ lovers. These souls in their millions are in this writing - maybe in a weaker sense than the direct authors, but they are there nonetheless.
This is why I always liked traditions with ancestor worship & culture heroes. e.g. the Yellow Emperor probably didn't exist and definitely didn't literally invent writing, daoism, the compass, etc, but what the yellow emperor *represents* (the cultural legacy & technological achievements of nameless past people) is very real.
Have you read Jordan Peterson's latest book, _We Who Wrestle With God_?
It's one long riff on the "real meaning" of various parts of the bible, and (spoiler alert) the overriding theme is something like "God is what a civilization deems to be the highest, best things of which we are capable; and asking 'do you believe in God?' is akin to asking 'do you believe in the highest, best things of which we are capable?'"
Attempting to compress a very long argument into one sentence makes this sound like Pilgrim's Progress in which various elements of the Human Experience are personified as literal objects, but this being Jordan Peterson the argument is a lot more sophisticated (and a lot more convincing).
I raise this because one element I kept returning to throughout the book was the historical evolution, how this all came together as it did, given that this is an argument vastly more sophisticated than most people are capable of.
And so I wonder the extent to which your monotheism aside captures this.
It feels like the natural state of humanity is one that sees minor divinity everywhere, whether shamanism or gods as essentially celebrities. (Like us, only more so along one or two dimensions.) In such an environment, do a few individuals experimenting to build a better social technology, try to embody the idea of a better society populated by better humans, by packaging it as a god (the one you should listen to and honor, while ignoring the temptations of the others) [let's call this say the time of Abraham?]; then some generations later after this seems to be working, up the ante by promoting him to God [let's call this say the time of Moses?], even as the other elements of the human experience subsequently get worked and reworked (moved out of stories about gods into the foundational stories about early human interactions with, via, or in spite of God) [let's call this say the time of the Judges, Kings, and Prophets?]
If one agrees with this overall view, then one can see religious history in a different way. At the superficial level, sure, we have various battles between the Hebrews and polytheistic neighbors, but *essentially* these are battles about hedonism vs ambition, battles about the choice of ease, convenience, pleasure rather than the choice to be the best you can be. And of course these are battles within every individual and within the Hebrews, not just Hebrews vs everyone else.
And then essentially the same thing with Christianity vs Paganism.
>and asking 'do you believe in God?' is akin to asking 'do you believe in the highest, best things of which we are capable?'"
This is kind of true, but only if you look at a traditional religious culture from the outside. From the inside, they say stuff like "if (the Eucharist) is just a symbol, then to hell with it", which is basically why those cultures are declining these days.
The situation of our times, then, is something like a few different things happened:
- science happened, and chipped away at the "story" onto which the God idea was constructed. By taking the Bible literally rather than seriously, it became possible to find one factual mistake after another, and to dismiss the whole edifice as irrelevant myth. This is basically 1700s and 1800s.
- technology happened and we became wealthy enough not to see the connection between certain behaviors (individual and societal) and outcomes. This is basically 1900s.
- various parasites found ways to hack their desired outcomes into this framework (hack the end goal of "highest, best things of which we are capable"). This is basically 2000s.
End result is that we've not just dismissed the God story, we've dismissed what the God story *stood for*, the very idea of striving to be better as individuals and a society, and the sacrifices that it entails in the short term for a better overall life.
Can we put together a non-supernatural version of the God story? I don't think so. We tried, that's basically the Liberalism since 1950 project, and we've seen how disastrously that's gone off the rails.
Without a humility regarding our abilities to understand society, and without an actual love for our society, it seems infeasible that we can create a successful successor even in the smarter fraction of society (vide EA which seems to make essentially all the same mistakes as Liberalism, just with more sophisticated words justifying the arguments).
So I don't know where this takes us.
Today it looks like the end game is much wider incursion of Islam in the West. Which I'm not crazy about because Islam is (even more so than Christianity and Judaism) grounded in the extremely literal interpretation of supernatural texts, and with much less of the "highest, best things of which we are capable" that justifies the Christianity/Judaism in practice).
A *possible* future is one where Mormonism fulfills this role (at least in the US) rather than Islam. I'd rather see this future, because Mormonism is a lot more optimistic about the "highest, best things of which we are capable".
It feels to me like it offers the structure, discipline, and community people crave; but it also doesn't offer the hatred (especially of the West and the self) that seems to be the currently most desired item on campuses...
I'd love to see an intellectual Mormonism that's willing to interpret the entire theology in a Jordan Peterson-like vein and that reaches out across all campuses in the US offering such a community.
Alongside a more traditional Mormonism for people who want a less abstract more traditional version of religion.
But this is theory. I don't know the practical extent to which Mormonism has (like traditional Christianity) fully drunk the kool-aid of Liberalism and lost all credibility as a source of practical life values and self-discipline.
>Can we put together a non-supernatural version of the God story? I don't think so. We tried, that's basically the Liberalism since 1950 project, and we've seen how disastrously that's gone off the rails.
Well, in my opinion it's far beyond current human abilities to intentionally design workable versions of such stories. The secret of our success, as it were, is cultural adaptation, which worked well enough while the world changed slowly, but clearly is no longer adequate. So, one option would be that the technological civilization declines/collapses, change slows down, and then Mormonism/Islam/whatever would contentedly squat among the ruins. Another option is that we (or, more likely, our more capable successors of some kind) develop social technology appropriate for the conditions of postmodernity, until it's too late (for this iteration).
Commenting a bit late, but the Epic of Gilgamesh and it's themes of mortality are interestingly used in, of all things, an old dinosaur horror videogame.
Hey, cool—I was thinking of doing a review of the ol' *Epic* too, but (as usual) procrastinated too long.
I *have* done a big essay comparing *EoG* translations and the receptions thereof; maybe I ought to finally post it...
(Of course, there aren't really that many options from which to choose—at least, not modern ones, and in this case the scholarship moves quickly enough that you probably want a modern one—but maybe it'd be useful to someone anyway. 🤔)
As a total layman, I'd be super interested in the history of the translations and how our evolving understanding of the text influenced our opinions on its content and the Mesopotamian culture.
Post it! I'm interested
I think you've missed the point greatly. Gilgamesh ended up as one of the great tragic heroes of all time, with one of the most moving conclusions to an epic there is, and you glossed over it as an abrupt anticlimax?
