In search of Gilgamesh, the epic hero of ancient Babylonia.

By Michael Dirda
Sunday, March 4, 2007; BW10

THE BURIED BOOK
The Loss and Rediscovery
Of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh
By David Damrosch
Henry Holt. 315 pp. $26

The oldest surviving fragments of the Babylonian epic we now call
Gilgamesh date back to the 18th century — the 18th century before the
Christian era, that is, more than 3,700 years ago. Etched in the
wedge-shaped letters known as cuneiform on clay tablets, Gilgamesh
stands as the earliest classic of world literature. Surprisingly, it
is a classic still in the making, for scholars continue to discover
and piece together shards — in Akkadian, Sumerian, Hittite and other
ancient languages — that occasionally add a few more lines to this
story of an ancient Middle Eastern king’s quest for immortality and
his coming to terms with the inevitability of death.

In The Buried Book, David Damrosch, a Columbia professor of
comparative literature, organizes his text as an archaeological dig,
opening with a prefatory account of Austen Henry Layard’s discovery
and excavation of the ruins of Nineveh in the 1840s, then gradually
working his way back from the Victorian era into ancient times. His
first and second chapters describe the career of George Smith, a
self-taught Assyriologist, who one momentous afternoon in 1872 was
working at the British Museum, going through a pile of Layard’s clay
tablets. Suddenly, Smith realized that he was reading about "a flood
storm, a ship caught on a mountain, and a bird sent out in search of
dry land."

The discovery of this "Chaldean account of the Deluge" so electrified
the young scholar that he danced around the museum and actually began
to "undress himself." (No one is quite sure if that meant anything
more than loosening his collar.) Smith had stumbled across an episode
(in Akkadian) from Gilgamesh, becoming the first person to read a
portion of the epic in more than 2,000 years. But stumbled is hardly
the word, for Smith was nothing less than a linguistic genius, the
unexpected man in the right place. As Damrosch writes:
"He became the world’s leading expert in the ancient Akkadian language
and its fiendishly difficult script, wrote the first true history of
the long-lost Assyrian Empire, and published pathbreaking translations
of the major Babylonian literary texts, in between expeditions to find
more tablets in Iraq.

Though this would have been the lifework of an eminent scholar at
Oxford or the Sorbonne, Smith’s active career instead lasted barely
ten years, from his mid-twenties to his mid-thirties. Far from holding
a distinguished professorship, he had never been to high school, much
less college. His formal education had ended at age fourteen."

Smith’s career — cut short by his death in the Middle East from
dysentery — was heroic, but so was that of his older colleague Henry
Rawlinson (to whom Smith dedicated his 1875 book The Chaldean Account
of Genesis). Rawlinson was a figure in the classic Victorian mold — a
military officer in India and Persia with a flair for languages,
possessed of exceptional courage and stamina, both physical (he once
rode 750 miles on horseback in 150 consecutive hours) and scholarly:
He spent 15 years patiently working out the meaning of Akkadian
cuneiform, then later produced one of those daunting monuments of
Victorian scholarship, the five-volume Cuneiform Inscriptions of
Western Asia.

The third great figure in Damrosch’s story of the rediscovery of
Gilgamesh is Hormuzd Rassam, a Chaldean Christian who served as
Layard’s second-in-command, attended Oxford and later headed up
archaeological expeditions for the British Museum. According to Andrew
George, a leading modern figure in Babylonian studies, Rassam is "an
unsung hero of Assyriology." Why unsung? Damrosch — no doubt rightly,
if somewhat tendentiously — points to racial, i.e.

"Orientalist," prejudice as the reason for his neglect. Rassam wasn’t
really, you know, quite the right sort, even though he grew to be more
English than the English, serving in the diplomatic corps and living
long enough to see his daughter become a star of the Gilbert and
Sullivan operettas. But Damrosch makes clear that the man’s
wide-ranging archaeological discoveries were consistently undervalued
or callously ascribed to others. At the end of his life, Rassam was
even compelled to bring a suit against the Egyptologist E.A. Wallis
Budge, who falsely accused him of selling artifacts.

At this point in his book, Damrosch turns to the excavation of the
library of Ashurbanipal, an Assyrian king of the 7th century B.C. who
valued poetry as well as power. Here, we are introduced to the court
life of ancient Mesopotamia, in particular the priests, sorcerers and
secret agents who formed the inner circle of such rulers as Sargon II,
Sennacherib, Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal himself. Damrosch neatly
conveys the immense antiquity of the Gilgamesh epic by noting that the
poem "was already ancient in Ashurbanipal’s day, copied and recopied
for more than a thousand years before the young crown prince studied
it in the Temple of Nabu."

