Gilgamesh and the Flood

by the middle of the 7th century bc northern mesopotamia had become the heartland of the largest state the world had ever seen known today as the neo-assyrian empire its control stretched throughout mesopotamia syria the levant and even as far north as anatolia in the west its territory ran as far as egypt whilst in the east its rule held sway over susa and parts of the zagros mountains at its peak it was ruled by a king named ashibanipal who would tout his military prowess and conquests in inscriptions scattered throughout his realm in the centre of his palace he built a great library that eventually grew to include some thirty thousand clay tablets and that attracted scribes from the four corners of the known world in modern times this library is often seen by scholars as ashibana powell's crowning achievement and its remains provide a vivid snapshot into the world that he and his dynasty inhabited yet as grand and ancient as ashibana power and his empire might seem to us now contained amongst the tablets of his library was the story of another king who had already been famous for mesopotamia for millennia in the epic that bore his name he ruled over the great metropolis of uruk the son of a goddess and immortal man possessed of strength and stature beyond all others his exploits took him the length and breadth of mesopotamia and saw him contend with monsters gods and his own mortality alike so great was his quest to thwart death that it even took him beyond the lands of mortal men to meet the immortal survivor of a worldwide flood an event that still echoes in modern religions to this day since the very dawn of writing it provided an ideal of kingship that surpassed all others and achieved a fame beyond almost any of his successors ashuban of power would prove no exception by the end of that same century his dynasty would be extinct his library buried and forgotten the great tablets that held this story remained sealed within its ruins for another two millennia waiting patiently for the day when they would be rediscovered from that day the exploits of this legendary king would draw the attention of a worldwide audience and once again one of the world's oldest known stories would be told the epic of gilgamesh since its rediscovery at the tail end of the 19th century the epic of gilgamesh's inspired excitement amongst scholars and the general public alike originally unearthed amongst the ruins of the library of asha banapal the discovery of its tablets came amidst a period of newfound interest in both archaeology and early human history its deciphering would inspire headlines in newspapers on both sides of the atlantic with this publicity being overwhelmingly centered on the flood story contained within one of its tablets in succeeding decades knowledge of the epoch itself grew amongst the wider public soon it became recognized that in the exploits of gilgamesh lay the blueprints of those of many later mythical figures including those of heracles and the heroes of the homeric poems the odyssey and the iliad much like these later heroes gilgamesh's restless spirit would take him to what were then the very edges of the known world to the cedar forest of what is now modern lebanon and syria throughout the land of babylonia and south to the land of dillman in the persian gulf throughout these travels he was joined by his faithful companion enkidu who he loved as he would a wife and whose death at the hands of the eternal gods would drive his own quest to fought death today these central themes of companionship love and the human struggle against mortality continue to resonate and gilgamesh himself has taken on a life outside of the epic often appearing as a character far removed from his earliest roots even then to many he remains inseparable from the babylonian epic that bears his name which this day holds the status of a foundational work in world literature but what is perhaps less known is that this work is far from gilgamesh's first appearance in mesopotamian myth in fact by the time the most famous version of his epic was composed in the late second millennium bc knowledge of his name and exploits was already more than a thousand years old long before babylon was even a city there is evidence that gilgamesh's name was being sung at the courts of the later sumerian kings where a rich body of hymns and poems were composed to celebrate his feats and virtues and before even these works were created we know that objects were being dedicated in gilgamesh's honour right back to the precipice of pre-history and that heroic figures performing deeds resembling his own appear in some of the earliest artwork of the third millennium bc and it is here in the hazy world of the earliest kings of mesopotamia that some scholars have even argued that a historical figure may have existed whose life and deeds formed a core ideal of kingship around which the literary epic was crafted so who was gilgamesh how did the epic that bears his name come to be was there a historical king of uruk who bore his name whose reputation later off was built upon to craft a more familiar epic and outside of gilgamesh himself how did the famous flood myth become part of the epic in this video we'll explore these questions by examining more than 2 000 years of history we'll start by familiarizing ourselves with the setting of gilgamesh's exploits the mesopotamian society at the third millennium bc we'll take a look at what evidence exists for a historical king bearing his name along with his earliest appearances in the inscriptions of the period from here we'll track the development of the epic from its earliest origins among some of the world's first empires through to the standardized text of the late second millennium bc along the way we'll also examine how mesopotamia itself changed during the millennium of his existence and examine what parallels can be drawn between it and the society in which it originated finally we'll examine the origins of an event with which the epic is inexorably tied the mesopotamian flood myth the discovery of which brought the epic to worldwide attention but before we do any of this let us begin with the story itself for those unfamiliar with gilgamesh and his appearances in mesopotamian myth here's a quick summary of the epic for which he is known in its story gilgamesh is the ruler of uruk the son of a mortal king named lugar bander and of the goddess ninsoon possessed of superhuman size and strength gilgamesh reigns as a tyrant over the city exhausting its men and taking its women into his bed as punishment for abusing his subjects the gods craft an opponent who is his equal the wild man enkidu after initially residing in the step where he grazes alongside wild animals enkidu is discovered by a hunter then civilized through intercourse with the temple prostitute shamhat after adopting human dress and manners he travels to uruk in order to confront gilgamesh where the two wrestle in the streets until the very houses of the city shake eventually however the two cease their battle an enkidu instead becomes gilgamesh's dearest friend who he loves as he would a wife and who he frequently refers to as the axe by his side after this a restless gilgamesh then proposes a journey to the cedar forest in honour of the sun god shamash where he intends to say its monstrous guardian humbaba with shamash's hell the two journey to the forest and overcome humbaba then construct a wrath from the cedar trees to return to uruk on arriving back in the city yogamesh then draws the eye of the goddess of love ishtar but rejects her offer of marriage due to her mistreatment of her former suitors angered by gilgamesh's refusal ishtar then forces her father anu to unleash the mighty bull of heaven which devastates uruk and its people together gilgamesh and enkidu overcome this bull whose horns gilgamesh dedicates to his father lugar banda whilst enkidu tears off the bull's right haunch and hurls it in ishtar's face as peace seems to have been restored to uruk enkidu has a dream of a gathering of the gods in which the great gods anu and enlil decree that for the crimes of slaying both the bull and humbaba enkidu must die struck down by the gods enkidu curses the hunter and the prostitute who civilized him from his deathbed only to be rebuked by shamash who reminds him of all the good he has experienced in life because of the two after enkidu's death so great is gilgamesh's grief that he refuses to leave his side for six days and seven nights only permitting his friend's body to be buried after a maggot drops from its nose in his mourning for his lost brother gilgamesh tears out his hair and clothes himself in the skins of wild animals then erects a grand statue in tribute to enkidu now fearful of his own death gilgamesh sets out to find his ancestor utnapishtim and his wife we are told were granted immortality by the gods traveling to the twin peaks of mount mashup at the ends of the earth he finds a tunnel that no mortal has entered guarded by a scorpion man and his wife ignoring the man's warnings he proceeds through the darkness of the tunnel eventually emerging in a fertile land known as the garden of the gods after killing a group of lions and dressing himself in their skins he recounts his tale to an alewife who directs him to uttana pishtim's boatman urshibani after gilgamesh has first destroyed the enigmatic stone ones that allowed urshibani to travel across the waters of death to uttana pishdim the boatman instructs gilgamesh to cut down 120 trees and to fashion them into poles crossing the waters they arrive at a place known as the mouth of the rivers where utnapishtim and his wife live after observing uttana pushed him and finding him much the same as himself gilgamesh asks him how he came to receive immortality an utnapishtim tells him of the great flood sent by the gods to drown mankind as a survivor of this flood utnapishtim was granted immortality by the king of the gods enlil who placed him to live at the mouth of the rivers utnapishtim then offers gilgamesh his own chance at immortality if only he can stay awake for seven days and nights despite his best efforts gilgamesh soon falls asleep waking to discover that seven days have passed as shown by the bread rations that uttana pishtim's wife has left by his side despite gilgamesh's failure utnapishtim gives him another test sending gilgamesh in search of a special plant from the ocean floor that will rejuvenate anyone who consumes it gilgamesh succeeds in retrieving the plant only for it to be stolen by a serpent whilst he bathes disheartened by his failure gilgamesh returns to uruk where the main body of the epic ends with him marveling to her shebani and the great city wall he has built then in her final somewhat tacked on tablet gilgamesh sends an inexplicably alive enkidu to retrieve a toy from the netherworld only for him to be captured by the dead with the help of the god shamash gilgamesh then raises enkidu's shade to the land above which then informs him of the grim conditions of the underworld and of gilgamesh's future role as the judge of the dead so we now have a general idea of the epic's content but if we are to understand the context of the events that it depicts along with the timeline of its wider development we'll also need to familiarize ourselves with its setting the mesopotamian world of the third millennium bc for it is in this period that not only is the epic itself set but we can also be reasonably sure that any historical gilgamesh would also have reigned and in examining this world we will gain an understanding not only of its society and wider geography but we will also see the underlying motivations of its characters let us begin then towards the end of the previous millennium this region had seen the emergence of the world's first known cities throughout the plains of southern and central mesopotamia of these by far the largest was the mega site of uruk which appears to have exerted a strong cultural influence over the other growing centers of the alluvial plane along with major economic influence throughout much of the ancient middle east as with the other settlements of the region life in uruk revolved around the hierarchies of its monumental temple districts each of which were dedicated to the cult of a major deity in addition to their role in the religious life of these settlements these districts appear to have acted as distribution centers for a portion of the city's populace with their dedicated work being rewarded with fixed amounts of rations it is also in the context of this system the world's earliest known written script proto-cuneiform appears to have emerged this early writing consisted of a complex system of signs impressed onto clay tablets with a reed stylus that were used at iraq and other sites throughout the middle east to administrate their complex temple hierarchies by far the majority of these tablets were used to record the receipt of goods by the temple such as grain dairy products and textiles along with their distribution to its attendant workforce the remaining tablets consist of long lists of objects places and animals and there is no evidence at this early date for writing being used in anything other than an administrative context this eric influenced trade system continued until around the years 3200 to 3100 bc when it appears to have faltered the exact cause of its collapse is still uncertain although it is possible that it coincided with a change in the local climate that saw much of the middle east become both drier and colder than in the previous millennium whatever its cause the result was that mesopotamian influence became restricted to the alluvial plane in places such as syria the levant and the iranian plateau we see the abandonment of protoconair form writing and a resurgence of local pottery styles mesopotamia itself entered the period known as the gemdet nasa characterized by a change from the manufacture of more plain styles of pottery to that of painted pottery with a distinctive purple colouring of other than this pottery however the gemdet nasir appears to have gladly continued the practices of the preceding uruk period protokin air form writing also continued to be developed throughout this time we know from lists of city names dating to this period that the individual settlements of the mesopotamian plane were already engaged in complex political and economic relationships with one another a common religious system may also have been in place throughout the region with its focus being the city of uruk this is demonstrated by tablets and clay ceilings that have been interpreted as offerings presented from other settlements to its goddess in anna also known under her later name of ishtar compared to the uruk period before it the gemdet nasa appears to have been short-lived to the point where there is still some debate as to whether it should be considered a separate archaeological period at all by comparison its successor the early dynastic period would last for much of the third millennium bc and saw the rise of one of the world's most iconic early civilizations the sumerians throughout the early part of this period we begin to see increasing growth of individual settlements into major urban centres throughout both southern and central mesopotamia while sturok remained a key player in the politics of the region it now had to