The Gilgamesh epic at Ugarit

Abstract

[Fourteen years ago came the announcement that several twelfth-century pieces of the Babylonian poem o f Gilgameo had been excavated at Ugarit, now Ras Shamra on the Mediterranean coast. This article is writ ten in response to their editio princeps as texts nos. 42‐5 in M. Daniel Arnaud’s brand-new collection of Babylonian library tablets from Ugarit (Arnaud 2007). It takes a second look at the Ugarit fragments, and conside rs especially their relationship to the other Gilgameo material.] The history of the Babylonian Gilgameo epic falls i nto two halves that roughly correspond to the second and first millennia BC respectively. 1 In the first millennium we find multiple witnesses to its text that come exclusively from Babylonia and Assyria. They allow the reconstruction of a poem in which the sequence of lines, passages and episodes is more or less fixed and the text more or less stable, and p resent essentially the same, standardized version of the p oem. With the exception of a few Assyrian tablets t hat are relics of an older version (or versions), all f irst-millennium tablets can be fitted into this Sta ndard Babylonian poem, known in antiquity as oa naqba īmuru “He who saw the Deep”. The second millennium presents a very different picture. For one thing, p ieces come from Syria, Palestine and Anatolia as we ll as Babylonia and Assyria. These fragments show that many different versions of the poem were extant at on e time or another during the Old and Middle Babylonian periods. In addition, Hittite and Hurrian paraphrases existed alongside the Akkadian texts. T his variety is today only represented by fragments, so that none of these versions can be reconstructed ev en in skeletal form, except for the Hittite paraphr ase. More second-millennium pieces of the epic are always to be welcomed, not only for their own sake and because they add to our knowledge of the epic’s evo lution, but also for comparative purposes, because they can help extend our knowledge of the Standard Babylonian poem where it is still fragmentary, and even allow us to fill gaps in its text. Ever since Gilgameo turned up in archives found at Bo gazkoy (Hattusa, the Hittite capital in Anatolia), it has always been likely that he would eventually surface at Ugarit. This probability was reinforced by finds of Gilgameo tablets first in a disturbed context at Megiddo and then in a twelfthcentury scriptorium at Emar on the great bend of th e Euphrates. These finds demonstrate that copying t he poem of Gilgameo was a part of the curriculum of sc ribal learning in the West throughout the Late Bron ze Age. It was thus no great surprise when the excavat ion of private dwelling houses at Ras Shamra in 199 4

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 — 28 citations exist upstream.

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