In the last third of The Buried Book, Damrosch zeroes in on the poem
itself, noting that " Gilgamesh is often read today as an existential
tale of the fear of death and the quest for immortality, but the epic
is equally a tale of tyranny and its consequences." It also reflects
on "the limits of culture … presented in contrast to the world of
nature." This is its plot: The young Gilgamesh is a "wild bull" of a
man, restless of heart, full of unfocused energy. He conducts his life
with seigniorial abandon, abusing his subjects and even flagrantly
exercising his right to sleep with girls on their wedding nights. The
women of his capital city of Uruk complain to the gods, who decide to
fashion Enkidu, a true wild man, to defeat Gilgamesh in combat.

At first the hairy Enkidu lives in a state of nature, literally
running with the gazelles, until he is sexually initiated by a temple
prostitute, after which the animals of the forest will have nothing to
do with him. When he eventually confronts Gilgamesh, en route to
deflower another virgin, the pair wrestle and nearly demolish the
surrounding buildings, before becoming fast friends (and even perhaps
lovers).

In due course, accompanied by his new buddy, the restless Gilgamesh
goes adventuring, defeats an ogre who guards a sacred cedar wood,
spurns the sexual invitations of the goddess Ishtar and kills the
monstrous bull she then sends to avenge her honor. But Gilgamesh and
Enkidu have now deeply angered the gods, and one of them must pay with
his life. After Enkidu suffers a series of dream visions of the nether
world, he finally dies, as Gilgamesh is racked with both grief and the
fearful knowledge that the same end waits for him. Can nothing be
done? He resolves to journey to the ends of the earth to confront
Uta-napishtim, a Noah-like figure who alone of mankind survived the
great Deluge and has been given the gift of immortality. In due
course, Gilgamesh crosses the Ocean of Death but learns that no one
can alter his mortal destiny.

Nonetheless, a fragment — outside the so-called "standard" version of
the epic — informs us that Gilgamesh is ultimately allowed to become
the godlike judge of the underworld.

In his last chapter, Damrosch discusses some later uses of the
Gilgamesh story, focusing on Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel
(in which a major character is a baseball pitcher named Gil Gamesh)
and Saddam Hussein’s novel Zabibah wal-Malik, a kind of love
story-cum-allegory of the first Gulf War. In particular, the
comparatist Damrosch urges his readers to understand that they are
part of an "Islamo-Christian civilization." " Gilgamesh and The Iliad,
the Bible and the Qur’an were not products of isolated, eternally
opposed civilizations; they are mutually related outgrowths of the
rich cultural matrix of western Asia and the eastern Mediterranean
world. Isaac and Ishmael are half brothers, and Uta-napishtiM and Noah
are closer still: they are two versions of one and the same
character."

Though useful, entertaining and informative, The Buried Book may
bother some readers with its lack of a strong narrative line, its
tendency to overemphasize irrelevant details (why include so many
pages on Rassam’s diplomatic mission in Abyssinia?) and its
well-meaning political correctness: Damrosch can sometimes seem as
condescending to the narrow-minded Victorians as they so often were to
"Orientals." Despite these blemishes, The Buried Book should help
introduce new readers to an ancient classic that has really come into
its own in the 21st century. Whether enjoyed in the brilliant (but
very loose) version of David Ferry or the scholarly transcription of
Andrew George, this Babylonian epic remains a very human story about
wisdom painfully acquired.

Appropriately, its hero is called, in the memorable first line, "He
who saw the Deep." And what does Gilgamesh learn? Before the end that
awaits each of us — "a man’s life is snapped off like a reed in a
canebrake" — we should perform good deeds, love our families and
enjoy simple pleasures. As Uta-napishtim says, in Andrew George’s
translation:
But you, Gilgamesh, let your belly be full,
Enjoy yourself always by day and by night!
Make merry each day,
Dance and play day and night!
Let your clothes be clean,
Let your head be washed, may you bathe in water!
Gaze on the child who holds your hand,
Let your wife enjoy your repeated embrace!
For such is the destiny [of mortal men].

Michael Dirda’s e-mail address is mdirda@gmail.com.