Great Voyages: Gilgamesh: Journeys to the End of the World

[Music] [Applause] well thank you very much for that kind introduction and thank you everybody for coming on what is one of the coldest nights I've experienced in Philadelphia it reminds me of the days in Ann Arbor Michigan where I kid you not one day the windchill was minus 40 in Ann Arbor and we had the good fortune to watch that on the news that the windchill in Chicago that day was minus 80 so it's actually not so bad here I'm going to start by some reflections on space and time and the development of the Gilgamesh narratives and I'm going to tell you a little bit of the stories associated with Gilgamesh and then I'm going to try to explain them a little bit it's a huge topic so I'm going to leave a lot out and I'm afraid you'll have to forgive me for that otherwise we'd be here overnight and I don't think anybody's quite ready for that so I want to start since the topic of this lecture series is great voyages I thought it'd be appropriate to start by thinking about maps and mapping we have a very privileged view of maps these days they're easily available to us they are fairly accurate we can play with them we are by the way on this previous slide I press too fast we are on the edge of still getting used to this we are on the edge of the world over here I don't know where the light is but you see where we are we can zoom in this is more or less the known world in ancient Mesopotamia well it's up here I'll mention that pieces of Gilgamesh traditions which are long-lived traditions come from a whole range of sites the dot marked with the a there is the site of Ulrich the city of Ulrich where Gilgamesh comes from and which is our focus this evening but all up and down the tigris-euphrates corridor the area we call Mesopotamia there are sites that have yielded Gilgamesh fragments and tablets at various times and all the way up into Turkey ancient Turkey the Hittites knew Gilgamesh and translated it into Hittite there are some pieces of translation into Hittite down along the shore there through what is now Lebanon Syria Jordan Israel we have fragments of Gilgamesh from all over so the Gilgamesh traditions were known all over the ancient world and Gilgamesh is voyages take him both into the ancient known extremes we'll start by going to Mount Lebanon and they take him beyond that to where the flood survivor lived and that's the second voyage we'll look at so we can zoom in we can see satellite imagery when the satellite imagery is not interesting enough we can make three-dimensional reconstruction of ancient org we're very lucky this is the Mesopotamian world view this is the famous map of the world that is now in the British Museum and the image like a number of other pieces from the British Museum feature tonight comes from the British Museum's outstanding online collections database where you can go on and search for pieces that they've interest by keywords and by the descriptive text and if you sign up you can get high definition images of them to use for your own research it's a wonderful service so this map was written let's say in the 7th century BCE in a city called sipar and it's quite interesting because it's a little like one of those joke maps you see the world according to New Yorkers that kind of thing because what you're seeing that circular band around there that's essentially the see the bit of water and that rectangle just below it in the middle that's Babylon so this is the world as seen from Babylon fairly straightforward place a few regions that are marked with circles a few waterways and then at the outer edge these pointy triangular protuberances which are called na goo area zones regions and which are probably mountainous and the text is very difficult to understand and rather broken but it mentions the flood survivor wouldn't have fished him we'll come back to him later so there's a connection between this and the Gilgamesh narratives um when we think about their view of their journeys their view of space is very different from ours we can visualize space in a way that they couldn't their mental maps are very different back to work I'm going to come back to or Achra peated Lee partly because Gilgamesh does I feel that was a nice piece of homology and partly because the talk consists of several discrete sections and I'm going to try to mark them off with this slide or ik to all intents and purposes is where cities began in Mesopotamia now I'm saying that knowing that this lecture may go on YouTube and my colleagues may say ah but and it's true ah but we don't have enough archaeology of the very early periods of some of the major centers like umma to be sure that there was only a look at the invention of cities but nevertheless what we do have from ORAC the earliest written texts we like to say they're the earliest written texts known and this is an example of one this is written in pictograms it probably dates to about 3000 3200 BCE we can say the language is Sumerian and not everybody in the world agrees with that but it's very likely and the writing system works both by depicting concepts and by conglomerating agglomerating concepts so in the bottom left corner what you see is a pictogram of a head and to the right of it you see as a pictogram of a food bowl and together they make the concept of eating we understand these texts after a manner but they're quite hard to translate few hundred years after the invention of writing Gilgamesh first appears this tablet is a list of gods from ancient city of Farah let's say it dates to 2,600 2,700 BCE it's quite difficult to date these earlier periods closely in absolute terms each of the cases is a god and on the reverse there it's a little bit fuzzy cuz I zoomed in so much that's the name Gilgamesh I can walk over to it Big Ear Gish bill pop da mess all those signs together is one way of writing Gilgamesh the