compete with other prominent city-states such as ur lagash uma and kish each of which controlled varying degrees of territory generally speaking the influence of each of these cities was limited to its surrounding agricultural land which would have stretched in a narrow band along either the river euphrates or the tigris for an average of 10 to 15 kilometers in either direction between them lay a patchwork mosaic of alluvial deserts resource-rich swamps and marshland and patches of less inhabited step that were often used for seasonal grazing each city also seems to become recognized as the dwelling place of a number of gods and goddesses that were joined into a more unified pantheon and at an unclear point the centre of mesopotamian religion transferred from the cult of inanna at europe to the cult of enlil at nippur inside the cities themselves the temple authorities that dominated political and economic life throughout the uruk period also remained though increasingly their power was counterbalanced by a new group of figures under the titles of em nc and lugao commonly referred to as kings by modern archaeologists how exactly these figures emerged is still a source of contention but it seems that from an early date these figures combined military power of important political and religious roles within the city alongside the emergence of these figures this period is also characterized by increased military activity between these states as shown by the appearance of widespread city fortifications throughout the first half of the early dynastic period alongside these changes many of the basic blueprints of mesopotamian society established in the preceding uruk period continue to be refined upon throughout the third millennium bc agriculture continued to depend on the careful management of water supplied by the euphrates and the tigris and crop irrigation seems to become ever more important as the climate in the region slowly dried out administration and trade was still performed using cylinder seals small round objects carved with inlaid scenes that could be impressed onto west clay as an identifier later these objects would also take on an important role in the correspondence between different city-states and rulers whose relationships grew more complex and formalized in airform writing also evolved to take on similar roles slowly losing many of its pictographic qualities in favor of both syllabic and phonetic elements along with a more developed system of grammar the result is that unlike the earlier protocunair form tablets to which we are largely unable to assign a language this later script is clearly recognizable as sumerian a language spoken by people of southern mesopotamia during this period and from around the middle of the early dynastic period we also see the increasing use of royal inscriptions throughout the region the names of kings been inscribed on objects such as stone vessels steel a and votive offerings so now that we have some understanding of the society in which the epic is set let us ask our first question is there any evidence for a historical monarch that dates from this period behind the later literary figure of gilgamesh understandably this question draws a mixed response from archaeologists and scholars of the period to paraphrase professor piotr mikhailowski for some the search for a historical gilgamesh is a serious enterprise whilst for others it is equivalent to the quest to discover the real king arthur the powered in roland or the abominable snowman a few scholars such as max malawan barry powell and stephanie daly have been willing to entertain the idea that a monarch carrying this name could have reigned at uruk somewhere between 2800 and 2600 bc with these arguments being based on later literary accounts and a small number of contemporary inscriptions on the whole however most archaeologists agree that there is no way to prove the existence of such a king using the evidence that we have at our disposal and that as such he is best treated as a purely mythical figure and looking at the excavations that have been carried out at uruk it is easy to see why many have drawn that conclusion in the collection of stories in which he features gilgamesh is intimately associated with the central ritual districts of uruk the ayana and the kulab both of which have been extensively excavated if such a figure did exist then it is in these districts that we may expect to find some evidence for his existence especially as a possible dating to around the 27th century bc roughly overlapped with the appearance of the earliest known royal inscriptions in southern mesopotamia unfortunately for us however no evidence of any writing or inscriptions have been found at the city dating from this period indeed there is also little evidence for monumental building at the centre of uruk during this time the one exception to this can be found in the ayanna district where the third millennium bc is marked by the development of a number of enigmatic structures that culminated in its final centuries in a large cigarette dedicated to the goddess in anna outside of these structures two possible explanations have been proposed the lack of evidence for monumental building here in the early dynastic period the first is that extensive parts of the complex may well have been destroyed or damaged by a later invasion that we know took place somewhere between the 24th and the 23rd century bc the second and better attested theory is that many older structures in this era could have been destroyed during its remodeling by a later king named ur namu whose name can be found inscribed on the ziggurats bricks either way what is clear is there is no evidence of gilgamesh to be found in the central districts of uruk itself but there is another monumental feature at iraq that is famously associated with gilgamesh and whose first construction would be credited to him in the earliest literary texts in which he features the great wall of uruk constructed in a period when uruk was nearing its peak size this vast fortification stretches for over nine kilometers and encircles an area of over 500 hectares built from fired mud bricks the wall itself averages nine meters thick in most areas and its surrounding complex measures some 40 meters in width embedded inside it are a vast system of buttresses towers and entranceways along with inlets and outlets for the city's canals this war was certainly impressive and its construction does correlate with a period when the city was known to be both large and powerful but unfortunately only limited excavations of its sections have been carried out and what work has been done it's found no evidence at all to connect its construction to gilgamesh whilst later kings are known to have placed votive objects inscribed with their names within the foundations of their major building projects no such objects have been found beneath the excavated parts of uruk's wall leaving us unable to connect its construction to any historical figure the exact dating of the wall is also uncertain though most archaeologists place its construction at the beginning of the early dynastic period which may well be too early for most estimates of historical gilgamesh's reign so if there was a historical gilgamesh there is no evidence of him to be found at his namesake city nor at any other center throughout mesopotamia during the first half of the early dynastic period instead if we wish to find his earliest attestations we have to skip forward by a couple of centuries it is here as we enter the later part of the early dynastic period that gilgamesh's name is first found under its sumerian spelling of bilgamesh nearly a half a millennium for his first known literary appearance here he appears not as a king but as part of a list of gods unearthed at the site of shuropa that dates from roughly the 26th to the 25th century bc whilst he receives no special treatment on this list his placing already seems to show an association with varuk as the entry above his reads or road-facing kullap referring to one of the city's central districts beyond this gods list we also find more information regarding gilgamesh appearing in a small number of inscriptions dedicated to him that date from around the 24th century bc one such inscription is preserved on a ceremonial stone mace head of unknown providence that were frequently made as votive offerings to a particular god or goddess to quote its text to bilgamesh the king of men earning gurima the son of the shepherd luga kagani has dedicated this artfully made mace it is of alabaster to him the strong one the son of the goddess ninsuman for his own life and for the lives of his wife and their children from this inscription we can conclude a few details to complement the limited information given in the gods list for a start whilst we know that gilgamesh was clearly regarded as a god during this period and even the recipient of votive offerings we also see him named here as a king of men an inclusion that may reflect his dual nature and his later literary appearances secondly we see the first mention of his divine parentage specifically that he is the son of the goddess ninsu moon later known under her familiar name of nin soon finally from his earliest attestations we see that gilgamesh is already being associated with idealized epithets of mesopotamian kingship with his title of the strong one being frequently adopted by kings in the late third millennium bc these two texts raise an interesting possibility as gilgamesh's earliest attestations in this period are as a god rather than a king are we to assume that he began his existence as a deity only later been given a historical background as a king of a rook this is certainly a possibility but we should also note that the mace head inscription does directly refer to him as a king of men an additional factor that we can conclude from these early inscriptions is that whilst some of gilgamesh's later attributes are already present there is little evidence of him being associated with many of the deeds we will see in the later epic this is also reflected in the small group of literary texts that have come down to us from the early dynastic period these texts are largely limited to those that have been excavated from the city of abu saleh in central mesopotamia along with those found at both mari and ebla in modern syria the archaic and often fragmentary nature of these texts makes them difficult to comprehend and understanding is often reliant on the existence of a later copy of the same text in a more readable script examples of this include a wisdom text known as the instructions of shuro pak later versions of which are addressed from the city's eponymous king to his son zio sudra along with a number of hymns and other mythological texts by far the most significant of these texts for our purposes however is a fragment of a mythological tale of the lovemaking between the mortal hero lugow bander and the goddess ninsoon which some scholars have attempted to relate to the birth of gilgamesh however according to a syriologist andrew r george at no point does this name appear in the tale and indeed the state of the fragment is such that even the idea of it referring to a birth remains unproven as we will soon see there are also good reasons to doubt that blue garbando was considered gilgamesh's father at this early date in addition to this text two others from abu salabi have also been claimed to mention gilgamesh himself although the validity of these claims remains controversial moving beyond what written evidence we have available it is also often noted that figures resembling both gilgamesh and his companion enkidu frequently appear in mesopotamian artwork dating to the early dynastic period indeed we frequently see heroic figures portrayed on cylinder seals and carvings from this period often being depicted in forms of heroic nudity and wrestling with animals such as lions and balls this latter motif known as the master of animals is a common one throughout the region and is known to date back to at least the 7th millennium bc it is certainly possible that these figures represent events from the later epic particularly gilgamesh's contention with either the bull of heaven or his later encounter with a group of lions whose skin he clothed himself in during his search for immortality unfortunately for us however we have no examples of direct inscriptions naming either gilgamesh or enkidu alongside these works and it is entirely possible that they depict other heroic figures from the period or that they simply represent more generic heroic archetypes so from what we've covered here we can conclude that to the people of early dynastic mesopotamia gilgamesh was known as a god worthy of dedications as a king of men and that his name was associated with at least one of the epithets given to later rulers but outside of this we have no clear evidence that he was ever a historical king of uruk or that he was a fixture in the literature of this time at this point we could easily abandon our search for a historical gilgamesh and assign him purely to the realm of mythology however in doing so we would be ignoring a small amount of indirect evidence that a number of scholars have pointed to as at least leaving his existence an open question and to observe this evidence we must leave the world of early dynastic suma behind and examined social and political developments within central and southern mesopotamia right at the end of the third millennium bc unlike the largely fragmented city-states that had characterized the region for much of the previous millennium the centuries ahead would see periodic unifications of the region under a single ruler prior to the rise of its first lasting empire there had been a number of erstwhile conquerors of mesopotamia but none of them appears to have succeeded in subduing lands far beyond the south or in passing their conquests onto a successor it would take until the 24th century bc before a king would establish a lasting empire encompassing most of mesopotamia and when it happened its founder would not be a sumerian but an acadian [Music] the acadians were a group of peoples from central mesopotamia a region that itself came to be referred to as akad unlike their sumerian neighbours they spoke a semitic language known as acadia but otherwise they shared many cultural similarities and worshipped a similar pantheon of gods under differing names as with the sumerians their exact origin point is uncertain but we do know that they were present in the region from at least the beginning of the third millennium bc as shown by the appearance of acadian names in the earliest cuneiform and in the 24th century bc it was a man from this region who would build what has been described as the world's first empire known as sargon later literary descriptions would cast him as a cup bearer the king of kish or even a simple labourer in the palace gardens at an unknown point he appears to have risen to power in central mesopotamia after which he invaded the south and subdued the sumerian city-states in doing so he deposed another aspiring conqueror a king by the name of lugao zaghezi who had recently subdued much of sumer and led him in a neck stock to the temple at nipper with the two regions now under his control he established his capital at the city of akkad also known as agade which