The Epic of Gilgamesh - Anonymous [0]
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1 - THE COMING OF ENKIDU
Chapter 2 - THE FOREST JOURNEY
Chapter 3 - ISHTAR AND GILGAMESH, AND THE DEATH OF ENKIDU
Chapter 4 - THE SEARCH FOR EVERLASTING LIFE
Chapter 5 - THE STORY OF THE FLOOD
Chapter 6 - THE RETURN
Chapter 7 - THE DEATH OF GILGAMESH
GLOSSARY OF NAMES
APPENDIX: SOURCES
PENGUIN CLASSICS
THE EPIC OF GILGAMESH
N. K. SANDARS studied, soon after the war, with Professor Gordon Childe at the Institute of Archaeology, University of London, and took the diploma of the Institute. She continued to work at Oxford, taking a B.Litt. degree in the prehistory of Europe, and thereafter she worked on the prehistory of the Aegean, receiving a studentship at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, a scholarship from Oxford University and a travelling prize from the University of Liverpool. She has travelled extensively in Europe and in the Near and Middle East, and has taken part in excavations in the British Isles and overseas. She has contributed articles to various journals and is the author of Bronze Age Cultures in France (1957), PrehistoricArtin Europe (Pelican History of Art, 1968), Poems of Heaven and HellfromAncient Mesopotamia(Penguin Classics, 1971) and The Sea Peoples (1978). She has written and lectured extensively on the poet and painter David Jones, and on the origins and history of art. N. K. Sandars is a fellow of the British Academy and of the Society of Antiquaries of London and a corresponding member of the German Archaeological Institute. A book of her poems, Grandmother’sSteps and Other Poems, was published in 2000 by Poets’ and Painters’ Press.
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This translation first published 1960
Reprinted with revisions 1964
Reprinted with revisions 1972
62
Copyright ©N. K. Sandars, 1960, 1964, 1972
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Set in Monotype Bembo
eISBN : 978-1-101-16045-9
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INTRODUCTION
1. The History of the Epic
THE Epic of Gilgamesh, the renowned king of Uruk in Mesopotamia, comes from an age which had been wholly forgotten, until in the last century archaeologists began uncovering the buried cities of the Middle East. Till then the entire history of the long period which separated Abraham from Noah was contained in two of the most forbiddingly genealogical chapters of the Book of Genesis. From these chapters only two names survived in common parlance, those of the hunter Nimrud and the tower of Babel; but in the cycle of poems which are collected round the character of Gilgamesh we are carried back into the middle of that age.
These poems have a right to a place in the world’s literature, not only because they antedate Homeric epic by at least one and a half thousand years, but mainly because of the quality and character of the story that they tell. It is a mixture of pure adventure, of morality, and of tragedy. Through the action we are shown a very human concern with mortality, the search for knowledge, and for an escape from the common lot of man. The gods, who do not die, cannot be tragic. If Gilgamesh is not the first human hero, he is the first tragic hero of whom anything is known. He is at once the most sympathetic to us, and most typical of individual man in his search for life and understanding, and of this search the conclusion must be tragic.