name probably had various forms probably had various realizations sometimes you'll see Bill ganesh for example in the published literature same thing so Gilgamesh is a guard let's say around 2600 and he received some offerings this is a mace from the Louvre here you see again you can read this by now right dingy a geese bill da PAP and then the sign beside it is lugal king so this is for Gilgamesh his king the ruler so and so dedicated this mace head for his life it's a votive offering at the same time during this third millennium tradition Gilgamesh is probably thought of as an early real king not just a God now we don't have direct documentary existent evidence of his existence and honestly I don't think it's that interesting whether he really lived or not it doesn't matter much for the traditions this object is in the Ashmolean museum it's one of the best preserved manuscripts for the best preserved manuscript of the sumerian king list and this is a document which claims to list all the kings that ever ruled in Mesopotamia and sure enough right there as you can no doubt see yes come on work with me ding here keish bill gah mess Gilgamesh Adani Lilla his father was a spirit phantom Lil's an interesting word the wind that whistles in the ruins of the devastated cities some people translated it as phantom gilgamesh's father is claimed to have been unknown in the king list which is quite interesting in itself this prism this object would have been written around let's say 17 1750 BC they also had a concurrent tradition that Gilgamesh's parents were partly divine Gilgamesh's mother was ninh son a goddess and Gilgamesh his father was lougle bandha an officer in the army of auric so you see when we talk about traditional in Mesopotamia we're not talking about a single fixed tradition that is in the heads of everybody who passes it on and interprets it and writes it down for future generations we're talking about something that's malleable that can be very positional so when we think about the voyages of Gilgamesh we think about not only the way that they're configured but also the ways in which they mean within their own contexts at the end Danny Danny Lilla n kolobok a the the Lord of Coolibar Colaba is a part of auric mood and then 26 I'm just going to say in English a crane for 26 years so it's set up as an entry for a real king this is part of their mindset in ancient Mesopotamia Gilgamesh was an early king who became a god he was born 2/3 to God around the same time as the King lists children learning Sumerian are writing tablets like this another social context of the Gilgamesh tales this is a tablet from our collections here at Penn it's written in Sumerian as I said and it's part of the curriculum it's a tablet which gives part of the story of Gilgamesh and who wa Gilgamesh and hawawa is the major episode in which Gilgamesh goes to the mountains and defeats well let's call Who I am a monster but I'll backtrack on that a little later so already you can probably see we've got a variety of traditions and a variety of contexts over time here's another one this is called inventively Gilgamesh P this is also in our collection I have a close-up of it the tablet is a little bit of braided so it doesn't photograph as well as some of the others in the slide sequence this is written about 1600 or so in CIPA this is interesting because it's part of the shift in the Gilgamesh narratives from Sumerian the language of the early tales in to Akkadian and the episode in here is part of the introduction of Enkidu the sleeping with the prostitute the townspeople send out to him and the battle with Gilgamesh so we have actually one of the more exciting Gilgamesh tablets and it's one of very few early Akkadian Gilgamesh tablets and it's the best-preserved so this is one of the prizes of our collection here it's an unassuming tablet when you look at it like this it looks a bit dark and boring but you should never judge a tablet by its color and almost a thousand years later this edition is over is evolving again this is another very very famous tablet possibly the most famous tablet in uniform history this is the flood tablet and this is now in the British Museum this was the tablet that prompted the Daily Telegraph in England to send a separate expedition back to a Shibani Palace libraries to see if they could find more and you can probably see if you look at this and think about the tablets that I've shown you the tablets change in shape and form and writing and by this period the tablets are being written by highly trained scholars they're part of the scholarly literature of the first millennium and that's something I'll come back to later as well back to work so we have mental mapping different views of space and we have the Gilgamesh traditions which are quite varied which evolve over time which have meanings situated within contexts that we have to think about rather than just the Gilgamesh epic now that's actually a rather I'm gonna say layman disclaimer I've just issued because I'm going to talk about mostly today the Gilgamesh epic but my way out of this is that when I talk about the Gilgamesh epic I'm really talking about the one that you all know from things like the Penguin Classics the one that was compiled by a scribe or allegedly compiled by a scribe called sin like even any and which is known in a series of eleven or twelve tablets depending on exactly how we analyze it from the first millennium so it's the famous well-known one the standard Babylonian epic so I'm going to talk mostly about the standard Babylonian epic and I'm gonna try not to drain too far from that but it's very hard because there are passages missing in the standard Babylonian epic and it's inevitable that we filled them in from other tablets so Gilgamesh is a composite on top of all this and Gilgamesh is adventures are composited out of lots of tablets of the kind that