This single fateful mistake is about as heartbreaking as, say, Orpheus and Eurydice, in a different way - Orpheus was consumed with worry about his love, while Gilgamesh was less than maximally paranoid about his luggage and lost his flower to uncaring nature. But Gilgamesh's tragic loss is broader because he lost eternal youth for all humanity (immortals can't die, the eternally young won't naturally die). I mean, if he just wanted to de-age himself, why didn't he just eat it, but instead immediately plan to use it on the elderly? Gilgamesh is clearly planning to cultivate this flower.
But fate hates humanity, so instead all we can do is gaze forlornly on the walls of Uruk. They're very nice walls, it's true, but the walls look a little different in the springtime of your reign than they do when you've returned from your mythic quest defeated and quite mortal. (And that's why it ends here and the voluminous fanfic continuations are somewhat lesser works).
The follies of our youth are, in retrospect, glorious compared the follies of our old age.
At the risk of projecting modern storytelling orthodoxy on a tale by a people a long time ago and a long way away- if the loss of the flower was a tragedy intended to be a focal point of the tale, it would not have been disposed of so quickly so near the end.
I think abrupt is the key word of abrupt anticlimax. So much work over the small stuff like preparing a boat, and the falling action happens in like 4 lines. I’m sure the author would prefer a long section where Gilgamesh stood on the ramparts and made decrees and ruled for generations and thought back to the snake and his friend and tied everything together. Or maybe he dies as a great king after winning a war or something. Anything other than the snake stealing the plant and repeat the first line of the epic.
> the walls look a little different in the springtime of your reign than they do when you've returned from your mythic quest defeated and quite mortal
"Hope makes a good breakfast, but a poor supper!" Sir Francis Bacon
Along similar lines, the introduction to Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino:
"Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his. In the lives of emperors there is a moment which follows pride in the boundless extension of the territories we have conquered, and the melancholy and relief of knowing we shall soon give up any thought of knowing and understanding them. There is a sense of emptiness that comes over us at evening, with the odor of the elephants after the rain and the sandalwood growing cold in the braziers, a dizziness that makes rivers and mountains tremble on the fallow curves of the planispheres where they are portrayed, and rolls up, one after the other, the despatches announcing to us the collapse of the last enemy troops, from defeat to defeat, and flakes the wax of the seals of obscure kings who beseech our armies' protection, offering in exchange annual tributes of precious metals, tanned hides, and tortoise shell. It is the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin, that corruption's gangrene has spread too far to be healed by our scepter, that the triumph over enemy sovereigns has made us the heirs of their long undoing. Only in Marco Polo's accounts was Kublai Khan able to discern, through the walls and towers destined to crumble, the tracery of a pattern so subtle it could escape the termites' gnawing."
https://invisible-cities.vercel.app/
I like Shaw's (I think) take: "“Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.”
Developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik studies the "lantern consciousness" of young children. Says they are more conscious than adults, and that psychedelics, novelty & artistic or scientific exploration temporarily make adult consciousness more like a child's.
https://alisongopnik.com/Papers_Alison/GopnikBonawitz2015.pdf
My reading is that he was going to test it on an elderly man before he took it himself. I don't read it as Gilgamesh wishing to save all humanity.
Excellent. Gilgamesh himself would smile upon your words, and then try to wrestle you.
This was a stunning read, thank you. I'm deeply fascinated (albeit fairly uneducated) on Mesopotamia/the emergence of civilisation, and I found this truly enthralling.
To anyone whom the conclusion resonated with, if you haven't read Siddhartha (Herman Hesse), I think you'd greatly enjoy it.
I'll be carrying the words of the innkeeper with me on my adventures from today forward—a wise lady indeed!
There is an extended take on the innkeepers wisdom in the bible: Ecclesiastes
See: 9:7–9:
"Go, eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with a merry heart; for God has already approved what you do. Let your garments always be white; let not oil be lacking on your head. Enjoy life with the wife whom you love, all the days of your vain life that he has given you under the sun..."
Also: read the whole thing (ECC).
> 8 There are some detailed pictures of the Pennsylvania tablet here.
The link is broken :-(
The original acxreviews.robennals.org version of this review had a working link, it's this one:
https://web.archive.org/web/20230525055935/https://www.penn.museum/collections/object_images.php?irn=245958
Thanks !
For those who want to share this story with their kids, I have enjoyed the appropriately abridged and beautifully illustrated version by Ludmila Zevan. It's broken into three books and is good for ages 7-10ish IMO.
https://a.co/d/0fUmh1FO
Obviously Enkidu was based on memories of Neanderthals.
Maybe Yetis are as well.
While the idea is interesting, the Neanderthals in the Near East probably died out 40+ thousand years before Gilgamesh. That would have been a helluva long memory.
I'd wager more on a human child reared by actual animals, that happened occassionally within written memory. Would fit with Enkidu being clearly one-of-a-kind.
Or even just a poetic exaggeration of a normal child. Little kids are wild, don't know about sex, and sometimes eat grass.
(I also think Adam and Eve in the Garden are small children.)
Children reared by animals never develop language (at least, Russian children raised by wolves don't), so that seems unlikely. He might just have been a bit unkempt.
True, but this is ultimately a work of fiction which probably rests on some reality, but embellishes things to be interesting.
If Gilgamesh was a real person, he probably didn't kill Humbaba and didn't reject a goddess either.
Depends on how old they were when they lost human contact.
Also, how normal they were before they were lost.
Not to mention being sent by the gods.
> I'd wager more on a human child reared by actual animals, that happened occassionally within written memory.
That is not something that has happened occasionally within written memory, or ever.
It is something we have written stories about, a rather different phenomenon.
I don't understand. You want to say that cases like Dina Sanichar weren't real?
What do you think happened to Dina Sanichar, and why do you think so?
Did wolves find him as an immobile infant and suckle him?
What was the nature of his relationship with wolves?
Can you distinguish him in any way from a child left in the wilderness who is raised, after the point of abandonment, by no one and nothing?
Your question seems fundamentally identical to acting incredulous over my imputed opinion that Uri Geller didn't exist.
Or another in the genre contrasting hunter-gatherers/barbarians/hill people vs. agriculturalists/civilized folk/alluvial empire
Enkidu is obviously based on the sci-fi concept of "What if there was a dude who was, like, real hairy?"
