#(2) the epic of gilgamesh (herbert mason translation)

[pendraegon]

are there any translations of gilgamesh you reccommend

okay first of all LOVE that i have a reputation of someone who not only has read multiple translations but also has pdfs of them...which is like, it’s true but i LOVE knowing that this sentiment exists. anyways, here’s a list of some gilgamesh translations and my thoughts on them for you anon! :3c

[1] the stephen mitchell “translation” — his is not so much a translation as mitchell himself has not translated the text from the akkadian HOWEVER, he has cobbled together a bunch of differing translations together into this one. it’s definitely the most...i don’t want to say easiest but the most readable of the bunch. if you’ve never read the epic of gilgamesh before i think this would be a good place to start! (:

[2] the andrew george translation. i think this is the most popular one if i’m not mistaken? this one’s cool because it has a side-by-side bit with what’s written on the tablet and then george’s translation from akkadian!! it’s definitely not as “novel-like” or “flowy” as say the mitchell or the sanders or the mason translation but it’s fun to peruse if you’re interested! (:

[3] the herbert mason translation. i REALLY like this one!!!!!!!! if you’ve seen the iconic “Gilgamesh was called a god and a man; Enkidu was an animal and a man. It is the story of their becoming human together.” it comes from this one!!!

[4] the nk sanders translation. i remember skimming this a while back and enjoying it!

[5] the stephanie dalley translation. [6] benjamin foster translation [7] the maureen gallery kovacs translation — haven’t read any of these three but poking around ive read really good things about dalley’s [8] the alexander heidel translation. also haven’t read this but this pdf comes with a comparison to the old testament. i’ll probably check this out bc it seems interesting??

edit:

[9] gutenberg has clay and jastrow's!

[farmandbarn]

Loss and Love

Thursday, 2 August 2018

A thankfully cool day for work. With the rain last night I spent most of my time digging on the inside of the barn rather than the outside where it would've been too muddy. Now I'm happy to be here because I know it's only temporary but, man, I get why almost all of our ancestors left the farm as soon as they were able. I say our ancestors since, until modern times, pretty much everyone lived and worked on a farm.

It just occurred to me, probably can't get a pizza delivered out here.

The lure of the city must've been strong. Especially with new opportunities. Like the factory. Hard to imagine thinking that a factory was cutting edge-- it was probably like working for Google or Apple back then.

That choice, from the perspective of today, seems grim. Long, back-breaking hours on the farm or long, back-breaking hours in the city. But for them, the ones in the past, it must've been exciting.

Things change, I guess. Much like this river I recently saw, which was, I'm sure, once very different looking.

Except for the few things that don't change. Or rather, can't. Certain literary figures, for instance. I say can't because, well, a change would destroy something vital inside us. It would sever a tie leading us back to ourselves, back to what it is to be human.

As Herbert Mason wrote, regarding his verse narrative translation of our oldest (surviving) story, the Gilgamesh:

Probably there was a Gilgamesh and he was endowed by tradition with a superhuman mind and spirit. Perhaps if we were to doubt the reality of Gilgamesh because of the folkloric hyperbole about him and his emotions as drawn in the epic, we would have to doubt whatever it is in ourselves that identifies with him-- or, for that matter, with the Biblical Job or the Shakespearean King Lear. Looked at in this light, the Gilgamesh has survived in our world because a constellation of our emotions is reflected in it. We could almost say that anything so profoundly human as the image of Gilgamesh was bound to reappear, yet we are still surprised to learn that one of the very oldest stories of man is so inherently contemporary.

The story of Gilgamesh is, by the way, a story of loss and grief. Things that never change. Personally, I have read and reread the story many times, but it was during the experience of pain and grief and loss that this story spoke the loudest. Across the centuries, across thousands of years, his voice still reaches us.

Gilgamesh sat hushed as his friend's eyes stilled. In his silence he reached out To touch the friend whom he had lost.

Though it is not only the sad things that are forever. There is, after all, Westley and Buttercup:

To doubt them, would be to doubt life itself. It would be a suicide of sorts.

[scottymcgeesterwrites]

The Great Flood Myth

    I wrote the first version of this article after watching the movie Noah by Darron Aronofsky. Everybody was confused by the rock people, which I immediately knew as having some basis in Jewish mythology.

The Great Flood Myth always intrigued me. As a freshman in college, whenever I had time to myself, I searched the school library for more information on why it appears that every major culture across the world has a Great Flood myth. It predates all ancient Hebrew scriptures. We’re talking way back to the time of the Babylonians. (The former being circa 1,000 BCE and the latter being circa 2,300 BCE)

The Genesis version of Noah’s Ark that we all are familiar with from the Old Testament is an adaptation of nearly the same story found in The Epic of Gilgamesh.

Not that Gilgamesh.

Yes, that one.

Gilgamesh has nothing to do with the flood directly, but rather he consults an old man, Utnapishtim, who goes on a long tangent about how he and and his family were warned by the god Ea of the destruction of humans. The reason for the gods’ hatred of man was because they were too loud.

Literally - that was it.

Imagine your neighbor trying to flood your house because you played the guitar too loud or fucked too loud.

In Babylonian mythology, man was created to serve the gods. The gods created us “in their image and likeness” to do their work. This is the source of many alien conspiracy theories which state that we were actually genetically engineered to serve our predecessors but, like Utnapishtim, I digress. Ea told him, “Yo, the gods hate you all, but I like you. You’re a cool dude. Go build a giant boat and like, I dunno, cross your fingers.” Essentially, Utnapishtim does the same exact thing as Noah, even with the animals. This and many other ancient Mesopotamian myths seem to have influenced Genesis, which makes us conclude that the Hebrews most likely came from ancient Mesopotamia. The Epic of Gilgamesh isn’t the first time the flood myth appears. Things can get confusing here with the mention of Babylonia and Sumerian and Akkadian, mostly because all these cultures lived together in the great region that was known as Mesopotamia.