I've shown you and we don't have a complete twelve tablets out of Gilgamesh we don't have a single complete manuscript okay yes a little bit early so I'm going to start telling the story at varying levels of detail Gilgamesh is the ruler of auric and he is supreme surpassing all other kings is the first line of the composition in the period of tablet P Gilgamesh P he's perfectly formed he's bigger than everybody else he's stronger than everybody else he plays rougher than everybody else this is a problem he placed too hard with the men folk he they wrestle and play ballgames and he wears them out and they don't come home at night and he plays too hard with the women folk and one of the things that Gilgamesh does apparently is to practice something which we call the use of prima noctus the law of the first night which means that he sleeps with Brides before their husbands do yeah oh the reaction is right it's appropriate because some of these things are markers of a king who goes too far a king who's acting beyond the social pale and the townsfolk of Ulrich appeal to the gods to give them somebody who'll be a match for Gilgamesh they can't take it anymore and the gods create Gilgamesh his companion Enkidu and Enkidu starts off life as essentially a wild animal he's anthropomorphic and he's big and powerful and strong but he lives with the animals he drinks with the animals he's uncivilized he lives in another dimension he lives in the uncivilized dimension and a lot of the Mesopotamian scholarship that I think of when I talk about Gilgamesh I may not have time to mention it all today it's connected with dimensions and the appropriateness of being in dimensions and the ability to move back and forth between dimensions and the implications of carrying out certain actions in a dimension that you don't belong in so the townspeople have to get Enki due into civilization and they hatch a cunning plan which is to send a prostitute out to him called shamhat the name means something like very lovely and shamhat seduces him and they have sex for six days and seven nights just so you know there are some I'm unit searching some I'm not so after this Enkidu wants to go back to his wild animals but he can't he's lost some of his natural powers he's lost the ability to interact with the animals he doesn't belong there anymore he's tainted by the knowledge of a woman from civilization so they take him back to the town they show him bread he doesn't know what to do with it they teach him to eat bread and drink beer he eats the food of the civilized dimension if you like and he crosses over and just after he does that Gilgamesh is on his way one evening to sleep with a new bride thank you do blocks his passage they wrestle and they wrestle to a standstill how many Westerns have you seen that happening what happens after you fight to a standstill with somebody they earn your grudging respect and you become friends right and that's what happens okay so now Gilgamesh and Enkidu are suddenly best friends and this buddy movie yeah so at this point the narrative there are some breaks and inconsistencies between the versions but basically what happens is that there is some kind of existential angst in play this is very clear in some of the Sumerian versions of Gilgamesh in who are where Gilgamesh is sad and anxious - Enkidu says why are you upset and Gilgamesh literally says because I went up on the walls of work and I saw the bodies floating past me and I thought what is he all for what's the point of it all and the point of it all Enkidu says in one of these contexts is that you have to establish some fame to go and kill something and write about it set up a monument a steely to establish your name so somehow within this general set of parameters Gilgamesh and Enkidu the plan of going to the cedar mountain Mount Lebanon to attack and kill huwa this plan right from the get-go has its problems they know that it's risky they know that it crosses its own boundaries because who wow I was put in charge of the cedar forest by n lil one of the supreme gods Endel is the appointed guardian the sanctioned guardian he's there to scare humans so they won't disturb the cedar forest so despite that they decide to go and they go and see Gilgamesh's mother in son and in son carries out a ritual in which she prays to shamash to protect Gilgamesh and Enkidu on their adventures and to help them in battle and she actually tells shamash who is the sun-god seeming here you can see the my son being lowered and raised by the guys on the roof she persuades so much to help them in battle so everybody knows when this expedition has begun that it's going to be problematic in the Sumerian version Gilgamesh takes 50 of his best troops with him 50 men of auric this is not quite 50 metaphoric but this is an early dynastic phalanx from what we call the steely of the vultures so it's a nice image to have as a background in the standard Babylonian epic Gilgamesh and Enkidu undertake the trip on their own and it's a long trip they travel 20 leagues they break for lunch they travel over 30 leagues and they camp further for the night every three days they incubate a dream they build a dream a house of the dream God and Gilgamesh lies down in this house and sleeps so that you'll have a dream and every one of the dreams is ominous they all foretell destruction doom failure and every time Enkidu says no no no you're misunderstanding it means this and put suppose have spin on it so again throughout this journey which doesn't reference much in the way of geography partly because they're on their way to known terrain Kings have been going to the cedar mountains for hundreds thousands of years and partly because that's just not what's of interest here what's of interest the focal point is the problematic nature of the expedition so after at least five dreams they stood there marveling at the cedar of of