> "you could put your brain in a new body, or upload your consciousness to the cloud, and in some sense that thing would still be you. If so, that means you are the information in your brain"
Perhaps this thought experiment is already cliché, and I am unaware of that...
...but what would happen if someone committed a terrible crime, which remained undiscovered until after The Uploading? If the new instance of the brain/information/consciousness is "still that person," would the new instance deserve punishment after the crime is discovered?
Greg Egan has a take on this in "Dust" [correction: "Permutation City"], except the question isn't one of legal guilt, but a character's own feelings of guilt about something he once did. He has himself (non-destructively) uploaded to the virtual world, hoping that at least his double there will be free of the guilt that torments him. It doesn't work, though—his double is simply another copy of him and feels exactly the same way about his past as the original did.
Depends on the purpose of punishment. If the goal is to reduce recidivism or isolate criminals from society, maybe the "Uploading" already accomplishes this. If the goal is to enact justice by harming those who have harmed others, or provide satisfaction to victims/family of victims (revenge), then plausibly their new instance should be punished.
This is one issue considered in the story, The Redaction Machine: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CKgPFHoWFkviYz7CB/the-redaction-machine
It's so interesting to reread one of these and only realize halfway through that you did, in fact, read the story once in the past. Must've been under a different link though, that one came up as never-visited for me, and I don't ever "redact" browsing history.
Still find it a vexing plothole that people wouldn't just continually reset in smaller increments. There's plenty of ways to leave digestible information for Future You, even moreso with advanced technology...and in terms of resource consumption, it ought to cost less to redact a year 60 times than to redact 60 years once, since state divergence like e.g. mutational load is nonlinearly cumulative. Even if that weren't the case, there's no good explanation for why people culturally anchor on the Schelling of "die for real before redaction" and not just when they feel they're too old. Who cares if you redact Grandma's cancer back to being benign instead of nonexistent? We'll just have to try again tomorrow night, and it's still an improvement. (The fact that people start eventually "redacting early" because reasons also negates this supposed norm anyway...)
There's also the whole conceit that original states are, uh, fixed in linear time, so you must become the 21 year old you of 2021 rather than the newly 21 year old you of 2081...there's probably a physics/information theory explanation for that, but it's load-bearing, and not immediately obvious as a layperson why this has to be the case.
> Humans talk first and then learn how to read; large language models read so much they learn how to talk
Wouldn't it be more accurate to say they read so much they learn how to write, and listen so much they learn how to talk? English spelling is notoriously disconnected from pronunciation, Chinese even moreso.
> There are some detailed pictures of the Pennsylvania tablet here.
No, that link goes to http://penns/ which isn't a valid url.
Someone above gives the correct link: https://web.archive.org/web/20230525055935/https://www.penn.museum/collections/object_images.php?irn=245958
Thanks.
Hmmm -- in a tangent from the woman tavern keeper, I am thinking of Kubaba, the woman tavern-keeper, who made firm the foundations of Kish, when she was king.
Possibly legendary. The century-long reign is, of course, legendary. But Mesopotamia may have a tradition of woman tavern-keepers being important figures.
This is a really good review. Some nitpicks:
> It may not have a singular definitive text, like the Odyssey, but neither is it a vaguely-similar body of tellings and re-tellings, like Robin Hood or Batman.
True, but I think it’s a bit further toward the latter end of the spectrum than this implies. Some major differences between versions:
- the importance of Enkidu. In early versions he’s just Gilgamesh’s servant/henchman, but by the Standard Babylonian Version he’s Gilgamesh’s closest companion and his death is a key turning-point in the narrative.
- how Humbaba is defeated. In some Sumerian versions, Humbaba has seven magical auras that make him invincible, and Gilgamesh must trick him into taking them off one after another (https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/etcsl.cgi?text=t.1.8.1.5#, https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/etcsl.cgi?text=t.1.8.1.5.1#). The omission of this scene in the Standard Babylonian Version reflects that the later version of Gilgamesh is unambiguously a warrior-hero characterised by reckless belligerence, not a trickster-hero who wins by cunning.
> some of its themes (eg ‘what makes a good king’ or ‘how best to serve the gods’) aren’t very accessible in the 21st century
If you reframe ‘good king’ as ‘good leader’, then the first question is just as relevant as ever. Admittedly, the story’s answer -- ‘a good leader should make a minimum effort to fulfil their responsibilities rather than pursuing harebrained schemes for personal glory’ -- is pretty simplistic, but it’s still relevant to the modern world.
On the second theme, I don’t think that the Epic is really asking this question -- none of the main characters (except Uta-napishti) are particularly trying to serve the gods well. To the extent that the story has any philosophical point to make about the gods, it’s that picking a fight with them is a losing strategy even for semi-divine superheroes -- which is basically just a restatement of the Epic’s main theme of accepting mortality.
> Akkadian - a predecessor of modern Arabic and Hebrew -
True, but misleading. Akkadian is the oldest member of the Semitic language family, which includes Arabic and Hebrew, but it isn’t their direct ancestor (note, e.g., the lack of the West Semitic active perfective suffix conjugation).
> Two ‘scorpion-men’ try to stop him going further. After a lacuna, he seems to have persuaded them to let him continue.
IMO it’s not clear if they’re actually trying to stop him, or just to warn him that the path is dangerous.
> Gilgamesh meets a woman called Shiduri, who is inexplicably running a tavern at the end of the world
In fairness, Shiduri is a goddess (her name is marked with the divine determinative), so her business is presumably immune to mortal constraints like ‘customers’ or ‘income’.
> A dog entered a tavern and said, 'I can’t see anything. I’ll open this one.'”
This is great! In the same vein, I’m fond of this Sumerian riddle: “A house on a foundation like the sky, a house veiled like a treasure-chest, a house on a base like a goose. One goes in blind, one goes out seeing.” The answer is (rot13) fpubby.
> We don’t remember Gilgamesh in the 21st century because of the walls of Uruk, which are dust now, or for his great kingship, over an impressive-for-its-time Bronze Age slave state. We remember Gilgamesh because what he did was meaningful to people.
I don’t think these things are really separable. It would be misleading (at best) to say ‘We don’t remember Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan because of their conquests, but because what they did was meaningful to people.’
> “A house on a foundation like the sky, a house veiled like a treasure-chest, a house on a base like a goose. One goes in blind, one goes out seeing.”
Maybe you can explain what you like about this one. To me it feels like the answer doesn't have much to do with the riddle, except the blind -> seeing part.