he either founded or greatly expanded finally he succeeded in doing something that no previous ruler had done and passed on this empire intact to his successors this acadian empire would persist for nearly two centuries reaching its peak in the 23rd century bc under sargon's grandson naram sin if we are to believe inscriptions from his long reign then narum sin succeeded in expanding the empire to the state of elam and the peoples of the zagros mountains to the east and as far west as the states of the eastern mediterranean exactly how much of this westward conquest was rooted in propaganda is uncertain for all we know it may simply have been a successful raiding party to the region either way the success led naram sin to take on unprecedented titles including king of the four quarters and king of the universe eventually he was no longer content to simply rule as immortal and in a famous victory steeler dating from his reign he is depicted standing above his men as a giant crowned with the horned helmet of a god [Music] naram sin's reign would bring the akkadian empire to its greatest extent but it also proved to be its high watermark exactly how intact the empire was towards the end of his reign is uncertain but after his death it quickly collapsed with possible causes being the combined stress of a major drought known as the 4.2 kilo-year event and a series of invasions of a group of peoples from the zagros mountains to the east what follows was an archaeologically obscure period that lasted for most of the 22nd century bc during which these invaders known as the gutians appear to have exercised a loose hegemony over the other cities of the alluvial plane then at the end of this period we are told from inscriptional evidence that the invaders were ejected from sumer by a confederation of cities led by uttohenga the king of uruk uttuhengao would not survive his victory for long however and in the ensuing power vacuum it would be his relative ur namu the governor of ur who would succeed in establishing the second major unified state of mesopotamia known as the third dynasty of ur or the neo-sumerian empire this state would resurrect the status of uruk as a major center for the worship of the goddess in anna and embark on an ambitious cigarette building programme throughout southern mesopotamia an issue restricted to the regions of sumer and akkad this empire would expand eastwards beginning with the reign of ernamo's successor shoghi coming to dominate the neighbouring region of elan in what is now southwestern iran whilst the resulting state was less far-reaching than the acadian empire it appears to have been more internally centralized consisting of a carefully administered core in mesopotamia which maintained a system of diplomatic contacts with the periphery beyond shulgi and his successors would go on to adopt the divine kingship of naram sin with shoghi himself demonstrating a special reverence for gilgamesh who he frequently named in his hymns finally the royal court of uh also appears to have established a uniform writing system within its borders establishing and sponsoring new scribal schools in the process it is in these scribal schools that we see a new period of creativity in sumerian literature along with the appearance of the first documents to shed light and what the peoples of southern mesopotamia considered their history and it is also through the lens of these documents that we see what some have argued is evidence for gilgamesh's existence by far the most famous of these documents is known to us as the sumerian king list a collection of manuscripts outlining the supposed history of the kings of sumer the earliest version of which dates back to the ur-free period later versions of this document detail the descent of the divine kingship of sumer from the heavens through an unbroken line of rulers first the city of eredu in the south then to the city of kish after a great flood had swept across the land after 23 kings had reigned in kish the city was defeated by uruk and the kingship taken to the anna district in this list gilgamesh is presented as a member of the first dynasty of uruk with his name being followed by the epithet lord of the kulab interestingly his father is listed here not as lou galbander but instead as a phantom or a demon and his immediate predecessor is given as the god of shepherds and fertility de music for some time after its discovery many scholars considered this list to have a degree of usefulness as a source of information on mesopotamian history at least in the abstract over time however a greater awareness of its flaws has developed and it is clear that the king's list existed less as an accurate chronicle of mesopotamian rulers and more as a form of propaganda designed to legitimize the rule of later dynasties for a start it presents sumer as having been ruled over by an unbroken line of kings with only one city possessing the kingship at a time many of its earlier rulers are also assigned reigns of an extraordinary length gilgamesh himself has credited a reign of some 126 years and this length is dwarfed by that of the pre-flood rulers one of whom has assigned a rule of some 36 000 years excavations at centers throughout southern mesopotamia have also found ample evidence of kings who exerted a wide degree of power throughout the region yet whose names are not included on the list finally this document also seems to have been periodically revised to take into account disputes between competing city-states and dynasties for example in its earliest versions the first dynasty to receive the kingship is that of the city of kish and a smaller number of dynasties are listed between it and hakkad in later copies however kisha has been demoted to the second dynasty on the list with the kingship originally dwelling at the site of eredo which there is no evidence of a dynasty possessing hegemony over the other cities of the region despite all these caveats there are two early rulers on this list for whom some limited inscriptional evidence has been found both of whom are named in later literary texts as contemporaries of gilgamesh they consisted the final two rulers of the first dynasty of kish and appear to date from a period when the city was indeed large and prosperous the first is a king by the name of mabara gisi later known as enmi baragisi boom a small number of inscriptions have been found in one such inscription found on a fragment of an alabaster vessel of uncertain is named as the king of kish making him the earliest known mesopotamian king whose name is verified by contemporary evidence based on the archaic rendering of the symbol for kish this inscription is fought to date from the first half of the early dynastic period matches well the hypothetical date for any historical gilgamesh the second ruler on the king list associated with gilgamesh in later literary accounts is the figure of akka or agar son of enmi baragisi and the final rule over the first dynasty of kish unlike enemy varagisi we have no contemporary inscription naming akka as a king of kish instead a figure who may be akka is attested to on a single stone steelway that likely originated from the city of uma in southern mesopotamia this steli known as the steeler of shum gao also dates from the first part of the early dynastic period and is fought to relate to a land transaction between the priest usham gao and an unknown woman who is possibly his daughter most interestingly for our purpose this delay also features a carving of a man next to which is the following inscription akka of the great assembly whether or not this figure is the akka of the king's list and later literary texts is uncertain if so then it would indicate that kish's hegemony during the first part of the early dynastic period ran at least as far south for zuma which is certainly a possibility indeed we do have an inscribed gem of unknown provenance that directly names agar as a king of uma although whether or not he was a king of kish remains uncertain we also know from the inscriptions as a historical king who claimed to rule kish known as mesa lim held a degree of power in neighbouring lagash and according to later traditions he may well have mediated a land dispute between it and uma it has also been argued by dr gebhard's selves that the personal name akka was fairly rare in the early dynastic period which may lessen the chance of it being a coincidence in our final piece of indirect evidence gilgamesh is also named alongside a list of later kings likely dating from just after the end of the ur free dynasty known as the tumau inscription this text outlines a series of rulers who are credited with the building and rebuilding of various temples at the hallway city of nippur in this list gilgamesh is credited with building the dunon burra a shrine that is known there from archaeological evidence though these excavations found no sign of any associations with this figure what is perhaps as significant however is that in addition to the historical personage of en mi baragisi and the possibly historical akka gilgamesh is mentioned alongside at least two other known kings of the southern city of misani pada and his son mesquiag nuna in addition to appearing on the sumerian king list missanipada is also known as a king from objects bearing his inscriptions at what may be his tomb at the royal cemetery of her along with an inscribed bead found at the city of mary far to the north west whilst less well were tested than his father mesquiag nooner is known from a small number of bow inscriptions made in his honor by his wife in which he is named as the lugow or king of ur however it should also be noted that nowhere in this inscription are either of these kings named as contemporaries of gilgamesh merely that they also dedicated various temple structures in the purr so what can we conclude from these various inscriptions well it seems likely that some of the figures later associated with gilgamesh were historical kings though how much their actual deeds and lives resemble those of the later literary tales is impossible to say as such some scholars have argued that their existence at least opens the possibility of gilgamesh himself being a historical figure despite this we still have no definitive evidence for the existence of gilgamesh himself and in the absence of such evidence we must consign him for now to the world of myth but as we end the hunt for a historical gilgamesh we now begin to see the literary figure emerge in earnest or it is during the period of the earth-free dynasty we see the first appearance of the exploits of gilgamesh as a figure of meth along with the character that he is most commonly associated with enkidu the neo-sumerian gilgamesh corpus exists in a largely fragmentary fashion it consists of five poems written in sumerian one of which has been found in two separate versions along with a small number of dedicatory hymns whilst we can be reasonably confident from their language that they originated in the ur free period only one has been found in fragmentary form dating from this time and most of these texts exist only in copies written by scribes a few centuries later even in these later forms two of the texts remain only partially complete what we have however is enough to recognize episodes of the later babylonian epic in the tale of gilgamesh and huawei we see a story highly resembling that of the cedar forest incident though with both a different inciting reason and location in this story the eponymous king proposes an expedition to the cedar forests of the zagros mountains in order to achieve lasting fame for himself after his death after amassing a company of young men to aid them gilgamesh and enkidu crossed sevenfold mountain ranges before finally finding a tree that matches their requirements after cutting the tree into logs they anger the forest protector a monstrous figure known as huwawa who knocks both gilgamesh and enkidu unconscious with one of his auras eventually enkidu awakens and manages to rouse gilgamesh who swears revenge on his assailant together the two trick huawea into forming a marriage alliance with two of gilgamesh's sisters and in the process of exchanging marital gifts they rob him of his auras now conceptualized as great cedar trees after the guardian has been rendered helpless gilgamesh considers letting him live but enkidu cuts his throat after warning the two would never see home again if he was allowed to live with this done gilgamesh and his men cut his auras into logs and return home there they offer huawei's head to the great god enlil who angrily berates them for their actions before distributing his auras throughout the land in the second gilgamesh tale we simply see a precursor to one of gilgamesh's other famed adventures his contention with the bull of heaven in this story gilgamesh is instructed by his mother ninsoon to carry out his duties and sit in judgement only for him to be detained by the goddess of love in anna here she proposes that gilgamesh become lord to her lady but he rejects her in some versions due to his mother forbidding the union after a missing section of text inanna is found weeping by her father the sky god anu who she asked to give her the celestial bow of heaven with which to kill gilgamesh anu refuses as the bore of heaven would find no food on earth only for inanna to emit an infernal scream that forces her father to give in she then leads the ball down to uruk where it destroys the date palms and consumes the river gilgamesh is informed of the creature's arrival by his minstrel after quenching his first reveal he vows to dismember the bull together he and enkidu dispatch the ball by finding its weak point after which enkidu hills its haunch at inanna finally gilgamesh fulfills his promise and distributes the ball's meat amongst the poor though he dedicates the horns to inanna in both of these poems we see clear parallels to later episodes of the epic though in each case these accounts are similar only in their outlines in addition to this elements of these stories are also fought by some scholars to give insight into mesopotamian society of the time for example gilgamesh's expedition to the cedar forest is seen by uric scholars margaret van s and reindeer nif as reflecting the actual needs of monumental building projects conducted by mesopotamian kings during this period as the palm poplar and tamarisk wood of the alluvial plain is either too soft or grows too short to be of much use in monumental construction by comparison cedarwood is an ideal building material that would indeed have been found in the zagros mountains to the east and we know that mesopotamian kings from this period would go to great lengths to secure this precious material in the later epic this event would also be relocated westwards to what is now modern lebanon a change that coincides with the increasing importance of western states during the second millennium bc similarly gilgamesh's refusal of marriage to the goddess inanna is also fought to parallel literary descriptions the sacred marriage ceremony between mesopotamian kings and the city's goddess though whether these ceremonies actually occurred or not is a topic of some debate when we move beyond these two works however what is perhaps surprising is the remaining sumerian poems contain no clear parallels at all to the later epic and indeed one of them contains