Gilgamesh And The Literary Traditions Of Ancient Mesopotamia

Abstract

The Epic of Gilgamesh is usually cited as the masterpiece of Babylonian literature. This poem is only one of several literary texts about the legendary hero, King Gilgamesh of Uruk. In many respects the evolution of these texts over more than two thousand years can serve as a paradigm for the history of ancient Mesopotamian literature. This chapter sketches this history, with special reference to Gilgamesh and other narrative poems, focusing on key moments by introducing individual scholars from five points in time. The literature of Mesopotamia in the pre-Christian era was composed mainly in Sumerian, Akkadian and Aramaic (largely lost). By literature is meant here writings that bear the imprint of creative imagination, i.e. belles lettres; excluded are the corpora of professional texts, such as the huge compendia of divination, astrology and exorcism that accounted for a large proportion of the Babylonian scribal tradition. Modern scholars have evolved a refined typology of this literature, dividing it into categories such as mythological narratives, epic poetry, hymns, wisdom literature, folk tales, etc. In most cases this typology has no counterpart in the ancient world. There were no Sumerian or Akkadian words for myth or for heroic narrative, and no ancient recognition of narrative

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 75 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.