The Learn Tracker
...life-long learning: structured, organized, searchable...
915
Lectures Watched
Since January 1, 2014
Hundreds of free, self-paced university courses available:
my recommendations here
Peruse my collection of 275
influential people of the past.
View My Class Notes via:
Receive My Class Notes via E-Mail:

VIEW ARCHIVE

Contact Me via E-Mail:
edward [at] tanguay.info
Notes on video lecture:
Gilgamesh as World Literature
Notes taken by Edward Tanguay on August 9, 2017 (go to class or lectures)
Choose from these words to fill the blanks below:
rudimentary, Chaldean, couplets, Rawlinson, Underworld, friends, Persia, Nimrod, Layard, antiquity, death, testament, Enkidu, cuneiform, Zabibah, place, 3000, 36, Rassam, rival, Rilke, British, Behistun, tablets, walking, Akkadian, immortality, flood, warfare, Iraq, medieval, Biblical, Genesis, cruel
•
when Austen Henry              discovered the clay tablets on which Gilgamesh is written, nobody could read them
•
he brought them back to the                Museum
•
gradually people start to study them
•
Sir Henry                    (1810-1895)
•
was in the British service in             
•
got interested in inscriptions
•
found inscription in                  which turned out to be by Darius I (550-486 BCE), in three different scripts
•
copied the inscription onto paper
•
spends 20 years learning how to translate it by comparing the scripts
•
by the 1870s, there is a                        knowledge
•
George Smith (1840-1876)
•
first to decipher part of the Gilgamesh                   
•
had never been to college or high school
•
gets interested in                  history
•
his firm was in                distance on his lunch hour to the British Museum
•
got hired by the museum
•
published what they had of Gilgamesh and publishes it under The                  Epic of the Deluge
•
Chaldea is the region of Southern          today
•
where the Babylonians came from
•
published the book The Chaldean Accounts of               
•
in the 12 tablets of Gilgamesh, one tablet is about the            story
•
George Smith persuades the British Museum to send him to look for more               
•
died when he was      after writing 8 books and establishing the field of Assyrian studies on a new basis
•
what does it mean for a work of world literature to enter the world
•
Gilgamesh made a career for George Smith but this interest also led to his            in a sense
•
after he wrote to the British Museum that there was tribal               , diseases, the British Museum told him to keep looking for it, and so he stayed two more months and died
•
Hormuzd              (1826-1910)
•
first important Iraqi archeologists
•
was a friend and then            of George Smith
•
found a number of the tablets
•
wrote the book, "Asshur in the Land of             "
•
Rainer Maria            (1875-1926)
•
claimed this was the greatest ancient work he has ever read
•
Saddam Hussein authored a book: "               and the King"
•
written in 2000, is a novel that the CIA believes was written by Saddam Hussein, probably with the help of some ghostwriters
•
the plot is a love story about a powerful ruler of                  Iraq and a beautiful commoner girl named Zabibah
•
she comes to the city to restrain and educate the headstrong monarch
•
as              comes to Gilgamesh
•
Zabibah's husband is a            and unloving man who rapes her
•
the book is set in 7th or 8th century Tikrit, Hussein's home town
•
Joan Lunden
•
Australian novelist
•
heroine goes on a quest
•
Gilgamesh is relevant in the world today but comes from such a different world          years old
•
a Sumerian king who has everything
•
the gods dispatch a wild man to teach him his           
•
the plan goes awry when they become best               
•
they set out together to see the world
•
they become so arrogant that the gods condemn the wild man to the                     
•
bereft, the king makes one last effort to achieve                        but fails
•
he stands before the walls of his great city
•
he knows his story will be his only lasting                   
•
format
•
has an ancient epic formality
•
rather dramatic but has a formal pace
•
history
•
1200 BCE priest Sîn-lēqi-unninni remade the text an adventure story into a story about a quest for ancient knowledge
•
so this story is about seeking antiquity to find a modern lesson
•
no one ever lived in                   
•
everyone always lives in the present
•
the oldest texts we have are already talking about an antiquity that they're reacting against
•
delivery of poem
•
when spoken in                 
•
measured, formal progress
•
much alliteration
•
half lines and then                 
•
points which allow the one reciting it to catch their voice

Ideas and Concepts:

From the crucial finds in linguistic history department, via tonight's Masterpieces of World Literature:

"The Behistun Inscription is a multilingual inscription in a large rock relief on a cliff at Mount Behistun in Western Iran, the finding and translating of which was crucial in the the decipherment of cuneiform script, and subsequently to the translation of clay tablets on which the story of Gilgamesh had been recorded over 3,000 years ago in the Ancient Cuneiform script of the Sumerians.

The Behistun inscription was authored by Darius the Great sometime between his coronation as king of the Persian Empire in 522 BC and his death 486 BC. It includes three versions of the same text, written in three different cuneiform script languages:Old Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian, a variety of Akkadian. The inscription is to cuneiform what the Rosetta Stone is to Egyptian hieroglyphs.

In 1598, the Englishman Robert Sherley saw the inscription during a diplomatic mission to Persia on behalf of Austria, and brought it to the attention of Western European scholars.

In 1621, the Italian explorer Pietro della Valle visited the inscription in the course of a pilgrimage.

In 1764, German surveyor Carsten Niebuhr visited it for Frederick V of Denmark, publishing a copy of the inscription in the account of his journeys in 1778.

In 1835, Sir Henry Rawlinson, an officer of the British East India Company army assigned to the forces of the Shah of Iran, began studying the inscription. Despite its relative inaccessibility, Rawlinson was able to scale the cliff with the help of a local boy and copy the Old Persian inscription. Rawlinson set to work on deciphering the text and returning to the site in 1843, and with the help of other scholars, he was eventually to the ability to read the inscription completely, which greatly promoted the development of modern Assyriology."
On the timeless lack of antiquity, via tonight's Masterpieces of World Literature: "In 1200 BCE, a priest named Sîn-lēqi-unninni rewrote the text of Gilgamesh from an adventure story into a story about a quest for ancient knowledge, thus turning it into an epic about seeking antiquity to find a modern lesson. If there is a lesson here, it is that no one ever lives in antiquity. Everyone always lives in the present. The oldest texts we have are already talking about an antiquity that they're reacting against."
Goethe and Eckermann
Goethe's Corpus and World Literature
The 19th Century Recovery of the Library of Ashurbanipal from 650 BC
Gilgamesh as World Literature
Themes from the Epic of Gilgamesh
Enkidu Introduced to Culture Via Shamhat
Gilgamesh, Enkidu, Humbaba and the Country
Gilgamesh and the Story of the Flood