no mythical or supernatural elements at all where they do appear to have played an important role however is in informing the later themes of the babylonian epic particularly that of human mortality and gilgamesh's struggle to escape death in the first of these tales known as gilgamesh and the netherworld we see gilgamesh's increasing association with the mesopotamian afterlife after a prologue describing how the gods divided the universe between them a great storm blows down a willow tree on the banks of the euphrates soon after the goddess happens across the tree which he takes back to uruk and plants at the iana district to her dismay this tree then becomes infested by evil creatures and after failing to gain the help of the sun god utu inanna turns to gilgamesh for help taking up his weapons gilgamesh rids the tree of its inhabitants and carves it into wood for inanna's furniture from what remains he carves two toys most likely a ball and a mallet and the next day he plays with these wearing out his subjects in the process the day after as gilgamesh is about to resume his play the women of the city complain and somehow the toys fall into the netherworld gilgamesh then dispatches his servant enkidu to retrieve them only for him to be taken captive after he fails to show the shades of the dead the proper respect horrified what has happened gilgamesh petitions the gods for help in the end only enki the sumerian god of water and mischief will listen and with the help of utu they raise enkidu from the neverworld as a shade in a lengthy series of questions gilgamesh asks enkidu of the condition of the dead and learns how the first they suffer can be relieved by offerings of fresh water by their descendants this examination of death and the afterlife continues in the second of these tales known as the death of gilgamesh as the poem begins we learn that gilgamesh has been seized by namta the emissary of death and now lies dying in his guise as the lord of creation the god enki shows gilgamesh a vision of the gods judging his exploits in the cedar forest and the previously unmentioned journey to the end of the world here we are told he learned wisdom from a man named sisudra the only survivor of an event known as the deluge an exploit for which the gods granted him immortality gilgamesh is then told that immortality has not been decreed for him but after his descent to the underworld he will be given a special place as the judge of the dead as consolation for this fate he is told he will be reunited there with enkidu and his family and that he will be revered as a deity after awaking from this dream gilgamesh appears to seek counsel and after a gap in the text he is advised that he should not be sad at his fate the poem then concludes with the people of uruk building gilgamesh's tomb at enki's instruction after diverting the river euphrates they build a stone tomb on the dry riverbed into which gilgamesh his wives and his retinue are sealed the river is then returned to its normal course in order to conceal the tomb and the people of iraq mourn their king according to andrew r george the poem then concludes either by praising gilgamesh as the greatest of kings or by explaining that the dead survive in the memories of the living between these four poems we can see many of the themes that would appear in the more developed epic of the second millennium bc in both gilgamesh and huwa and gilgamesh and the netherworld we see the king's fear of death and of the great deeds that he undertakes in order to grant his name lasting fame in the confrontations between gilgamesh and huawei and later the ball of heaven we see the first signs of his great physical prowess whilst in gilgamesh in the netherworld we see early signs of his tyranny over the people of uruk in the death of gilgamesh we also see his first association with the immortal survivor of the flood a significant step for the development of the later epic in gilgamesh and the netherworld we also have an important source for the mesopotamian concept of the underworld here they believe the dead carried out a shadowy existence where they either roamed naked or clothed in birds feathers with only dust to sate their first with the exception of figures such as gilgamesh who received an exalted position near enough to actual life the only respite from this existence was thought to be through the offerings of libations given to the dead by the living it is for this reason that people in mesopotamia considered having many descendants to be of the utmost importance as those who died without descendants were consigned to the worst form of existence imaginable finally the descriptions of gilgamesh being buried alongside his royal entourage and harem has drawn comparisons to what may have been actual burial practices from the time the most famous example of this has been found at what has been dubbed the royal cemetery of ur where a mass grave known as the great death pit was unearthed in the 1920s by a team led by british archaeologist leonard woolley inside this pit the remains of up to 74 men and women were found who appear to have been musicians attendants and bodyguards of the tombs occupant each of these people was killed by being struck over the head with an axe after which their bodies were embalmed dressed and laid out neatly as if in life it is uncertain how willing any of these deaths were or if the burial was truly royal in nature but its existence indicates that mass internments of otherwise healthy followers alongside significant figures were not unknown in ancient mesopotamian society we come now to the final sumerian gilgamesh poem here we find a story that seems to have no connection at all to the later epic and it is completely devoid of mythical or supernatural elements known as gilgamesh and akka it concerns the contention between the cities of kish and uruk for the hegemony of sumer in this story the king of kish akka sends emissaries to uruk demanding its submission in response gilgamesh seeks the council of the city's elders who caution him to submit rather than going to war ignoring their advice gilgamesh instead secures agreement from the young men of the city who lord his prowess and predict his victory soon after this acker arrives and lays siege to uruk gilgamesh asks for a volunteer to challenge akka to single combat and his guard burhitura volunteers on leaving the city however berger turo is immediately captured beaten and then brought before akka the steward of uruk then appears on its walls and akka asks the hapless guard if this is gilgamesh birhatura answers it is not and if it were akka would soon be vanquished a reply that earns him yet another beating gilgamesh then appears on the wall and when akar asks bihutura the same question he answers in the affirmative akka is then swiftly captured by gilgamesh who repays an old debt to him by freeing him and allowing him to return to kish whilst the events of the envoys of akka are all but disconnected from the later epic it does give us some sense of how the sumerians viewed the idea of kingship and like the contemporary king list it provides us with some information on how these people saw their own history a number of scholars have also hypothesized that elements of this story reflect some aspects of sumerian society that go undocumented elsewhere for example gilgamesh's consultation with both the elders and the young men of the city has been taken as evidence of an early form of democracy where the head of a sumerian city-state would consult with distinguished men of the city prior to making major decisions similarly the appointment of a champion to fight akka on gilgamesh's behalf points the idea that early warfare in southern mesopotamia may have often had a more ceremonial element than the fully pitched battles that we often envision these hypotheses are certainly interesting though for the moment they remain just that another interesting aspect of these sumerian poems is the elements that they lack compared to the later epic perhaps the most striking of these is that whilst they mark the first clear appearance of enkidu his role is clearly less developed not only does he lack his later wild man attributes but in the text he is usually described as a servant to gilgamesh rather than an equal partner in the past scholars such as jeffrey t gay have used this difference in status to argue that the friendship between the two is an invention entirely of later authors whilst andrew r george has argued that some elements of the deeper friendship can be seen in gilgamesh's emotional reaction to enkidu's death in gilgamesh in the netherworld the differences in enkidu's presentation have also led some past scholars to hypothesize that enkidu was himself the subject of a separate body of literature that was later integrated into the gilgamesh epic however no evidence whatsoever has been found to support this idea and it is now known that there are other potential sources of enkidu's wild attributes so how did these poems come to be written up until now the only evidence we have of gilgamesh are a few scattered inscriptions and some possible depictions in artwork that date the early dynastic period one argument is that these stories may have previously existed within wider mesopotamian society as oral traditions indeed there is some evidence that these works were recited aloud during the ur free period shown by the inclusion of hymnic elements in the introduction of the poem gilgamesh and the bull of heaven if this is true then these poems may well have been read as a form of courtly entertainment for the earth-free kings much as gilgamesh is entertained by his court musician lugow gabagol however if these tales were originally oral compositions there is little evidence of this to be found within the texts themselves which lack many of the features associated with oral storytelling another argument against this possibility is that as we have previously covered we do have some early examples of mesopotamian literature dating back to the early dynastic period and amongst those there is no undisputed evidence of tales related to gilgamesh we also have no evidence for gilgamesh in literature dating from the immediately preceding periods though the picture here is complicated by the fact that the acadian capital is still yet to be located and that the gutian period is poorly attested archaeologically on the whole however it seems more likely that these works were original compositions created by scribes at the academies of the earth free kings to flesh out previous traditions and deeds that had been associated with gilgamesh in prior centuries indeed we know from the hymns of the time that the second earth-free ruler shoghi held gilgamesh in a particularly high regard and it would not be surprising if the poems were composed at his instruction to honor a ruler with whom he felt a special kinship so strong was this feeling in fact that shoghi would even declare gilgamesh his adoptive brother as shown in the sections of a surviving hymn quote shulgi the righteous shepherd of samir praises his brother and friend the lord gilgamesh in his might addresses him and his heroism mighty one in battle a devastating flood who smites the enemy in the heat of the combat a catapult of the holy wall skilled in hurling the slingstone against the house of quish you brought forth your weapons its seven heroes you captured dead the king of quiche emma barack easy you trampled on his head as if he were a snake you brought over the kingship from quiche to uruk another thread that scholar jeffrey t gaye has noted is the resemblance between many of the physical feats attributed to shoghi and his hymns such as his skill at wrestling and athletics and those of gilgamesh in the later epic alternatively these kingly attributes may reflect those attributed to the acadian kings particularly the god-like stature claimed by naram sin ultimately though we have no way of knowing if five of these figures influenced gilgamesh's depictions and it is just as likely that his athletic prowess is influenced by common attributes claimed by mesopotamian kings throughout history so to conclude our discussions of the sumerian gilgamesh poems let us quickly discuss another question that divided scholars after their initial discovery whether they belong to a unified sumerian epic it was initially taken for granted that these works were indeed part of a larger narrative and it was not until the work of samuel kramer in the 1940s that the idea was disputed over time however scholars have concluded that there is no evidence at all that these tales were considered part of a unified epic not only is there no evidence of these poems being grouped together during ancient times but as we have explored earlier these poems lack many of the central plot points are fully developed themes of the later epic there is also no clear evidence of textual passages linking the individual poems together the one small piece of evidence to the contrary is the existence of a copy of gilgamesh in the netherworld found at the archaeological site of meteoran hero passage exists that appears to bridge the end of this poem to the beginning of gilgamesh and huawei with the hero turning from his grief at enkidu's death to the living one's mountain of the later poem however this copy dates from a later period and also contains an inherent contradiction as enkidu was consigned to the underworld in the first tale yet is somehow alive and by gilgamesh's side again in the second hale as such we can conclude that there is no convincing evidence of the unified epic in this period and its genesis most likely belongs to the centuries ahead the time has come to move on if we had to find the earliest known appearance of the unified epic of gilgamesh we must move forward by a number of centuries into the early second millennium bc this period coincides with major changes in both mesopotamian culture and politics after controlling the region for more than a century the earth free dynasty came to an abrupt end around the late 21st century bc with the reasons for this collapse still being unclear one argument is that this collapse was due to the increasing migration of a group of peoples known as the amorites into mesopotamia these people likely originated to the west shown by their acadian name amuru or westerners and seem to have lived a pastoralist lifestyle that saw them alternate between sedentary living and seasonal nomadism people with amorite names had been mentioned in documents from at least the middle of the third millennium bc but from around the turn of the second millennium bc we see a vast increase in the number of amorised names appearing in documents in the centuries ahead a number of rulers with amorite names would also succeed in establishing their own dynasties throughout mesopotamia where they quickly assimilated both local customs and belief structures whether or not these people played any role in the collapse of the earth-free state however is a controversial topic amongst archaeologists and this appearance may simply be a coincidence what we do know is that early in the reign of the final earth free ruler ibisin many of the other cities within the empire ceased paying taxes to er and the whole system by which the state maintained itself quickly collapsed unlike the collapse of the acadian empire before it the end of the earth