What I like about it is that, like the bar joke, it's so shorn of its cultural context that it reads like absurdist humour. Sorry if I didn't make that clear.
Isn't the bar joke just not being read literally enough? The only necessary cultural context is the ability to understand the language the joke was written in.
At least, there was a twitter thread years ago by an Assyriologist who pointed out that (a) the dog's setup line has been translated into English as "I can't see a thing", because this is what the grammar of English requires, but (b) in the original, the subject of the verb "see" is not 𝗜 but instead 𝗺𝘆 𝗲𝘆𝗲𝘀. (Compare something like "my stomach troubles me" versus "I'm hungry".)
He then gave a more direct translation of the joke:
𝘈 𝘥𝘰𝘨 𝘸𝘢𝘭𝘬𝘴 𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘰 𝘢 𝘣𝘢𝘳 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘴𝘢𝘺𝘴 "𝘮𝘺 𝘦𝘺𝘦𝘴 𝘥𝘰 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘴𝘦𝘦 𝘢𝘯𝘺𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨".
𝘏𝘦 𝘴𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 𝘰𝘱𝘦𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘮.
I hadn’t heard of this reading. Thank you for inspiring me to have a look at the original text of the bar joke (lines 73-75 at https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/etcsl.cgi?text=c.6.1.05&display=Crit&charenc=gcirc#)
In the second line, the noun in the absolutive case (Sumerian is an ergative/absolutive language) is indeed ‘eye’ (igi). My reading of the verb (nu-mu-un-du8) is that nu- is the negative modal prefix (‘not’), -mu- is the ventive prefix, and the -n- of -un- is the perfective (ḫamṭu) 3rd person singular personal/animate ergative prefix, presumably referring to the dog. The verbal root is du8, which as a transitive verb means ‘to open’, and in combination with igi means ‘to see’. There is no speech marker or verb meaning ‘say’ in this line. So I think it would be fair to read the second line as something like “He did not see anything”, with the understanding that one of the standard idioms for ‘seeing’ includes the word for ‘eye’.
The verb in the third line looks like an imperfective (“I will open this”) and ends with the quotative enclitic -e-še. Note also that ĝal2 (which is usually interpreted here as part of the verb) can also be read as ‘door’ (ig); this leads to the “I will open the door” readings, which unfortunately struggle to explain ne-en ‘this’, which is a strictly independent demonstrative (as opposed to an enclitic demonstrative, which attaches to a noun).
So overall, it seems like the third line, not the second, should be taken as direct speech. But I’m not really good enough at Sumerian to have a strong opinion.
I found an archive of the thread. (The tweets themselves have been both taken down and withdrawn from the Internet Archive...)
As reported, his reading doesn't involve any quoted speech:
𝘈 𝘧𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘭𝘺 𝘥𝘰𝘨 𝘸𝘢𝘭𝘬𝘴 𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘰 𝘢 𝘣𝘢𝘳.
𝘏𝘪𝘴 𝘦𝘺𝘦𝘴 𝘥𝘰 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘴𝘦𝘦 𝘢𝘯𝘺𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨.
𝘏𝘦 𝘴𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 𝘰𝘱𝘦𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘮.
https://archive.is/FOP4W
> I think what we're seeing is an odd case of vowel harmony in which the /i/ of the conjugation prefix has assimilated to the /e/ of the following syllables.
> en-e-še stands for /i3-n-eš-e/.
> "He [imperative] open them."
I have no training and can't have an opinion of my own, except to note that this reading is sufficient to explain why this is in a list of jokes.
Thank you for looking into it.
I believe that Sumerian vowel harmony is only found in Old Sumerian texts, so it would be unusual to find it as late as the second millennium; but I’m not well-versed in this.
As to the context, I wouldn’t feel totally confident describing it as a list of jokes; while some of them definitely seem humorous, others seem more like idioms, proverbs, or aphorisms. For example:
Joke-like:
> Nine wolves having caught ten sheep, there was one too many and they did not know how to share out the portions. A fox came along and said: "Let me allocate the portions for you! The nine of you take one sheep. I by myself shall take nine -- this shall be my share!"
> The dog understands "Take it!", but does not understand "Put it down!"
Proverb-like:
> No one will give away even a barren cow for nothing.
> No-one walks for a second time at the place where a lion has eaten a man.
(Translations from https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/etcsl.cgi?text=t.6.1.05#)
I wonder if the house parts relate to the shape of the written word or the sound of the spoken word?
The word 'school' is literally 'house where tablets are distributed' (é-dub-ba-a), so the word 'house' (é) is a match.
And the word 'treasure-chest' is dub-šen, which also contains the syllable -dub- and which sounds vaguely like the word for 'scribe' (dub-sar).
Of course, I have no idea if any of this is even close to the intended interpretation.
"I wonder if we can expand our definition of making it." -- well, we better. "Making it" in many capacities has empowered things that clearly should not have the power and existence that they do, to continue to survive. The pressures of the 21st century are eroding what isn't timeless, let's say, whether from 20th century or many more centuries ago.
What exactly is wrong with reading the classic chronologically?
The author can’t answer until after the contest voting closes, but I imagine the risk is that Gilgamesh in particular is not easily approachable, for the reasons outlined. Starting with it, before building up experience with similar but more approachable works, would scare some people off.
The Epic of Gilgamesh is usually not included in the classics. The earlist work usually included is the Iliad.
In that case, unapproachable lists of gifts notwithstanding, I wonder if the problem is that starting with great works of literature from a culture so different from your own, where seemingly-minor differences in meaning can hint at nuances of the original culture which can vastly change the interpretation of a passage, can train you to look for similar subtleties of meaning even when a person’s culture is much more similar to your own, possibly to the point where you wilfully misunderstand them.
One motivation people have for a chronological reading is that you can see how each text makes references to the ones that come before it. But the problem is that you inevitably have to start in the middle, without some of the earlier texts that the first one you start with is referencing. And in practice, in terms of reading comprehension and artistic experience, by starting early, you're starting with the ones from the most distant cultural background from your own, that you'll be least prepared to understand.
A reverse chronological reading has the advantage of starting with the familiar, and then gradually moving you to more and more distant settings and background assumptions, in ways that you'll be better-prepared to follow.