the Mount of mal Lebanon and again now the versions have some differences but the essence of what happens is that Gilgamesh and Enkidu approach who our to fight him and our initially repelled intimidated laid low depending on the version shamash comes to their help in the standard Babylonian version he sends his 13 wins and he blinds who our and they have who our at their mercy now who wa is an interesting character whoever is described in monstrous terms but as I said already he's a legitimate monster he belongs in the cedar forest it's his dimension he's not harming anybody while he stays there and nobody goes to harm him okay this is one representation of who our again from the British Museum well this is in fact is a model used for divination or at least I say used for I'm gonna delete that a model derived from the practices of divination one of the common forms of divination in Mesopotamia is sacrificial divination you have a ritual you address the gods you kill the animal you read its insides one of the things you read is the configuration of his entrails so if you look carefully you'll see that this looping tubular structure is a single sequence and it's actually the entrails of a sheep and what's written on the back here amongst other things says if the entrails of the Sheep look like the face of who our then it's an omen of whatever right so we know that this is a representation of who our because the back tells us we don't have to guess we're pretty sure this is a representation of the hero's killing hawawa this is one of several images you'll see from cylinder seals on the right is the actual seal and on the left is a roll out and some of these associations of imagery on the seals are more convincing and some are less this is one of the more convincing ones this is the coup de Grasse at the very end of the episode of who our when who our pleads for mercy Gilgamesh is tempted to stay his hand Enkidu says no we have to kill him and Gilgamesh kills him he kills endless appointed guardian of the cedar forest this is actually a sacrilege it's not a great act of heroism it's problematic okay they cut down cedar trees they make a door they put on a temple they come back to orc and Gilgamesh who is so perfect catches the eye of Ishtar and on the left here if you want to imagine what the earliest form of Gilgamesh could possibly have been this would be it this is almost certainly a statuette of a ruler from the city of Uruk around 3000 BCE give or take and you can see that the musculature on the arms is quite carefully modelled I'm not saying this actually is Gilgamesh you understand but the perfection of the ruler is embodied in Gilgamesh is perfection and it's Gilgamesh is perfection that attracts Ishtar's gaze and on the right is an image of Ishtar and Ishtar invites Gilgamesh to marry her and Gilgamesh rejects her out of hand he lists her previous lovers he taunts her he's impolite again this is inappropriate when you deal with you're polite to her for good reasons and we know this because we have hymns to Ishtar we know what the Kings say to Ishtar so Gilgamesh doesn't behave to Ishtar in the way that he should Easter is furious are being spurned and goes to her father and and says we need to do something about these to send down the bull of heaven to destroy them so sure enough the bull of heaven comes down and snorts and stomps and terrifies the townspeople and there's a big fight between Gilgamesh Enkidu and the Bulevar and you can see from this cinder seal roll out what the result is Gilgamesh is expertly plunging his sword into the back of the bulls neck or head the texture describes this as the the ideal kill point Gilgamesh is an expert butcher so then firstly they defeat the bull of heaven the bull of an secondly when they see that Ishtar is angry about this they throw pieces of it at her they disrespect Ishtar seriously okay this is too much at this point somebody has to die and it's not gonna be Gilgamesh so it has to be Anki do so Anki do in another dream there are lots and lots of Dreams in Gilgamesh foresees his fate and falls sick and is sick the text tells us for at least 12 days and then as happens more than once there's a break we lose it we don't see it in kid whose actual death the standard Babylonian epic as preserved segues into the funeral of Gilgamesh there is a Sumerian text sorry I misspoke there because of what I'm about to say the funeral of Enkidu there is a Sumerian text about the death of Gilgamesh in the Sumerian traditions the immortality of Gilgamesh is capped by his death there isn't this well we don't have I'm getting myself in trouble here by saying there isn't we don't have a present because in this field you can always find something else tomorrow we don't have extensive tales of his attempts to achieve immortality in the way they were going to see later what we have is a composition which describes the sickness of Gilgamesh and his dissatisfaction that he's going to die and the reassurances of the great things he's achieved including bringing back knowledge from before the flood which I'll get back to you later and then again that the texts are broken but what they describe is something very like what we see archaeologically from the royal tombs of war of which this is a reconstruction a mass burial the ruler is placed there with servants with soldiers with wealth the ruler is going to have a palace in the underworld now in the center babylonian epic because they want to keep Gilgamesh in life they transform part of this into the burial of Enkidu it doesn't necessarily mean that in 750 BCE they knew about the royal tombs of war but there are textual similarities there's a textual lineage there so Gilgamesh buries Enkidu later he admits that he is frozen into stasis by Enki dews death he admits that he's set by the rotting body not knowing what to do until a maggot falls out of the bodies