free dynasty appears to have been relatively orderly with no sign of disruption throughout southern and central mesopotamia the exception to this seems to have been at er itself where later copies of messages have been uncovered addressed from ibi sin to an official named ishbira urging him to buy grain at whatever price it was available from the cities of issen and kazalu it has been argued on the basis of these letters the region around earth free itself was undergoing a famine during this period however their authenticity has been disputed it has also been proposed the need for grain was due to a loss of expected tax revenue from the wider empire later ishbira would break away and form his own state of the city of isin near nepur which he also seized control of soon after ibisin would continue to reign atter for another two decades when an invasion by the elamites and the king of shimaski a state in the region of the sagros mountains seized both him and the city ishbiero would fare better and succeeded in driving out this invasion in his 27th year of rule he and his successors would later claim hegemony over sumer and akkad as heirs to the ur-free dynasty but in reality their state was much smaller in scale with their power being limited to most of southern mesopotamia elsewhere in central and northern mesopotamia new rulers would emerge to forge their own states each of which would attempt to dominate the region in the centuries ahead the political history of mesopotamia in the second millennium bc is highly complex and a full discussion of its events is beyond the scope of this video let us suffice then with a quick summary the first four centuries after the collapse of the earth free dynasty running from the beginning of the 20th century bc the end of the 17th century bc are collectively known as the old babylonian period in its first two centuries seven mesopotamia was dominated by two major players the dynasty of isin founded by ishbi era and a rival state led by the city of lhasa along with a number of small states in central mesopotamia a previously unimportant town by the name of babylon grew into a major city ruled by an amorite dynasty whilst to the east the city of eshnuna became the heart of a powerful state to the north the cities of asura and nineveh became wealthy for their role as trade intermediaries between the developing city-states of anatolia and those of southern mesopotamia whilst to the west lay the amrite's kingdoms of mari yamcat and katna these first two centuries are characterized by a period of almost continual warfare between these states in the end however it was the newcomer of babylon that would succeed in uniting much of mesopotamia beneath its rule around 1766 bc a coalition of elam babylon marry and possibly lhasa sat dash nuna ending its bid for hegemony two years later babylon's king hammurabi would turn on his former ally and defeat elam with the help of vishnu and his new rulers only to turn on this ally again and sack the city once more soon afterwards he would subdue both mary and larsa too incorporating them into a new state that ran from mary in the northwest to the shores of the persian gulf in the south soon hammurabi took on the titles of the acadian and ur-free kings before him dubbing himself king of sumer and akkad king of the four quarters once again sumer and akkad were united and in the centuries ahead this region will be known under a new name babylonia throughout this period of feuding city-states the literature and written language of mesopotamia continued to evolve perhaps the most important development from the perspective of the gilgamesh mythos was a change in the way the literature was being recorded up until the end of the third dynasty of ur sumerian had been the dominant written language of both central and southern mesopotamia from at least the beginning of the second millennium bc however its use would be eclipsed by that of acadian which went on to become the diplomatic language of both the middle east and much of the eastern mediterranean soon sumerian was no longer being spoken and slowly it was limited to the role of an academic language used mostly by scribes despite this works of sumerian literature continued to be recorded and this period also saw a major firing of acadian literature throughout the scribal schools of the region alongside a count of the exploits of the kings of uruk lou garbander and enmakar now both firmly established as gilgamesh's father and grandfather respectively we see for the first time accounts such as atana and the eagle and of the acadian hero atra hasis and most importantly for us it is during this period that we see the first evidence for what is likely a unified epic of gilgamesh the old babylonian epic of gilgamesh exists today mostly in fragments that have been found at southern centers such as nipper uh and this in from what we can tell many of these tablets appear to have been composed during the training of new scribes who likely copied them down as part of their schooling only two tablets are largely complete the first outlining the taming of enkidu and his confrontation with gilgamesh and the second covering the beginning of the journey to the cedar forest beyond that the remaining fragments include portions of gilgamesh and enkidu's slaying of the forest guardian humbaba along with a section of gilgamesh's later journey to meet with the survivor of the flood now for the first time named as uttana pishtim a simple translation of the names isudra into acadian for obvious reasons the amount of information regarding the development of the epic that can be garnered from this material is limited it is generally agreed among scholars that the fragments we do have available constitute a unified epic though due to several factors this is not 100 certain for a start the beginning and ending of the two major tablets have not survived in the available copies meaning that we lack the exact bridging text between the two it also remains uncertain whether this version of the epic contained all of its later episodes for example the old babylonian episode of the bull of heaven has yet to be found and so it cannot be ruled out that this episode was added in later some missing plot points are however implied by the presence of the later episodes for example we can be reasonably certain that the first tablet would have detailed gilgamesh's tyranny over the people of uruk as otherwise there is no reason for enkidu to be created in the second tablet similarly gilgamesh's description of enkidu's death in the surviving fragment of tablet 10 indicates that this episode was likely also part of the epic at this time although the exact events that lead to it remain uncertain finally we see the presence of the more unified themes of the exercise of power and kingship along with gilgamesh's search for immortality and his love for enkidu the loss of whom spurs him on to find a way to thwart death so how was this new acadian epic composed well it's unlikely that we'll ever be sure it could well be the work of a single author or the culmination of the work of many different scribes throughout the period in support of the former theory it has been argued that the old babylonian epic is written in a more simple poetic style than the later standard epic and scholars such as andrew r george have used this to argue that it could well be the work of a single poet of genius in support of the latter argument it must be said that this poetic style does not exclude the possibility that this version of the epic was the result of the cumulative work of more than one author and that its language is merely the result of a later editor who formalised the text we also know that scribes will continue to revise the text of the epic in the centuries ahead and it is possible that a similar process of revision led to the creation of the old babylonian version so putting aside the question of a single author for the moment what sources may have inspired its composition the most obvious suggestion is that the old babylonian epic would have been composed using the earlier sumerian poems with a combination of acadian translations and new material being used to establish a unifying plot and themes as well as to expand on events only mentioned briefly in its forerunners in the process some less relevant material would naturally have been excised such as the content of the poem gilgamesh and akka support for this idea comes from the fact that we know the sumerian poems were still being copied down by scribes during this period and it is likely that the author or authors of the unified epic were familiar with them in some fashion there are some problems of this theory however as many gilgamesh scholars have pointed out outside of the overall plot points the text of the epic bears only a slight resemblance to those of the poems with corresponding episodes and any direct translation of sumerian into acadian can be largely ruled out possible explanation for this is that the writers of the acadian epic were only loosely familiar with these earlier poems or as jeffrey t gaye has suggested that they were working from an arcadian intermediary that only paraphrased their contents andrew our george has gone further than this suggesting that the epic of this era may have been based not on the existing poems but on acadian oral traditions within old babylonian society indeed from the hymnic refrain seen in later versions of the epic we can surmise that the epic may well have been sung within babylonian society much as the poems before it after all if the epic were a familiar form of entertainment during this period it would in turn make sense for scribes to copy it down as part of their training or to formally transcribe a record of it and whilst it is almost impossible to track oral traditions in a dead language this may also explain the sheer volume of new material seen in this version the best example of this is the vast expansion in enkidu's description and backstory whilst it has been claimed that there are already some hints of a deeper friendship between gilgamesh and enkidu and the sumerian poems it is in the old babylonian epic that we see enkidu's role transformed no longer a simple servant he has become a wild man crafted by the gods as gilgamesh's physical equal described as extremely hairy he begins his life ignorant of the ways of civilization living and grazing amongst the herd animals of the staff after being civilized through intercourse with the prostitute shamhat he travels to uruk where he comes into conflict with gilgamesh after wrestling with him enkidu instead becomes the hero's closest companion and gilgamesh frequently describes him as the axe by his side elsewhere gilgamesh is explicitly described as loving him as he would a wife and it is the loss of enkidu that directly inspires his quest for immortality the level of originality of each of these plot points differs but in particular enkidu's newfound status as a wild man seems without any clear precursors in mesopotamian literature in the past a number of scholars have argued that these newfound attributes are inspired by earlier sumerian stereotypes of the amorites who they considered an uncivilized people a commonly cited example of these stereotypes is found in a passage from a composition known as the marriage of matu which dates from the third millennium bc to quote its text a tent dweller buffeted by the wind and rain dwelling in the mountain the one who digs up mushrooms at the foot of the mountain who does not know how to bend the knee who eats uncooked meat who in his lifetime does not have a house who on the day of his death will not be buried whilst these stereotypes very much reinforce the sumerian view of the amorites as uncivilized it should be noted that they display a little overlap with enkidu's description for example the amorites are mentioned as eating uncooked meat whilst enkidu grazes on the grass of the plains and the amorites do not share enkidu's hairiness nor his kinship with wild beasts it is also clear that by the time the earliest version of the epic of gilgamesh appeared many of the major ruling dynasties of the region could trace their beginnings to amorite ancestors and this ancestry would no longer have been considered in a negative light there is however another document that is according to jeffrey t may have at least indirectly influenced the epic's depiction of enkidu known as a debate between sheep and grain it also dates from the third millennium bc and details another version of the sumerian creation myth whilst it is unlikely to have served as a direct textual source for enkidu's wild man attributes it does include a description of primordial man with whom he shares some similarities quote mankind of that time knew not the eating of bread knew not the wearing of garments the people went around with skins on their bodies they ate grass with their mouths like sheep drank water from ditches this text then goes on to explain the civilization of mankind by the gods who mediate to them the mez this elusive concept is mentioned frequently throughout sumerian literature and is roughly thought to mean the norms of civilized society including sexual intercourse agriculture crafts priesthood and kingship this process shows clear parallels to the civilizing of enkidu who is first elevated from the beasts by intercourse with a human woman then taught the ways of humanity by the shepherds of the steppe so in the old babylonian period we see much formalization of the epic's content and indeed its major additions from this time would remain largely the same in later versions however at this stage much of its content is still missing and if we wish to see the epic in its familiar form we must again move forward and examine changes in mesopotamian politics around the end of the old babylonian period whilst hammurabi was able to pass on his unified empire to his son samsui luna he himself would not be so lucky after an initial period of stability samsua luna faced two rebellions in the south from the rulers of lhasa and uruk along with an invasion from a new group of peoples from the zagros mountains to the east known as the cascites this group of people would go on to play major roles in mesopotamian politics and are perhaps best known for their association with the use of horse-drawn chariots in warfare samsu aluna was successful in thwarting this invasion and in pacifying the south claiming in one of his year names to have destroyed the wars of both uruk and larsa as punishment but this success wouldn't last soon after the defeat of the southern rebellion babylon seems to have largely withdrawn from the area alongside this retreat also came a shifting of the center of mesopotamian religious life until now the central god of the southern and central plains had been enlil whose cult was based in the southern city of nepur after the babylonian withdrawal however his cult moved northwards to babylon itself a move that coincided with the slower ovation of its local god marduk to the head of the babylonian pantheon and most importantly for us this withdrawal had an unintentional side effect by forcing many of the scribes of the south to leave their cities this act unintentionally preserved many of the period's manuscripts within their abandoned households including the only surviving copies of the sumerian gilgamesh poems