This was great. It reminded me of The Buried Book by David Damrosch which is a history of the epic told backwards - effectively excavating down from the discovery of the palace, the working out how to read the text and so on. And on the way taking in the British invasion of Ethiopia where a key character has been taken hostage. It is absolutely one of my favourite books of all time.
It is also one of the great regrets of my podcasting 'career'. I asked Damrosch to come on the podcast to talk about it an he agreed. I was so excited! But after that I could never get him to reply to another email. I don't know whether he had just thought better of it or was ill or what. Regardless, it is an absolutely fantastic read - can't recommend it enough.
On repetitions, sometimes customs outlive their original purpose and then get used for something else. One example is the way the whole thing is book-ended by the paean to the glory of Uruk.
Another (I believe) is at the end of Tablet II. Gilgamesh has proposed to Enkidu the quest to kill Humbaba. Enkidu tells him this is a bad idea, but Gilgamesh brushes aside his objections. So Enkidu tells the elders of Uruk about what a bad idea it is. Then the elders go to Gilgamesh and tell him what a bad idea it is, repeating several of Enkidu's lines exactly. And then:
"When Gilgamesh heard the speech of his counselors,
He looked at his friend and laughed"
It's like he's saying, "You've been talking to them, haven't you, I can tell."
Then Enkidu joins him on the quest, 'cos a man's got to stand by his friend.
The philosophy lecturer Michael Sugrue has a video that introduces a thesis of epic poetry as the World Encyclopedia of its generating culture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKOoVMg9x1M.
In they video above, he explicitly looks at The Epic of Gilgamesh through this lens, posing the idea that this time period marks an emergence of the recognition of individual human experience as subjective. I.e. for some reason, Mesopotamean culture found it important to make Gilgamesh recognizing his own death through that of Enkidu a central subject worthy of retelling for centuries.
I greatly enjoyed this review. I feel like I learned a lot (I vaguely knew that genesis was based on other works including the flood, but that’s it). I had no knowledge of the origin of writing, clay tablets and how they are studied, or even hearing of this outside of the Star Trek reference. It was written entertainingly with LOTS of micro humor and asides and references. Just the right amount! It even relates it to AI. This is a perfectly tailored post to this audience, so much so that it almost feels like Scott himself wrote it, though I don’t think he did. Not enough kaballah related jokes for Scott. Thank you for writing.
As a slight aside, I’ve noticed, perhaps by interacting on reddit and other platforms where this is common, that I am now vaguely triggered by phrases that sound like AI. If a comment or post has one, I immediately stop and ask myself if something is AI written. It’s difficult to ever know for sure and I don’t want to witch hunt accuse people of doing so (I have, incorrectly, in the past. There were 3-4 such phrases in the final two sections of this post. I find myself pausing to think - was this edited by AI? Written by AI and then transcribed to remove the lame bits? Did an author need an analogy and turn to AI for just one sentence? Usually my rule of thumb is to consider the rest of the work. If there are 4 ai triggers in a 4 sentence comment, it’s probably AI. (‘It’s just just x, it’s y’, flowery metaphors that don’t make as much sense in close proximity to each other, labeling an opposing argument in quotes [if you want to argue for the “let’s go to breakfast” side, then you don’t value sleep”], etc). In this work, I noticed 3-4 things that made me question in a work that’s very long, so I find it unlikely to have being used AI.
I write this aside to say, I don’t like that my mind does this. Why do I care? We’re all online anyway. I use spell check. But somehow, knowing it’s another human brain on the other side of the text, not a mostly automatic reply, is why I’m here. I wouldn’t like to be the only human on Moltbook. I proportionately enjoy the internet less the more proportionately it becomes moltbook. There’s two alternatives - we witch-hunt and overcorrect and people get annoyed but AI usage gets semi-banned/downvoted, or people that agree with me just use the internet less. Probably not a bad thing.
As a further aside, at my work, they highly encourage us to use copilot to write emails. They say it makes us more efficient. There’s something so viscerally different about using copilot to write someone’s annual review than taking the time to do it yourself. I’m not sure why but it has something to do with the above, and sincerity, even when both people know.
Anyway, good review, better than any I read last year so likely has my vote.
I sure hope Scott would comment on the Kabbalistic implications of the god named Ea saving as many people as possible.
I agree on both points - having enjoyed the review, and having a negative feeling about reading something that sounds like AI.
Stylistically, this one did not ping my personal AI detectors. But it was in the same neighborhood while still feeling recognizably human. I wonder if the author corresponds with AIs often enough to pick up some of their stylistic tics, the way one often does after reading a lot of a particular human author.
I thought this as well. It didn’t ping it but a few small style choices activated my subroutine.
There were definitely a couple moments here and there that triggered my "AI spidey-sense", but it wasn't consistent enough that I felt comfortable bringing it up as a possible false positive. The Sword of Pangram unfortunately hangs over all writing, these days.
I did however notice that the Conclusion section takes a rather different tone from the rest, in addition to being almost bereft of links and footnotes. Felt sort of The Bottom Line-y. Epecially:
>Gilgamesh contains multitudes, and the clearest example is in the Old Babylonian version giving us an alternative perspective to the Standard - a perspective delivered by a woman running a tavern: [block quote]
...which is nearly a straight copy-paste from earlier, that we didn't really need explicit reminding of? Previous review had this same thing, where some later sections would seem to "forget" a passage or concept was already used prior, and reintroduce them as if they were novel. It's strange.
In some ways in this review of this text, it’s more of a reference to the text repeating itself. I’d personally chalk this up to an editing choice. I enjoyed the conclusion repeating the body some. Gave me a sense of closure.
I loved the review but in the beginning and end I also felt like there was some AI stuff going on. I almost stopped reading at the beginning because of that, but very glad I kept going.
The tricky thing about AI prose is that we are all linguistic sponges, and inevitably pick up some of the style of language we see and hear a lot. And kids pick it up way faster than we do. Seems inevitable to me that over time we are going to speak more like AI's.
Also, and this is an intuition that is harder to defend: We are going to *think* more like AI's, partly because more of our thinking is done by AI, partly because we will absorb some of the AI thinking style as we do speaking style. Net result is that we are going to become less conscious. (Except for little things like that, though, man are those suckers going to be great for us.)
"[S]ome days I dream of a big-budget Hollywood adaptation or a prestige TV series to bring it into the popular imagination on the same level as the Odyssey. (Other days, I think I should be careful what I wish for.)