The first real tale of the flood myth that was adapted into the Epic of Gilgamesh was seen in the tale of  Ziusudra, a Sumerian myth. This follows the exact same story except with different names. Ea is replaced by Enki and Utnapishtim by Ziusudra. A notable difference is that Ziusudra was the ruler of the great city Shuruppak. In the end, there are three ancient tablets that still survive telling the same sort of flood myth:

The Tale of Ziusudra (Sumerian) The Tale of Atra-Hasis (Akkadian) and lastly Utnapishtim’s tale in the Epic of Gilgamesh (Babylonian) But we also see similar stories, if not exact, in almost every fucking culture ever.

In Hindu mythology, a Vishnu avatar warns the first man, Manu, of the flood and tells him to build a boat.

In African tribes, we see a variety of a flood myth.

In Greek mythology, humans angered Zeus, so he decided to flood the world. Prometheus warns Deucalion and tells him to build an ark. (The Greeks seemed to hypothesized that there was a flood based on fossils found inland and in mountain areas.)

We even see flood myths in Native American mythology, which really brings up the question - Is this based on a true event?

During those ancient times, the Ice Age was receding. (Technically we are still in an Ice Age - an Ice Age is defined by a period of time when there are polar ice caps) Water levels rose in the Persian Gulf, and on a global scale, the water level rose gradually for thousands of years from 18,000 BCE to 8,000 BCE. There are dozens of other explanations for this universal mythological phenomena, which include:

a meteor crashed in the Indian Ocean around 3000-2800 BCE, creating the Burckle Crater and generating a massive tsunami.

the Thera eruption (about 1630-1600 BCE), also would have created a tsunami.

the rapid draining of Lake Agassiz (specifically to explain Native American flood myths)

and aliens, becuase why the fuck not? You gotta have aliens.

Noah in the Old Testament vs. Darron Aronofsky’s film Noah

In the Old Testament, the story of Noah is really about 2 pages long. You’d think that’s hardly enough to make a 2 hour long movie from, but there’s a lot a writer can conjure up from the surrounding mythology. Before the flood story in Genesis, there’s a tidbit of verses people usually gloss over because it references blatant, weird mythology that nobody cares about except fantasy and sci-fi writers (so me). Genesis 6:1-4 talks about beings called the “nephilim”. Little is written about them in those verses aside from the fact that they’re implied to be a hybrid of angels and humans. The angels looked down at the humans, got a little horny, and made angel-human freak babies. They were also known as giants.

Nephilim is derived from the Hebrew word for “fall”, which gave rise to the idea of “fallen angels.”

Fallen angels are virtually never mentioned in the Bible by those names, but actually by the word for “watcher”. Darron Aronofsky’s fallen angels are actually called Watchers in his film. Watchers are referenced once as angels in the canonical Bible in Daniel 4.

Watchers are greatly expanded upon in the apocryphal (non-canonical) Book of Enoch, with Azazel being the most famous. He and other watchers taught the humans how to create weapons and jewelry and other cool stuff. Of course, this book was not accepted into the final canon for Christianity, neither in mainstream Judaism.   Even the rock creatures are based on something. They were molded after the Jewish mythology of golems, and though the word in Psalms 139:16 was meant to figuratively describe a human’s unshaped form, Jewish folklore has them as actual beings that one could create to do one’s bidding. So in short, all this isn’t 100% pulled out of Darron Aronofsky’s ass. He was molding canonical and non-canonical references into a reimagined story. Here are some other differences between the movie Noah and the real mythology:

Tabul-cain is briefly mentioned in the Old Testament but he isn’t associated with the flood myth. Tabul-cain is briefly noted as the world’s first smithy. Darron uses him as the main antagonist in the film, which is actually quite fitting. There is a scene of him forming swords, which is a reference to his Biblical personae.

All of Noah’s three sons each have a wife to take to the ark in the Bible. Of course, for character conflict to drive a more dramatic story, Ham is denied a wife in the film.

Emma Watson’s character is completely made up

(Seriously, if the Bible had hot bitches like that, a lot of us would still be reading it)

Methuselah actually died 7 days before the flood began in the Old Testament

In both versions, Noah gets drunk after the flood. In the Old Testament, he does so because he creates the first vineyard and essentially becomes the world’s first drunkard. In the film, it was out of depression.

More about Noah is actually elaborated in the Qur'an, the Islamic equivalent to the Bible.

While in the Bible, Noah just does what he’s told without a word, the Qur'an has him as a prophet. He goes out and warns people about the flood. They don’t believe him and shun him. Some of this is played out in the film, although I cannot say if Darron also looked at the Qur'an (but I bet he did).

Sources: The Flood Myth by Alan Dundes

Reading the Old Testament: An Introduction by Lawrence Boadt

The Epic of Gilgamesh translated by Herbert Mason, Mariner Books

St. Joseph’s Edition of the New American Bible On a sidenote, I highly suggest reading the Epic of Gilgamesh for leisure. It’s a great epic. Make sure you find a complete version of it though. The real epic is somewhat fragmented, and we only publish what we found. But some versions, like the one I unfortunately nabbed, cut out what’s fragmented.

BONUS ROUND:  Gustave Dore (French, 1832-1883) was notable for illustrating scenes from the Bible, including The Deluge (Great Flood). He’s also famous for illustrating Dante’s Divine Comedy.

Darron references some of Dore’s illustrations during the great flood scene.