exactly why this retreat occurred is uncertain and it seems to have been accompanied by major movements of peoples from the south to cities such as kish and babylon whatever the cause the result of this withdrawal was that much of the region came under the control of a shadowy group of rulers known as the first sealand dynasty for whom we have little inscriptional evidence to the north and the east both assyria and elam appear to have thrown off babylonian hegemony around this time and samsua luna's rule became largely limited to central mesopotamia by the end of the 18th century bc the empire of hammurabi was already a distant memory the final century of the old babylonian period is poorly documented we know that samsung luna's successors remain secure in northern babylonia and indeed this region seems to have prospered during this time by the reigns of its final rulers however it is clear that babylon was increasingly in conflict with a number of tribal groupings who assyriologist paul auenbulu has associated with the cascites despite this when the destruction of the first dynasty of babylon came it was not at the hands of a mesopotamian power instead the end came in the form of an attack by the hittite king nacilli the first who sacked babylon around the beginning of the 16th century formed in the late 18th century bc the hittites heartlands laid to the north west around the city of hatusa in central anatolia by the time of the sack of babylon their control had expanded to include much of this region along with parts of northern syria previously controlled by yamcad exactly why mercilessly chose to attack a region so far from the hittite heartlands is unclear and indeed this military venture appears to be more of a raid to seize plunder rather than any attempt at conquest whatever the cause according to later babylonian and hittite documents mercilessly sacked the city around 1595 bc and carried off the cult statue of marduk in the resulting power vacuum the city's amarite dynasty would be replaced by a cassite one although much like their predecessors these rulers soon took on the trappings of mesopotamian culture and language after this babylonia descended into something of a dark age the rest of the 16th century bc and sources for the early cascite period are scarce what we do know is that at some point in the early 15th century bc the kassaic king ullam buryat succeeded in subjugating the seal and dynasty to the south reuniting babylonia into a single political unit by the middle of the 14th century bc the influence of this unified state was felt as far north as assyria and as far south as the states of the persian gulf making it one of the great powers of its day this growth in power coincided with large-scale sponsorship of public building by the casside rulers including a vast new capital city at der kurigalzu the central ziggurat of which still stands some 57 metres tall today and most importantly for us the cassite period is marked by a new period of creativity in babylonian literature along with the development of a literary dialect that would remain standard throughout the region for nearly a millennium in the middle centuries of the cascite period we see some small evidence for a version of the epic that is still in flux today this version is known by scholars as the middle babylonian epic of gilgamesh although really all we have are a scattering of fragments from nipper and ur in the south from the western cities of ema megiddo and ugarit and at the hittite capital of hatusa in central anatolia most of these fragments date from around the 14th century bc and are so disparate that few comparisons can be made either between them or with the text of the old babylonian version perhaps their most important contribution is that they include excerpts from episodes of the epic previously unseen in the old babylonian version these include the tale of gilgamesh's creation and his tyranny over the people of uruk the remaining parts of the cedar forest expedition the defeat of the bore of heaven and parts of enkidu's death bed speech we can also see that the text of the epic continued to evolve during this period and that it's copying out appears to remain a staple of scribal instruction throughout babylonia finally it appears during the only ancient period in which versions of the epic appear to have been written in languages other than acadian this includes a largely unintelligible version of the epic written in hurien the language of a group of people who ruled various states in syria and northern mesopotamia the most notable of which was the state of mittani in the west this state would prove a powerful foe for both the hittites and the new kingdom of egypt throughout the 16th and 15th centuries bc and would temporarily succeed in subjugating assyria to the east for its power collapsed in the 14th century bc to this we can also add a fragmentary paraphrase of the epic written and hittite the exact source of which is difficult to tell interestingly parts of the bowl of heaven episode are included amongst these fragments may indicate that such an episode was present in the old babylonian epic if this version was derived from it so moving on from the limited remains of the middle babylonian epic it is during the later centuries of the cascite period that we finally see the emergence of the 12 tablet epic with which most people are familiar today known as the standard or late epic its surviving tablet state from the first millennium bc and were originally found in the libraries of the neo-as-syrian kings asha banapal and his grandfather senate cherub however according to scholars such as andrew george and mark van der meerup it is likely that this work was originally composed during the late second millennium bc either at the end of the cassitec period or shortly thereafter the giveaway for this is the highly ornate nature of its text a style known as standard babylonian that first appeared in the cascite period and it would remain the main literary dialect of the region until the extinction of acadian as a major language indeed many of the later copies of these texts were attributed to earlier authors by scribes in the first millennium bc with themselves broadly grouped into families that claim descent from one of these illustrious ancestors many of whom bore cascite names the epic itself is no exception to this and by the neo-babylonian period it had become recognized as a creation of an especially illustrious ancestor to quote a list of texts and authors dating from this period series gilgamesh from the mouth of sin laki uni exactly who sin lei kiunini was is a contentious question amongst gilgamesh scholars such as the scarcity of information that we have on his life that any number of arguments have been made both for and against his existence even if he did exist his exact relationship to the text is uncertain as we've discussed before serious arguments have been made that the elegant text of the old babylonian epic was composed by a single author who may well have been sin like you nini alternatively if he lived in the cassette period then he may simply have been a late editor of the text who collated the 12 tablet version the remains standard from that point onwards it may even have been some influential editor of a middle babylonian version of the epic it provided the blueprints for the standard epic of the late second millennium bc in the absence of any other evidence about his life however there is no real way for us to know which if any of these possibilities is true about the most we can say is that by the first millennium bc the babylonians already considered him an ancestor figure of both great antiquity and prestige as seen by his inclusion in a later version of the sumerian king list that presents him as the chief's scholar during the times of gilgamesh himself in reality this listing has little bearing on fact and it's likely an attempt by these later authors to enhance both their own prestige and that of the text by inflating its antiquity so what is there to say about the standard epic compared to its predecessors well besides its moronate literary style we mostly see a restructuring of existing plot points rather than wholesale insertions or changes as we have outlined throughout this video the newer content found within the epic at this time also reflects ideas and events hinted at in earlier versions of the story as well as in the sumerian poems that preceded it for all we know this new material may already have been part of the epic by the old babylonian period but regardless of when it was inserted we must acknowledge the drafting of these new sections which still have required a great amount of creativity and skill as the writer or writers of the epic would have had to take what were only briefly defined episodes of gilgamesh's life and expand them into a narrative that combined the overarching themes of the epic alongside this however we must acknowledge that not all parts of the epic were so successfully integrated the worst offender in this regard is the final part of the epic tablet 12. widely regarded by scholars as a late appendage to the epic it consists of a direct acadian translation of the second part of the sumerian poem gilgamesh in the netherworld beginning immediately after gilgamesh's toys fall into the underworld with the exception of some slight expansion of the text this piece displays little to no integration with the earlier epic being crudely tacked on without even a bridging sentence in between the result is that at the beginning of this section enkidu is now miraculously alive again before his descent into the underworld and its events proceed largely in a vacuum disconnected from the previous epic exactly when or why this tablet was added into the narrative is uncertain one theory voiced by geoffrey teague is that this section was included in order to instruct gilgamesh on the conditions of the underworld says he might better understand the role that he would play after his demise as judge of the dead back to the main text of the epic what is also interesting is how the mesopotamian society it depicts remains closer to that of the third and the early second millennium bc than that of the cassitec period for example in the standard epic enlil remains king of the gods despite him having long been supplanted as the head of the babylonian pantheon by marduk indeed by the cascite period enlil had been so demoted that he barely appears in the late babylonian creation myth the enumer elish in which marduk takes on the central role as the lord of creation as a result it seems clear that by this point the larger elements of the epic have become fixed within babylonian scribal traditions with the plot points of its ancient storyline being respected rather than being altered to reflect more contemporary developments putting all these comparatively minor points aside the standard epic stands out from its prior versions by its inclusion for the first time of what has become the epic's most famous element we have seen hints of its existence earlier when discussing the sumerian poem the death of gilgamesh and the opening of the sumerian king list indeed it was the inclusion of this element that led to renewed interest in the epic following its initial rediscovery and it would soon raise its profile to worldwide attention it is this event that would influence works far beyond its original epic and shaped the canon of both other mythologies and of religions still practice throughout the world today the flood [Music] in 1872 a momentous discovery was made by a 32 year old man in the employee of the british museum he held no formal degree no great scholarship or position being a mere assistant to the more renowned assyriologist sir henry rowlinson his name was george smith he came from a humble background being born to working-class parents in a cramped london tenement to put it bluntly people with his background were not wanted in the academic world of the 19th century and his parents have been under no illusions as to his chances his formal education ended when he was only 14 and instead of attending high school he was soon apprenticed as a banknote in graver during this apprenticeship however the young smith became obsessed with biblical studies along with the emerging field of assyriology named for its initial focus on excavations is assyrian cities such as nineveh in northern mesopotamia at the time this field was still largely unformalized indeed many of its earliest excavations have been conducted by amateurs interested in determining the truth of the biblical account of history cuneiform itself had only been painstakingly deciphered over the course of the last three decades and henry rawinson's first volume on the cuneiform inscriptions of western asia had only recently been published when smith arrived at the museum in 1861 as david danrosch notes in his work the buried book the disorganized nature of the field offered smith a rare gap in the armour of the british establishment where his lack of formal schooling would be considered less of a barrier to entry somehow or another the young man managed to insert himself into the disorganized department hurrying to the museum during his lunch break on the three days the museum was open to the public at first he drew no attention going ignored by the department's two members of permanent staff eventually however they realized their surprise that this young man could read cuneiform better than any of themselves and soon rawlinson would convince the museum to hire him on as an assistant curator by all accounts the pay was unimpressive but it did not dampen smith's enthusiasm for the job soon he was working long hours piecing together uniform tablets for transcription in 1866 he published his first article and the next year rowanson had the museum hire him on as his assistant for the future volumes of cuneiform inscriptions as smith himself would describe it this hiring marked his official entry into public life but despite this progress his great ambition of excavating in mesopotamia himself went unrealised and he was unable to convince the university trustees to finance such an expedition indeed by this point many of them felt that the museum already had enough of what they dubbed primitive babylonian and assyrian artifacts then in november of 1872 whilst working on volume 4 of rowlinson's series smith was sorting through a group of tablets that had laid untranscribed in the museum archives for the last quarter century they had been discovered at nineveh in the 1840s by the pioneering archaeologists ahmad srasam and austin henry layard comprising of a trove of some 22 000 tablets known as the library of the neo-assyrian king ashibanapal as smith later recollected i noticed references to the creation in a tablet number k63 in the museum collection and allusions and other tablets to similar legends i therefore set about searching through the collection commencing a steady search among these fragments i soon found half of the curious tablet which had evidently contained originally six columns of text two of these were still nearly perfect two others were imperfect about half remaining while the other remaining columns are entirely lost on looking down the theater column maya caught the statement that the ship rested on the mountains of nazir followed by the account of the sending