nose okay he's in denial for a long time about Enkidu's death so following Enkidu's burial Gilgamesh decides that he has to find the flood survivor and he sets off on his quest he doesn't know exactly where to go but he arrives at the twin peaks of Mount masu which are the entrance to a tunnel under the mountains which is associated with the passage of the Sun and he meets there the first of several people in his travels who live outside of any fixed dimension in a way their interstitial characters and these characters are the scorpion men a scorpion man and his spouse perhaps and this image of a scorpion man is taken from a game one of our objects some of you will have seen it it's from the bullheaded liar the faceplate of the lyre has a banqueting scene with some animals carrying trays and at the bottom is this scorpion man and the scorpion men challenge Gilgamesh and ask him what he's about and they understand that he's two-thirds God and eventually they let him pass and Gilgamesh just passes Gilgamesh passes into the tunnel under mount ma shoe which is pitch black one day he travels it's pitch black he can't see before him and he can't see ahead of him two days he travels three days and so on until eventually he comes out into the light into the garden of shamash where carnelian bushes and lapis lazuli bushes are in bloom so it's a very alien landscape that he emerges into he's traveling a long way away through several different environments he's come under the mountains now he's in the land beyond the mountains and he makes his way to a bar which I have to say if I were traveling beyond the mountains will be my temptation as well the the alewife there'sa Dorie sees him coming he's not sure what kind of man he is what kind of wild man he is his clothes are disheveled he's in a complete state he reaches there refreshes cleans up a little bit and she tells him how to find the boatman or Shalaby so he's making his progress to the mountains past the Scorpion men under the mountains beyond this mysterious in the first and last in yes and he reaches the boatman Borgia Nabi who is at the sea at the edge of the world that you have to cross in order to get to the flood survivor and this something that still very poorly understood about a narrative at this point some characters called the stone ones that are somehow associated with Bush and Abi's passage across this deadly sea and Gilgamesh kills the stone once so he he does away with his means of getting across the sea that he wants to cross to visit wouldn't have pushed him fortunately there's an alternative he can cut wooden punting poles and here is an image of somebody punting in the marshes in Iraq I can tell you it took me many many years to realize that when I discuss this episode with my undergraduates very often they didn't know what punting was I resisted the temptation to put in one of my pictures from my Cambridge days here choosing something more culturally appropriate but it's the same idea he has to cut enough punting poles to get across the sea without touching it Pole leave it Pole leave it Pole leave it you could have a punted you know when you bring the pole up you get wet so he reaches wooden a pitched him which means finder of life and there are several names for the flood survivor Ziusudra is another one life of a remote day is how I would translate that and the flood survivor tells him this very well-known story about how he came to be where he is and how he came to be immortal and I think most of you probably know the outline of this story the gods decide that humanity has to be wiped out so they decreed there will be a flood but the god heir who in Cimmerian is called Anki doesn't want humanity to be wiped out completely and he saves one of the people who are most expert in his ways wouldn't have pitched him or sometimes called Atrahasis exceedingly wise and this is a kind of wisdom that's associated with serving the gods knowing how to serve the gods ok so the flood survivor is the one who knows most about the special knowledge that pertains to eya the god of magic and knowledge he saved for a reason and the gods let loose the flood the rains rains for six days and seven nights and the boat they built the ark it's very similar to the biblical stories I'm sure most of you already know is held fast on the mountain and after seven days they start sending out birds and the first two birds return there's nowhere to land and eventually the Raven is sent out and it flies around doesn't come back to the boat because there's some way to land in this food and the first thing that wouldn't a fish team does is make a sacrifice the gods and the gods smell the savour of the sacrifice and they gather round buzzing like flies because they've destroyed humanity and humanity is what feeds them though so what ana piston knows exactly what to do when the flood is over and after he tells Gilgamesh this tale which is partly an explanation of the extremis that you need to go to to become immortal Gilgamesh says but I really want to be immortal and Aetna fished him says well alright then if you want to be immortal prove that you're good enough prove that you can stay awake for seven nights and as soon as he's issued the challenge Gilgamesh starts to nod off he's been traveling for a long time and he was at that bar right so Odin episteme says to his wife bake bread every day place a little for bread by his head by Gilgamesh his head and then when he wakes up he'll see how long he's been asleep so they do that day after day seven days and when Gilgamesh opens his eyes he says what we've all said at some point he said I wasn't sleeping just resting my eyes right and the best images are no look at the bread the bread tells its own story so they concretize time is quite interesting and the seven day old loaf is on moldy in the sixth day loved one is shriveled and so on there were in different