Oh indeed. Just imagine:
This Fall only on Amazon Prime! From the creators of "Rings of Power" we bring you Payne and McKay's "Humbaba: The Untold Story"!
The blockbuster of 2027! Coming to an IMAX near you! Christopher Nolan's "Gilgamesh"! Starring Zendaya as Aruru and Elliot Page as Enkidu!
Gilgamesh to Urshanabi: "We were the Akkadians all along. Our Sumerian Age is collapsing".
The reviewer says the ending is an "effing weird" anticlimax, but it seems quite fitting and instructive, and modern in a way, that the hero ends up back where he started, a sadder but wiser man.
It reminds me of a quote from a T S Eliot poem [quick Google to get my facts and the quote straight! ..] called Little Gidding:
"We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time."
This was delightful, and thank you for this. One reason I’m such a Terror Management Theory Maximalist is that the further we go back in time, the more directly the ur-conflicts seem to approximate the great dread of oblivion, the trumpeting finality of erasure. Gilgamesh just lays it out, a story of a dude emoting fecklessly, such behavior a proxy for the conflict and the thesis. That’s why, I think, the ending is so great: it’s above all a *reorientation*, something like a coming-to.
Anyway this was awesome; thank you for penning this.
This is the kind of writing I wish more people in this lane would do. Specific, useful, no fake depth.
Very much agreed.
Phenomenal
Great piece Scott
It's not Scott. Read the paragraph in italics at the very beginning.
"This is one of the finalists in the 2026 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. "
As I can't tell that anonymous person THEY wrote something great, I will tell Scott who posted it.
But hey...Thanks a million for telling me what I already knew.
There is a particular tradition of poorly-founded guesses that Scott submitted a review to his own contest (because one time he actually did), so your top-level comment is going to read to a lot of people here like an overconfident, off-the-cuff assertion that he wrote it, regardless of what you meant.
While I get that, I don't really care.
This was simply me...telling Scott....that THIS was a great piece.
I'm not those other people, and this was a great piece.
This is delightful
Alternate listening, in case Akkadian is too highbrow for you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAMRTGv82Zo
If, like me, you haven't our reviewer's patience and persistence to read the original with all of its quirks, you might enjoy Robert Silverberg's retelling, "Gilgamesh the King". It's been a while since I read it, but seems to capture the core of the story.
A literally fantastic commentary. Thank you, whoever you are, very much.
I would 100% recommend reading there are rivers in the sky by Elif Shafak if this epic really interested you. A character in the book explores the epic and it’s cultural and geographical significance of the time
The best thing here is Shiduri: the tavern-keeper gets the wisest lines in the poem and the later editor cuts them. But the ending wants two things at once, since her point is that you die and that’s fine, while yours is that in some sense you don’t. Maybe I remember wrong but Akkadian isn’t an ancestor of Hebrew and Arabic. It’s East Semitic, they’re Central Semitic, so the relation is collateral rather than lineal.
what a wonderful read! really awesome!
I may not be the first in the comments, but not only the deluge made it into the bible, the wise bartender's advice to Gilgamesh did, too: Ecclesiastes 9:7–9:
"Go, eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with a merry heart; for God has already approved what you do. Let your garments always be white; let not oil be lacking on your head. Enjoy life with the wife whom you love, all the days of your vain life that he has given you under the sun..."
I may not be the first in the comments, but not only the deluge made it into the bible, the wise bartender's advice to Gilgamesh did, too: Ecclesiastes 9:7–9:
"Go, eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with a merry heart; for God has already approved what you do. Let your garments always be white; let not oil be lacking on your head. Enjoy life with the wife whom you love, all the days of your vain life that he has given you under the sun..."
And the whole of Ecclesiastes aka Qohelet is about a great king, bored to death and in fear of it, trying different stuff to find a way out of mortality, but finds they are all 'vain'.
Damn, and here I was hoping we could get through just one Review Contest with no shoehorned mentions of AI. Although this one's less of a stretch than some previous offenders, to be sure.
Tone was weird throughout, I found this somewhat irritating to read in a way that felt disconnected from the actual content. Think it's partly due to the constant external links and copious footnotes, some of which clarify, others of which are just for the lulz. Sort of reminded me of The Sequences in this regard: I couldn't just gloss over the links/footnotes, because they might contain really important relevant information, but also they might just be shitposting filler. Ultimately this amounts to distraction from the review itself...which already doesn't have "a lot of ruin" to spare formatting-wise, due to the unfortunate decision to regularly break up the Tablets with longish interludes. I kind of just want to read the story, then analyze later? It's already largely a disjointed tale of random episodes to begin with, don't make it harder! Not even saying the historical context is superfluous, just that it takes up roughly as many words here as the Tablets themselves.
(It was also my understanding that one of the interpretations for the ending of the poem is that the narrative is supposed to be circular in nature - it doesn't actually end, just starts over again at the beginning, an endless synecdochal cycle of death and rebirth. Is this a hallucination?)
It's also funny to run into subculture boundaries...Gilgamesh might not be as well-known as some other heroes of myth, but you absolutely could not escape knowledge of That Shiny Golden Bastard and his bullshit Gate of Babylon if you were a weeb of a certain era. That particular interpretation of the OG King makes me want to grade this review on a curve and mash the "like" button automatically (or, hell, even his foppish FF5 appearance)...but it wouldn't be an honest review of the actual review of the actual Epic of Gilgamesh. I wanted to like it, but could not. Look upon my review, ye mighty, and despair. As another gold-loving king once said, "Sad!"
Did somebody ‘call it’ yet that this is the secret Scott Alexander review? If not, first.
Awesome - and in any case, Scott-level - read!
Most of this wasn't news to me, I knew Gilgamesh well already. But I have one passage to address.
> But for some reason, when inventing writing from scratch, this simple recipe [alphabets] seems unavailable.
I have a pretty good guess why they didn't think of an alphabet. In these days of universal literacy, our writing strongly influences how we think of speech, even though a linguist would tell you speech is primary. There are people who think there is a "p" sound in "psychology", until you put a candle in front of them and show them the flame does not flicker as they say the word. People are not aware that they have a merger like cot-caught until you show them.
Imagine you're an English person trying to invent alphabetical writing from scratch, unburdened by the legacy of Latin. Good for you! You will be able to write "little" with a 1:1 correspondence to the IPA symbols transcribing the sound of the word, /ˈlɪtᵊl/, though your symbols will be different in shape as you won't base them off the Latin alphabet.