forth of the dove and is finding no resting place in returning i saw it once i had ear discovered a portion at least at the chaldean account of the deluge according to later accounts by his contemporaries so excited by this discovery was smith that he leapt up and began to strip off his clothing although he made no mention of such an event in his own account whether it happened or not word of his discovery spread quickly as we mentioned before the society of his time was one that was growing increasingly skeptical about the literal truth of the bible it had only been 13 years since the publication of charles darwin's on the origin of species by the time of smith's discovery the theory of evolution had been largely accepted by the wider scientific community advances in the understanding of geology were also similarly undercutting many of the foundational stories of the biblical creation and textual critics had begun to cast out on the bible's presentation of history as such smith's presentation of his findings to a meeting of the biblical archaeology society on the 3rd of december which included amongst its audience the then prime minister william gladstone led to immediate attention from the worldwide press soon after newspapers on either side of the atlantic were trumpeting smith's discovery and what they saw is its clear connections with the biblical story of noah to quote the new york times noah's log of the deluge is said to have turned up among some ancient chaldean inscriptions and an account of it which has been given by mr george smith of the british museum has caused a good deal of excitement especially one passage in which the gods of the period are described as feeling very bad and sitting like dogs with their tails between their legs this irreverent remark occurs in a narrative of the deluge which purports to have been given by one of the survivors to a chaldean monarch named isdubar the original composition of the narrative is placed at the latest in the 17th century before the christian era and it might be much earlier at the same time however the paper sounded a cautionary note for the present the orthodox people are in great delight and are very much pre-possessed by the corroboration which sisit affords to biblical history it is possible however as has been pointed out that the chaldean inscription if genuine may be regarded as a confirmation of the statement that there are various traditions of the deluge apart from the biblical one which are perhaps legendary like the rest the discovery of the flood portion of the gilgamesh epic launched smith to immediate preeminence as an assyriologist and gave him the opportunity to realize his dream of excavating in the field over the next four years smith would conduct free expeditions to nineveh publishing his findings in volumes that were as much travelogues as they were reports in 1876 he published his translation of the gilgamesh epic under the title the chaldean account of genesis placing its flood myth fallen centre by the time of his unexpected death he had eclipsed his contemporaries in fame and appeared to be on the precipice of a long and distinguished career unfortunately for him his young family and the field of assyriology his third expedition to nineveh would be his last on the return journey he stopped in a small village outside of aleppo where he came down with dysentery his companions managed to rush him to the city in search of medical aid but nothing could be done and he died there on august 19 1876 he was just 36 years old the flood myth contained in the gilgamesh epic received worldwide attention from the moment of its discovery and remains one of the primary sources of interest in the story to this day whilst much of the focus placed upon it is due to its connections with the later biblical flood story it should be emphasized that to the mesopotamians themselves the flood was a seminal event in history before it came an age when gods and primordial forces stalked the land when humanity animals and the first cities were created and when the kingship itself first descended from the heavens in these antediluvian times they believed that kings reigned for thousands of years and the population of the world far outweighed that of later mesopotamian society in tablet 11 of the epic of gilgamesh we have only a paraphrase of the flood's events but even this lays bare the scale of its destruction in this tablet the survivor of the flood utznapishtim relates the story of its events to gilgamesh in order to explain his immortality we learn that in a previous age the city of shuropak located on the euphrates to the south of nippur was home to the gods anu enlil ninerta energy and ayer the babylonian name for the sumerian god enki so great had mankind multiplied in those days that it was said the whole world bellowed like a ball and this noise roused the anger of the king of the god zen lil he decreed that humanity should be exterminated and that all life should perish beneath the waters of a giant flood in doing so he also made the other gods swear an oath of secrecy but after the decision was made ayer crept out of the council by pretending to speak to the wall of a reed hut he warned the mortal man utnapishtim of the coming flood following ayer's advice utnapish tim tore down his house and built a boat with seven decks that measured 120 cubits on all sides after seven days labor the boat was complete another pissed him loaded onto it all of his gold and family along with his craftsmen and beasts both wild and tame that evening as predicted the storm got adad flooded the land with a torrential downpour lasting for six days and nights terrified by the storm that they have unleashed the gods cowered like dogs whilst ishtar bemoans the drowning of mankind atnapishtim's boat survives however and on the seventh day of the flood he throws open a porthole only to reveal water stretching as far as the eye can see finally a land appears in the form of the peak of mount nasir on which uttana pishtim's boat runs aground after seven more days he sends out first a dove and the swallow both of whom return after finding no place to land finally he sends out a raven who finds that the waters have receded and does not return asana utnapishtim then performs a great sacrifice on the mountain the fragrance of which draws the gods one by one ishtar soon arrives and she bemoans endless foley in calling for humanity's destruction eventually enlil himself arrives angry at humanity's survival only to be shamed by both ishtar and enki finally emerald then blesses both utnapishtim and his wife with immortality and sets them at the mouth of the rivers to dwell for all time since its initial discovery comparisons have rightly been drawn between this story and the account of the flood given in the book of genesis where the role of utnapishtim is taken by the patriarch noah and his family indeed when placed side by side the two stories are almost identical with only minor changes being inserted into the genesis narrative to fit with the wider biblical canon for example in the genesis flood story the many gods of the mesopotamian pantheon are replaced by the single god of the bible who now has to perform both the role of summoning the flood to destroy humanity and of warning the last righteous man and his family to build the ark conversely the genesis story retains even small details of the gilgamesh flood myth down to the god of the bible being pleased by the scent of noah's sacrifice much as were his mesopotamian predecessors as such it is now widely agreed by scholars that the events of the genesis flood narrative are taken almost wholesale from gilgamesh and that other mesopotamian myths such as the enuma elish also appear to have influenced the wider biblical account of creation and going beyond the biblical account other mythologies also show flood stories with clear influences from gilgamesh in greek mythology a similar flood myth concerns the adventures of the greek hero ducalian in this account zeus has grown angry at the actions of the bronze race of men and decides to eliminate them by flooding most of greece with an abundance of rain on the advice of his father prometheus who kalyan survives this downpour by building a great chest into which he places himself and his wife pira along with enough provisions to last out the flood after nine days and nights ducalion comes to rest on the shores of mount parnassus where zeus rewards him with whatever his heart desires ducalion then uses this wish to repopulate greece turning the stones he and his wife through into men and women so the gilgamesh flood myth was clearly a major influence on the later mythologies of the eastern mediterranean but where exactly did it originate going only by the material we have discussed so far in this video it may seem like this story is an entirely new addition to the standard epic whilst we know that the survivor of the flood was associated in some way with gilgamesh as far back as one of the sumerian poems we have no evidence at all of the flood story in any earlier version of the epic in itself this may simply be an accident of survival as only portions of the old and middle babylonian epic remain but if we instead look to the wider literature of mesopotamia it becomes clear that there are at least two older flood myths that appear in both acadian and sumerian texts the first and better attested of these two is the acadian creation myth the atrahasis the oldest versions of which dates the old babylonian period whilst the story itself claims to be concerned with the flooding of the world by the gods it actually begins by outlining the human creation myth according to its texts after the anunnaki gods have divided the world between them they force the younger gods known as eg to labour on their behalf after laboring for 3 600 years the ogiji gods grow tired and rebel against the anunnaki to solve this problem the anunnaki then slaughtered the god iloella then have ayer and the creator goddess mammy craft humanity by mixing his blood with clay after 600 years pass humanity multiplies so much that their noise angers the great god enlil and from here an almost exact equivalent of the gilgamesh flood epic plays out although in this story the hero's name is atra hasis whom much like uttana pushed him also dwells within the city of shiropak the second mesopotamian flood story is somewhat briefer and is tested today only in the form of a single fragmentary tablet written in sumerian known by the titles of the eredo genesis or simply the deluge this story dates from around 1600 bc and outlines yet another variant of the mesopotamian creation myth in this story we again see the creation of mankind by the anunnaki which in this tell comprises of the gods an enlo enki and nina sag after a missing portion of the text we hear that ann and enlo have decided to destroy humanity and they force each god to swear not to interfere to get around this engi tells the planet of the gods to a wall behind which is hidden the hero of the tail zeo sudra after another missing passage which presumably detailed the construction of a vessel by the sudra we hear that after the flood has raged for seven days and nights the waters fall quiet the sumerian sun god utu then appears and zia sudra dutifully makes a sacrifice in his honor after a final missing section we find the hero prostrating himself before anu and enlil we grant him eternal life and place him to the south of mesopotamia in the land of dilman upon its translation in 1912 it was initially presumed that the sumerian story of the deluge was a predecessor to the flood story of gilgamesh much as the sumerian gilgamesh poems may have preceded the old babylonian epic over time however it has become clear that the account of the flood given in gilgamesh is more likely to be a paraphrased version of the atrahasis and according to stephanie daley the sumerian story itself may well be derived from the akkadian account as proof of this jeffrey t gaye has offered several pieces of evidence firstly not only are the plot points of the two almost identical but some lines in the epic are copied almost word for word from the atrahasis for example in tablet 11 of the epic the list of gods present at the meeting to decide humanity's fate is copied over exactly from the opening of the atrahasis even though in the gilgamesh version some of these gods play no role whatsoever in its events and figures that do such as ishtar are absent secondly the flood of the atrahasis is already present in its old babylonian version where it plays a key role in the story by comparison the gilgamesh flood story appears only later in the standard epic and there plays no clear part in its central quest finally there also exists something of a smoking gun in line 187 of the tablet where the author accidentally names up to napishtim as atrajasis so it seems likely that whilst the version of the flood myth presented in tablet 11 was first introduced into the epic of gilgamesh in the late second millennium bc developed versions of the myth date back at least as far as the old babylonian period before that all we have are scattered references in documents dating from the end of the third millennium bc leaving us uncertain as to what significance its legend would have held during these earlier periods we are aware of at least three earlier sumerian creation myths that may well date the early dynastic period known as the barton cylinder the debate between winter and summer and the previously mentioned debate between sheep and grain however none of these creation myths mention the flood possibly indicating that it is not yet taken on its significance within the beliefs of the region so now that we have gone back as far as the available literary works on ours let us conclude our examination of the mesopotamian flood myth by asking a question occupied many early archaeologists during the excavations of mesopotamian centers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries is there any evidence that the mesopotamian flood myth was inspired by a real-life flood event that took place either in mesopotamia itself or throughout the wider middle east indeed this question would feature prominently in many of the early reports of finds from this region during the 1920s and 30s what also complicates matters is that since the late 90s a new hypothesis has emerged that attempts to explain the origin of this myth from outside of mesopotamia a claim which has in turn been fed by copious press attention so before we move on to examine any potential evidence for a flood within mesopotamia itself let us briefly discuss this hypothesis in 1997 what has become known as the black sea deluge hypothesis was first suggested by geologists william ryan and walter pitt according to this hypothesis which has since been somewhat revised around the end of the 6th millennium bc there was a catastrophic inundation of salt water from the mediterranean into what is now the black sea these authors have argued that this sudden rise in sea level would have had a catastrophic effect on the neolithic communities in the surrounding region and it is the memory of this catastrophe that would have inspired the later mesopotamian flood myth later an alternative to this hypothesis was also suggested by a el that this inundation actually took place somewhere between the 15th and the 11th