states of decay they're not edible interestingly think about that for a moment in what I was saying about heating and changing dimensions maybe Gilgamesh had a chance to enter wouldn't the fish names immortal dimension if he'd been able to eat the bread instead of falling asleep and leaving it there in any case Gilgamesh fails Gilgamesh is too weak and the Piston says well I'm sorry you're gonna have to go and I not sure that you're gonna make it home okay on your own so I'm gonna send or shanaar be with you and put the pitch Tim's wife intercedes and says don't send her away empty-handed giving one more chance so when the pitch Tim gives Gilgamesh a precious piece of knowledge and the knowledge is the location of a plant under the sea if you take the plant if you eat the plant you become young again so sure enough Gilgamesh goes Aleutian I be and he dies that dive down under the sea and he retrieves the plant that makes old men young again and something in him makes him think I'm going to try this on somebody in Iraq first and he doesn't eat it he doesn't trust wouldn't have pushed him enough he doesn't trust himself enough he doesn't know enough about the plant lore to be sure that what he has is what he should be taking he puts it down and during the trip a snake comes along and eats the plant and Slough sits skin as it slithers away the mistake becomes young again that's why snakes shed their skin little et illogical note right because they managed to eat gilgamesh's youthful plant very nice little detail so wouldn't have pitched him send this Gilgamesh an ocean IV on their way and they arrived back at a rook safe and sound and this is the end of tablet 11 of the standard Babylonian version I'll read it out just for the sake of it Gilgamesh spoke to him to ocean RB go up ocean hobby onto the wall of aura can walk around survey the foundation platform inspect the brickwork see if it's brickwork is not kiln fired brick and if the seven sages did not lay its foundations one square mile is City one square mile is date grove one square mile is date they fit half a square mile the temple of Ishtar three square miles and the hearth is its measurement that's the end if you believe that tablet 11 is the end of the epoch which there are good reasons for believing was the case at certain times in its development isn't that a bit anticlimactic you go all this way and get back home and you're admiring the brickwork well there's a trick to this ending which is that it's circular this is part of a frame and it's a frame which brings you back to auric and back to the beginning of the composition and I've jumped into the middle part of the preamble I will explain without getting into too much detail that we know partly because of gilgamesh tablet P that the first line of gilgamesh around 1600 BC was surpassing all other kings that's line 29 in the standard Babylonian epic so we know the first 28 lines of the standard Babylonian epic are a later Edition and they're there to make a point and this is the end of that later edition and if you look at the part that overlaps go up onto the wall of auric you'll see that it overlaps up until measurement and that's where the worm the tale comes around that gets put back in the mouth of the worm right like the aurorus because that's where you come back to open the tablet box of cedar release its clasp of bronze lift the little bit secret pick up the tablet of lapis lazuli and read out all the misfortunes of Gilgamesh all that he went through that should say tablet Gilgamesh tells you with this circular frame that it's partly about writing it tells you that Gilgamesh doesn't achieve immortality he can't eat the bread because he can't stay awake he doesn't eat the plant because he doesn't trust himself he doesn't act in a timely manner but his deeds are written down and it's the written version of them that you can read that notionally is in the walls of Uruk so this is like all those books that start with the discovery of a manuscript in an attic it's that kind of frame right this is part of a Mesopotamian culture and it's one of two things I'm going to talked about in the last ten minutes of my talk that are more interpretive so there is this notion that rulers should establish their name their fame by setting up inscriptions monuments on the left you see this famous victory stele II of nehrim scene which is now in the Louvre that dates to about 2300 give or take and to the right and neo-assyrian monument 1500 or so years later we have a number of these things goes back to this thing that Gilgamesh said to rank you do said to Gilgamesh you need to establish your fame and set up a steely and the word for steely in Cimmerian is na dua literally planted stone and this is a funny kind of Adi didn't expect to talk about smearing and flawless you today but I sort of am anyway it's a funny Dee that probably has a doer the word for the tablet that you take out of the walls of Iraq is a Naru it's the same word loaned into Akkadian so from steely to tablet monumental account kings exploits Gilgamesh is exploits there's a continuity there there's an interrelationship between what Gilgamesh the King does and what the mortal Kings do so mortal Kings in some ways model their behavior on the kinds of activity that are associated with the written traditions of Gilgamesh there are other examples of this I could have cited several I just picked this one the so-called coup Seon legend of nehrim scene whoever you may be governor prince or anyone else whom the gods feel named to exercise kingship I have made a foundation box for you I have written you a steely in Kufa in the MS lamb in the cellar of ner gal God have I left it for you behold this daily listen to the wording of this stealing this is a document that's expressly being set up for future generations to read it's explicitly in the cultural frame of reference let experts