But that is the broad transcription. Your mind, not used to writing and standardized language, will in fact hear something more like [ˈɫɪɾɫ̩] or [ˈlɪʔo] depending on who says it. The sounds assimilate and meld into each other, there is no discrete boundary, something that is called "n" in the Latin-based English orthography is different depending on its context and the person who says it and how fast they're talking right now.
By the way, you mention in the footnotes that tones can be denoted by diacritics. I'd argue that this is a product of modern thinking too. Linguistics knows that e.g. in Modern Chinese, tones are orthogonal to other vowel qualities, so it makes sense to use an orthogonal notation for them. Something similar, encoding the individual factors of pronunciation into writing rather than making an arbitrary letter for every combination of them, was done by King Sejong or Jan Hus (for Czech), but they too already had millenia of experience with writing to build on.
For an ancient it might not be so obvious. Did you know that Old Chinese didn't have tones, but had more complicated syllable structure, and gradually some of these letters in the syllables faded out but left an influence in the form of tones - so if you had something like Chinese in the middle of the transition, the tone of a vowel would be inextricable from the phonemes around it.
With concepts, it's a clearer than with sounds. Everyone, even people who speak a foreign dialect or language, agrees what a sheep is (with the possible exception of philosophers). So making a character for "sheep" and then borrowing it for a homonymous word might perhaps be more comprehensible to ancient readers.
Dang this reads like classic SSC. Love it.
I'm married to a woman from an evangelical background, and several years ago her family reunion was in Kentucky, where we all visited the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter. To their credit, rather than Victorian outrage, the museum openly addressed the similarities between the account of Noah and Gilgamesh, as well as discussed other early civilizations' accounts of a great deluge in pre-recorded history. Made for some great discussions between the family's biblical literalists and non-literalists at the bourbon tastings the next day.
One of the unfortunate consequences of America being so steeped in Protestant Biblical literalism (including atheists) is the gap between what “divinely inspired” means to the average person (like, I presume, the author) and the average well-read Christian. Assuming for the sake of argument that the flood narrative is taken directly from the Epic (and not drawn from a common oral tradition, which, conversely, would be evidence for the truth of the Biblical account) that would not preclude “divine inspiration.”
> It’s easy to think of the many versions of this text as a distraction or an annoyance, but we should resist the temptation to ignore anything except the ‘proper’ version. The Epic of Gilgamesh is best thought of as an evolving work of art, honed by generations over a thousand years. It may not have a singular definitive text, like the Odyssey, but neither is it a vaguely-similar body of tellings and re-tellings, like Robin Hood or Batman.
I don't understand what the author is trying to say here. Every single one of the mentioned examples is identical in this regard. All of them are the vaguely-similar body of tellings and retellings that he says they aren't. That's how mythology works. People tell stories, and versions diverge, and sometimes people compile several stories into anthologies.
Considering the Odyssey:
>> Zenodotus curated an edition of the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey that differed significantly, in both form and content, from a later edition curated by Aristarchus of Samothrace, director of the Library in the second century BCE, whose reputation as an editor—not only of Homer but also of other Classics—eventually overshadowed the earlier editorial efforts of Zenodotus.
>> Aristarchus frequently questioned the edition of Zenodotus, whose Homeric text featured a wealth of alternative wordings—ordinarily described as variants—where the form and the meaning of such variants differed, sometimes radically, from the corresponding forms preferred by Aristarchus.
( https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2024/2024.02.18/ )
How exactly is that supposed to be different from the Epic of Gilgamesh, or from Batman?
We have a standard recension of Robin Hood that comes to us from Howard Pyle, who compiled his version just five short centuries after the earliest Robin Hood stories we know of. How is that different?
> while the Old Babylonian represents Babylonia in ascendance, the Standard Babylonian is likely from a time of its decline, as the Assyrian empire gradually eclipsed it. This version has a feel of a culture looking backwards more than forwards; the scribal tradition of the day was focussed heavily around preserving classics in the form of ‘definitive editions’, which is probably why this version is edited so carefully and bears such scholarly skill.
Again, this is exactly the same phenomenon already known for Odysseus, Robin Hood, and Batman. With no differences!
> If you’d like to hear it in the original Akkadian while you read, the internet can provide
Funny to think that in 4000 years, the last speaker of English may be some dedicated linguist posting whatever the 6000AD-equivalent-of-a-YouTube-video-is with a title like "Twilight, read in its original English"
Are there any good versions for kids? It seems like there is some decent raw material here for an illustrated kids' book.
One note on the similarity of the flood narratives in the Epic of Gilgamesh and Genesis: the review says this is "seemingly clear-cut evidence that one of the foundational texts of Christianity had not been divinely narrated, but recycled from an earlier myth," but think about this evidence in Bayesian terms. Are similar flood narratives what we would expect to see if Genesis borrows from Sumerian mythical traditions? Yes. Are similar flood narratives what we would expect if Genesis is true and the flood actually happened? Also yes. Since this evidence fits both hypotheses (and is often used by Christians as evidence that the Bible is true), we shouldn't assume that Victorian Christians (or modern Christians) would be outraged at the discovery of the Epic of Gilgamesh.
I think the third option was the most parsimonious one: these creation myths were in the zeitgeist. Today, almost everyone knows that the Earth is round and orbits the Sun and is orbited by the Moon etc.; back then, everyone knew that the Earth was flat and at one point it was all flooded by the gods who saved one righteous man etc. The ancient people who eventually became Jewish believed that too; it was an obvious fact of life to them. But they also honestly believed that they figured out the right answer to who the god was, who the righteous man was, what really happened, and what lesson is to be taken from it all.
If genesis were literally true, humans were created twice.
"I keep wondering how common it was for men in particular to want to run off and live wild,"
I doubt this was common. but like other near east societies (and far east for that matter), the steppe was an endless source of people who were already living wild, who could be tempted to assimilate.
Sometimes the assimilation would be peaceful-- you might hire them as auxiliaries to patrol the borders. Sometimes less so-- they might conquer the city and replace the ruling class. Hammurabi, for example, had been a nomad of a tribe called the Amorites before ruling Babylon. But regardless of how they come to the city, the city civilizes them.