millennium bc with the source of flooding instead being the caspian sea to the east now bear in mind that i'm far from a geologist and as such i'm unqualified to judge whether either of these events actually occurred but looking at it from the outside these hypotheses seem to be heavily contested with many geologists debating the extent and timing of each of these hypothetical inundations moreover the available archaeological evidence shows no great sign of population movements throughout the period of these inundations that can be directly tied to such a catastrophic flooding we do know that from the second half of the seventh millennium bc there is evidence of sizable movements of people out of turkey both to the west into greece and further on into europe and to the east going as far as egypt however it is still uncertain whether these movements could have been caused by such a major inundation event and indeed there are other environmental reasons such as an ongoing climate event known as the 8.2 kilo year event that may explain these movements but even if we assume that all these events did in fact happen the idea of them having inspired the mesopotamian flood myth relies on an unprecedented period of oral storytelling viewing the youngest date for a black sea inundation being separated from the first mentions of the flood by nearly three millennia it also fails to explain why no evidence of such an event was preserved in other cultures closer to the center of the event such as the old hittite kingdom which was a contemporary of the old babylonian atrahasis finally there is also no reason to think that the ancient mesopotamians would have had to rely on such a distant event to inspire their own flood narratives a seasonal flooding would have been more than norm than the exception on the alluvial plain as we discussed in the early parts of this video agriculture in southern mesopotamia during the third and second millennia bc would have relied on careful systems of water management to be successful and too much river water could easily have damaged cropland a particularly devastating flood could even wash away immature plants in the middle of the growing season resulting in a poor harvest and starvation major floods could even swamp and destroy the mud brick homes of those who live nearby in cities such as uruk this would have posed a particular danger as evidence indicates that the ancient course of the euphrates river flowed through the centre of the city itself the result of all of this is that there is far more reason to think that the ancient mesopotamians would be more inspired by their own living conditions rather than a hypothetical event that took place millennia before so putting aside the idea of a black sea hypothesis is there any evidence for a more localized flood in mesopotamia itself the catastrophic effects of which may have provided the core for the later myths the answer is complex evidence for major flood strata has indeed been unearthed at a number of ancient cities throughout southern mesopotamia the most substantial of these have been found at free sites at kisch to the north at the site of the later flood myths shuropak and near what would have then been the southern coastline at the city of earth luckily for us an account of the discovery of the flood layer at the last of these was penned by the site's principal excavator selenade woolly it took place during the course of the 1928 to 1929 digging season after excavating his most famous find the royal cemetery of ur woolly ordered a small test shaft dug into the soil beneath after progressing through the occupation layers he soon reached eight feet of empty mud however under this he discovered his surprise yet more occupation debris dating from the 4th millennium bc of this puzzling interruption and sequence he quickly formed an interpretation though he hesitated to share it in the end it was his wife fellow archaeologist catherine wooley who gave voice to his suspicions to quote his later writings by the time i had written up my notes was quite convinced of what it all meant but i wanted to see whether others would come to the same conclusion so i brought up two of my staff and after pointing out the facts asked for their explanation they did not know what to say my wife came along and looked and was asked the same question and she turned away remarking casually well of course it's the flood in the season prior to wooly's discovery of the flood strata auteur two archaeologists named steven langdon and louis waterlin were directing a series of excavations at the city of kisch which had begun in the early 1920s during the course of their investigations they came across what they described as a thick layer of sand deposited by a flood beneath which they found a series of brick tombs despite discovering this layer earlier than woolly they were slower to publish their findings and in one of those twists that academics around the world will be familiar with will he receive both the credit and the lion's share of publicity later excavations conducted at the city of shuropak similarly uncovered a flood stratum a finding that was given particular significance given its status as the home of the survivors of each of the mesopotamian flood myths so are these scattered flood strata evidence of a large-scale flood throughout mesopotamia the distant memory of which led to the flood story of the atrahasis of gilgamesh and of the story of ducalion and the biblical flood didn't turn the answer is almost certainly no whilst these findings were received with great enthusiasm at the time the idea that they represented a single region-wide flood quickly ran into difficulties for a start no evidence of flood strata on this scale have been found during excavations at any of the other southern mesopotamian sites dating from this period this comes despite the fact that many of these centres were located close to sites with flood strata and were indeed fed by the same river system and when it comes to the free centers with evidence of flooding even a cursory examination of the evidence throws up further problems as laid out by david macdonald in a 1988 article on the subject it is immediately obvious that the timing of these layers do not always overlap and each one varied in their intensity at uh we see evidence for a single large flood event dating from around the middle of the 4th millennium bc by comparison as kish we see evidence of three separate floods two of them dating to the beginning of the early dynastic period and a third dating from around 2600 bc what also complicates this picture is that these assigned dates precede more modern developments in radiocarbon dating casting some doubt on their accuracy and even if we are to accept the idea that these floods did in some way influence the later accounts of the flood found in sumerian and acadian literature we would still have to explain the many centuries between them and the first known description of the deluge as with the old babylonian version of the epic of gilgamesh we could argue that such accounts may have been passed down in oral tradition during this time but ultimately there is no way of proving this theory as such we must conclude that there is no strong evidence that these floods had anything to do with the later mesopotamian story and at the most all we can say is that these legends may well have been inspired by the frequent flooding that came as part of life on the alluvial plain [Music] so what became of the epic of gilgamesh after the appearance of the standard version well as we've previously discussed this work seems to remain popular as a tool of scribal instruction well into the first millennium bc in addition to its appearance as part of the libraries of the near assyrian kings we know of more than 70 copies that have been unearthed throughout the middle east by the first millennium bc it already appears to be considered a work possessing great antiquity and wisdom which may explain how much of its text remained fossilized compared to other epics of the period exactly how popular it was within wider society however we cannot say as noted by andrew r george his popularity as a teaching tool may indicate that the stories of gilgamesh were still familiar to the average person as transcribing a well-known story would have been an ideal starting point for teaching the cuneiform writing system unfortunately we have no clear way of knowing if this is true it is entirely possible that by this time knowledge of gilgamesh had become unlimited only to courtly scribes along with rulers interested in his ideal of kingship what we can say is that despite its continued importance throughout the early and mid first millennium bc the slow waning of the acadian language from the sixth century bc onwards in favor of aramaic also seems to have resulted in a decline in the epics copying even then parts of its story would continue to influence other works throughout the middle east and the eastern mediterranean in the archaic greece of the early 1st millennium bc the gilgamesh story likely had a significant influence on the development of both the iliad and the odyssey in the latter work the exploits of odysseus parallel many of those accomplished by gilgamesh such as his contention with the giant polyphemus his visit to the netherworld and his refusal of immortality through his spurning of the nymph calypso on top of these yoga mesh is also thought to have influenced the characteristics of the most famous greek hero heracles much like gilgamesh this figure displays supernatural strength and stature his mortal and yet of divine parentage and garbs himself in the skin of a lion these attributes may similarly have influenced the description of the biblical judge samson who was possessed of immense strength until his long hair was cut and in addition to the incorporation of the mesopotamian flood myth into both the jewish torah and the christian old testament gilgamesh and humbaba are also fought to appear in the apocryphal book of giants where their names are assigned to a pair of giants unrelated to the events of the epic gilgamesh also seems to have survived as a popular figure into the roman period in the second century the author alien includes an account of gilgamesh's miraculous birth and usception of the throne of uruk from his grandfather a story that has clear parallels to those surrounding the birth of the acadian emperor sargon the great finally scholar stephanie daley has suggested that the later story of bulu kuya in the arabian nights bears some similarity to gilgamesh's quest to meet the immortal survivor of the flood though this interpretation has been disputed despite its clear influences on these later works by the end of the first millennium bc the epic itself appeared to have lost much of its importance according to geoffrey teague its last known copy dates from ivor the second or the first century bc and alaskan airform documents to contain any mention of gilgamesh date from around the second century as with most babylonian literature the decline and eventual extinction of cuneiform writing saw the end of the epic's relevance and from this point onwards it was lost for more than 2000 years its most well-known copies were lost even earlier remaining sealed in the burnt library of ashubanapal after the fall of ninef to a combined force of meads babylonians and syphians in the year 612 bc ironically it is this baking process that may well have served to preserve the tablets and allowed their fragments to survive until their rediscovery by homur's rasam in the early 1850s even then however gilgamesh himself remained an obscure figure and the publicity surrounding george smith's initial translation of the epic was almost entirely focused on the flood narrative contained within tablet 11. what didn't help matters was that the highly fragmentary state of the available materials at the time meant that the initial translations of the epic of gilgamesh or is dubar as he was mistakenly known or little resemblance to the epic that we know today over time however more and more fragments of the epic were unearthed resulting in a series of increasingly accurate translations in the early 20th century by scholars such as peter jensen alexander heidel ephraim spaza and noah kramer after the end of world war ii awareness of the gilgamesh epic also began to grow beyond the realms of academia in the uk douglas jeffrey bridson's 1953 radio play the quest of gilgamesh helped to popularize an adapted version of the epic to the general public whilst in post-war germany the ruined cities huge death toll and population movements of the post-war period drew comparisons to the epic by a series of celebrated poets and novelists around this time authors also began to take note of the homoerotic elements in gilgamesh and enkidu's relationship and a long literary trend began depicting the two as lovers from the 1960s gilgamesh would continue to reach a yes larger audience and in the 60 years since he has paid in almost every artistic medium possible obviously a full discussion of all of gilgamesh's appearances in popular culture is more than this video can hope to achieve but perhaps the best summary of gilgamesh's modern role is given by theodore zielkowski in his work gilgamesh among us here he wrote that gilgamesh has achieved something few of mythic figures have accomplished by establishing himself simply as a name or character often independent from the epic itself the result is that there are few people in western culture to whom he is entirely unfamiliar even if the epic itself is unknown to them so as we end here today we can say with confidence that whether or not an actual gilgamesh ever existed his name and exploits have managed to live on in popular culture long after those of mesopotamia's greatest monarchs have been all but forgotten and looking back now millennia after the society that composed his epic has vanished from the face of the earth it seems that his quest to overcome death may not have been so futile after all hello everybody it's charles here thank you for watching the video all the way through this one's certainly been quite a long time coming so i hope you enjoyed it before we end here today i just want to say a quick thank you to the archaeologist dr jeff emeling for allowing me to use some of his photos of various sumerian cities in this video you can find a link to his research profile in the description below if you also want to keep up to date on what's happening on this channel you can always follow me on twitter over at twitter.com the underscore histocrat and if you'd like to support the channel a little further you can also head over to patreon.com thehistocrat thank you and take care folks

Channel: The Histocrat

Views: 1,464,626

Keywords: mythology, history, Gilgamesh, Epic of Gilgamesh, Mesopotamian history documentary, history documentary, mesopotamian flood myth documentary, babylonian history documentary, akkadian empire documentary, sumer, sumer documentary, sumerian history documentary, gilgamesh documentary, enkidu, Third dynasty of Ur, mythology documentary, iraq history documentary, noah documentary, biblical history documentary, Uruk Period documentary, sumerians documentary, histocrat, early human history

Id: aBvr7SJ4VE4

Length: 132min 17sec (7937 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 01 2021