scholars tell you the stealing most Kings couldn't read you who have read the steely and placed yourself so that you can proceed effectively you who that takes is difficult have blessed me so may a future one bless you so there's a payoff for the person setting up the steely you get posterity you get blessings for posterity you get a kind of immortality you can't get physical immortality but you can write yourself immortal the other threat I want to pursue takes us really into the heart of the first millennium into the heart of the palaces and temples of a neo-assyrian period and this is a rather wonderful artistic impression by Laird of the city of Nimrud from which we have a number of scholarly texts that feed into some of the things that I'm going to talk about now this is a period in which knowledge and writing was very very important now it's quite possible that they were similarly important centuries millennia beyond this but we can really document it in this period 7th 8th century BCE they have really good data so I'm gonna go back to the standard Babylonian Gilgamesh introduction this is the added bit the first bit the second bit is not the added bit he who saw the deep the foundation of the country who knew the proper ways was wise and everything was wise and everything he everywhere explored the secrets of the seats of power he knew the sum of wisdom about everything he saw the secret and uncovered the hidden he brought back intelligence the word is Teemu in Akkadian report message understanding from before the flood he brought back the knowledge from before the flood Gilgamesh who scoured the world ever searching for life and reached through sheer force but in a pitched him the distance who restored the cult centers destroyed by the deluge and set in place for the people the rites of the cosmos okay so Gilgamesh is not just associated with writing Gilgamesh is associated with knowledge I mentioned earlier that in the Sumerian tale the death of Gilgamesh one of the things they tell him to make him feel better is not just why you defeated who hour it's you brought back the knowledge from before the flood it's a great thing he did to understand how great we have to talk about fish men which is good because it's always good to talk about fish men now the fish men are mysterious but understandable and they relate to native Mesopotamian traditions about the origin of knowledge and we have these traditions from several sources we have them from really good early early relative to the later ones that I'm going to talk about really good sources from about 700 BC we have a catalogue of texts and authors and the first entry in the catalog is that the corpus of magic and the corpus of lamentation just as a whole come from the mouth of a ax these this knowledge comes directly from the gods and in the next entry some other material comes from a character called who Anna now who Anna is known from a later author this is why I said early it's all relative in my field called Berossus and Berossus was a Babylonian born priest writing third century BC in Greek almost everything he wrote is lost but one of the things he tells us is a story about knowledge and he says that all the knowledge of civilization was brought by a fish being who swam up the Gulf and stayed with people during the day and imparted to them the knowledge and while he was there he didn't eat or drink anything he went back to the sea at night and since that time Barossa says the Babylonians believed no new knowledge has come a dapper Oh a nice we know the same character are the is the protege the first protege of the God they are the god of magic and wisdom that's why the list of his sequence in the catalogue and there are other things that show that a dapper is the first sage the word is AB kallu otra nota laps into it but I may and these sages are viewed by the scholars as their intellectual ancestors and when the scholars carry out rituals which is what you're seeing here on the left you're seeing a scholar with a fish cloak carrying out some kind of purification ritual and on the right in the middle here you see there's a sick person on the bed and there are two fish cloaked characters one either side when the scholars carry out these rituals they put on these fish cloaks to connect themselves with the origins of knowledge so the notion of the fishy origin of knowledge is very much alive for them okay there's a connection between the scholars and the king in this period the scholars advise the king the connection has some tensions the king can banish scholars but the scholars are close advisers the king depends on them to do certain things correctly this is an image of Ashurbanipal who probably did actually know how to read and write and he's carrying a work basket because he's involved in rebuilding Babylon this kind of rebuilding ritual requires a lot of expertise you have to know the proper procedures you have to know the right days the right order to do things you have to know the right texts the right lamentations the right incantations is tremendously complicated to carry out this kind of act yet the Kings had to do it all the time and the Kings depended on their scholars for this all right now we're in trouble area I don't think that was me so the other thing we have from this period besides the notion that the knowledge that the scholars are part of the King's retinue that they had vies him on ritual matters is that they're also experts on all sorts of protective procedures and they're in correspondence with him we have hundreds of letters from scholars to the King and you can actually read them if you're inspired this evening you can go to Iraq which is the open richly annotated connect from corpus which is one of the things that I run and thanks to the generosity of Simo parpola and all of the individual authors of the volumes all 19 volumes are on Iraqi and you