Fascinating stuff. Parts of the commentary remind me of Terra Ignota, in a good way. Not sure what I took away from it but maybe that's as it should be. (For some obscure reason I've recently started to wonder if trying to impose modern notions of "theme" and "message" onto ancient epics is a mistake!)
"Saddam Hussein's romance novel"
If I had a nickel for every dictator who also wrote a terrible romance novel I'd have three nickels, which isn't a lot but it's still weird that it happened thrice.
(The other two, if anyone cares, are Napoleon Bonaparte and Benito Mussolini.)
> All the people who loved them, and the people who loved their lovers, and the people who loved their lovers’ lovers. These souls in their millions are in this writing - maybe in a weaker sense than the direct authors, but they are there nonetheless.
This is why I always liked traditions with ancestor worship & culture heroes. e.g. the Yellow Emperor probably didn't exist and definitely didn't literally invent writing, daoism, the compass, etc, but what the yellow emperor *represents* (the cultural legacy & technological achievements of nameless past people) is very real.
https://substack.com/@dmierkin/note/c-82835404
Here is my small tribute to the epic
Re Footnote 6:
Have you read Jordan Peterson's latest book, _We Who Wrestle With God_?
It's one long riff on the "real meaning" of various parts of the bible, and (spoiler alert) the overriding theme is something like "God is what a civilization deems to be the highest, best things of which we are capable; and asking 'do you believe in God?' is akin to asking 'do you believe in the highest, best things of which we are capable?'"
Attempting to compress a very long argument into one sentence makes this sound like Pilgrim's Progress in which various elements of the Human Experience are personified as literal objects, but this being Jordan Peterson the argument is a lot more sophisticated (and a lot more convincing).
I raise this because one element I kept returning to throughout the book was the historical evolution, how this all came together as it did, given that this is an argument vastly more sophisticated than most people are capable of.
And so I wonder the extent to which your monotheism aside captures this.
It feels like the natural state of humanity is one that sees minor divinity everywhere, whether shamanism or gods as essentially celebrities. (Like us, only more so along one or two dimensions.) In such an environment, do a few individuals experimenting to build a better social technology, try to embody the idea of a better society populated by better humans, by packaging it as a god (the one you should listen to and honor, while ignoring the temptations of the others) [let's call this say the time of Abraham?]; then some generations later after this seems to be working, up the ante by promoting him to God [let's call this say the time of Moses?], even as the other elements of the human experience subsequently get worked and reworked (moved out of stories about gods into the foundational stories about early human interactions with, via, or in spite of God) [let's call this say the time of the Judges, Kings, and Prophets?]
If one agrees with this overall view, then one can see religious history in a different way. At the superficial level, sure, we have various battles between the Hebrews and polytheistic neighbors, but *essentially* these are battles about hedonism vs ambition, battles about the choice of ease, convenience, pleasure rather than the choice to be the best you can be. And of course these are battles within every individual and within the Hebrews, not just Hebrews vs everyone else.
And then essentially the same thing with Christianity vs Paganism.
>and asking 'do you believe in God?' is akin to asking 'do you believe in the highest, best things of which we are capable?'"
This is kind of true, but only if you look at a traditional religious culture from the outside. From the inside, they say stuff like "if (the Eucharist) is just a symbol, then to hell with it", which is basically why those cultures are declining these days.
The situation of our times, then, is something like a few different things happened:
- science happened, and chipped away at the "story" onto which the God idea was constructed. By taking the Bible literally rather than seriously, it became possible to find one factual mistake after another, and to dismiss the whole edifice as irrelevant myth. This is basically 1700s and 1800s.
- technology happened and we became wealthy enough not to see the connection between certain behaviors (individual and societal) and outcomes. This is basically 1900s.
- various parasites found ways to hack their desired outcomes into this framework (hack the end goal of "highest, best things of which we are capable"). This is basically 2000s.
End result is that we've not just dismissed the God story, we've dismissed what the God story *stood for*, the very idea of striving to be better as individuals and a society, and the sacrifices that it entails in the short term for a better overall life.
Can we put together a non-supernatural version of the God story? I don't think so. We tried, that's basically the Liberalism since 1950 project, and we've seen how disastrously that's gone off the rails.
Without a humility regarding our abilities to understand society, and without an actual love for our society, it seems infeasible that we can create a successful successor even in the smarter fraction of society (vide EA which seems to make essentially all the same mistakes as Liberalism, just with more sophisticated words justifying the arguments).
So I don't know where this takes us.
Today it looks like the end game is much wider incursion of Islam in the West. Which I'm not crazy about because Islam is (even more so than Christianity and Judaism) grounded in the extremely literal interpretation of supernatural texts, and with much less of the "highest, best things of which we are capable" that justifies the Christianity/Judaism in practice).
A *possible* future is one where Mormonism fulfills this role (at least in the US) rather than Islam. I'd rather see this future, because Mormonism is a lot more optimistic about the "highest, best things of which we are capable".
It feels to me like it offers the structure, discipline, and community people crave; but it also doesn't offer the hatred (especially of the West and the self) that seems to be the currently most desired item on campuses...
I'd love to see an intellectual Mormonism that's willing to interpret the entire theology in a Jordan Peterson-like vein and that reaches out across all campuses in the US offering such a community.
Alongside a more traditional Mormonism for people who want a less abstract more traditional version of religion.
But this is theory. I don't know the practical extent to which Mormonism has (like traditional Christianity) fully drunk the kool-aid of Liberalism and lost all credibility as a source of practical life values and self-discipline.
>Can we put together a non-supernatural version of the God story? I don't think so. We tried, that's basically the Liberalism since 1950 project, and we've seen how disastrously that's gone off the rails.
Well, in my opinion it's far beyond current human abilities to intentionally design workable versions of such stories. The secret of our success, as it were, is cultural adaptation, which worked well enough while the world changed slowly, but clearly is no longer adequate. So, one option would be that the technological civilization declines/collapses, change slows down, and then Mormonism/Islam/whatever would contentedly squat among the ruins. Another option is that we (or, more likely, our more capable successors of some kind) develop social technology appropriate for the conditions of postmodernity, until it's too late (for this iteration).
Commenting a bit late, but the Epic of Gilgamesh and it's themes of mortality are interestingly used in, of all things, an old dinosaur horror videogame.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QxJZ7giOefs
To say anything more would be a massive spoiler.
This was super interesting! We read this last semester but our professor made us look at it through the lens of “POCO Theory” 🙄