can search them in translation and this is just one that I picked more or less at random partly because of the not quite at random I lighted upon it I was thinking of the Gilgamesh and the plant thing concerning the drug in the second paragraph about which the king my lord wrote to me what the king my lord said is quite right let us make those slaves drink first and let the Crown Prince drink only afterwards in other words let's try the potion on somebody who doesn't matter and then see what happens yeah and if it's a if it's good then we'll try it on the Crown Prince so you can see that there were life and death issues that these scholars were advising the King on the scholars connect themselves to knowledge the King is connected to the scholars the knowledge starts with the fish being coming out of the Gulf nothing new is brought thereafter what happens when the flood wipes out humanity the knowledge is gone when aar saves on the pushed him his best disciple he does it because he's saving the knowledge and after the flood when the gods decide that the piston has to live far away beyond the realm of civilization they're banishing knowledge this is why it's so important that Gilgamesh brings back the knowledge yes these guys the experts who carried out these rituals were aware of this problem and when they read Gilgamesh they didn't just read it for the writing they saw what a failure Gilgamesh was they saw the number of times he did something wrong he committed sacrilege he failed to achieve immortality he didn't know what to do an anchor do died everything about Gilgamesh this behavior is problematic and if you think about it there's a reason in these guys heads which is that Gilgamesh is a king in an age where there is no knowledge the knowledge has become embodied in a pushed him far beyond civilization Gilgamesh lives in an age of ignorance he has no scholars around him he has no sages he can't do things right if he wants to and when he gets advice from Enkidu it's often wrong and one can make an argument actually that Enkidu is something akin to an advisor a sage and that OSHA nabhi is something akin to the return of knowledge so writing and knowledge I think that's the end of it yes so I just wanted to wrap up by sort of reviewing a few of the things that I've said and combining them with the last tablet tablet 12 which I've left out of consideration here and this is the tablet in which Enkidu goes to the nether world Gilgamesh Enkidu in another world in Sumerian this is a really problematic tablet it doesn't belong organically in the narrative people have had a hard time fitting it in but I think there's a couple of ways in which one can fit it in if one thinks about the two things I've just discussed Gilgamesh in writing and Gilgamesh and knowledge so on the one hand writing is a way for Kings to establish their name their fame and their immortality on the other hand when Gilgamesh goes all the way to the end of the world and talks the flood survivor and learns the story of the flood orally verbally he brings back that knowledge that he's gone all the way there to get the story is encoded in writing and put in the walls the story is fixed by being put in writing it's preserved so there's a contrast between the oral narrative in the flood and the written version which can survive writing becomes about the longevity of tradition the survival of knowledge and you can look at the story of the visit to the underworld in this light you can say you can't go to the underworld and come back but Enkidu goes the underworld and is summoned back perhaps as a ghost and talks about it it's another place that the tradition is tenuous about because you can't see you can't go there it's oral so there's a connection between visiting the flood survivor and getting that knowledge and visiting the underworld there's a kind of completeness about it and there's one last story I will mention to wrap up with that reinforces some of this completeness because there is a tale about a dapper and the dapper is this first sage expert of every do expert of pea and a dapper is out fishing one day and the south wind turns over his boat and a and a dapper curses the south wind breaks the wind with his words he uses the magic of words to break the wings of the wind and this is a problem the gods notice they summon a dapper to heaven the one place that we don't see humans visiting in Gilgamesh is heaven we have the underworld we have the West we have wouldn't have pitched him a dapper goes to heaven and is offered the bread of life and the water of life the gods offered to make a dapper immortal but air has preempted this AR tells a dapper when you get offered this stuff don't take it why because a ax is a head of the Gods if a dapper goes to heaven and stays there the knowledge stays there with him so then Gilgamesh has another dimension because when you read it against a dapper it's also a story of how knowledge was also almost lost but was saved by Gilgamesh so it's immortality not just of Gilgamesh but knowledge and its travels that are undertaken not just by Gilgamesh but by the knowledge you have to go and get it you have to travel to learn and on that note I will end thank you [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Penn Museum

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Keywords: University Of Pennsylvania Museum Of Archaeology And Anthropology (Museum), Penn Museum, Philadelphia Museum, Philadelphia Museums, Steve Tinney, Great Voyages, Gilgamesh (Book Character), Gilgamesh, Mesopotamia, travels, journeys, Iraq

Id: 46Xst2do8p4

Length: 60min 26sec (3626 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 10 2014

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From the Penn Museum 2013-2014 lecture series: Steve Tinney, Associate Professor, Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations, University of Pennsylvania.