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Notes on video lecture:
Themes from the Epic of Gilgamesh
Notes taken by Edward Tanguay on October 5, 2017 (go to class or lectures)
Choose from these words to fill the blanks below:
flood, texts, Homeric, Ashurbanipal, servant, memory, forms, brother, writing, competition, scribe, repetitive, historical, literature, economically, gods, longer, Old, awkward, intestines, 1200, poems, final, intimate, Shulgi, city, medium, 2000, shorter, Uruk
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how does Gilgamesh have such an                  sense to it
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it is the first              literature text
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you would expect as a first literary text
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an               , first attempt at literary excellence
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the scribes would have tried a lot of things and not really understood what is required to create a successful literary text
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the history of the text
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dates from around          BCE
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attributed to a              name Sin-leqi-unninni
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he is working in a long tradition that goes back at least 800 years written tradition and 500 years oral tradition
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back to the                      Gilgamesh in 2500-2600 BCE
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historical Gilgamesh
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his city          is a major center
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very likely the place where full-blown literary                first developed
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so you luck out if you're the king of that town where they start to write
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older Sumerian literature
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goes back to around          BCE
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King              of Ur (reigned 2029–1982 BCE)
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first known patron of                     
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lived not that far away from Gilgamesh's city of Uruk
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Shulgi starts to commission            about Gilgamesh
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identifies him as a kind of                figure
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Enkidu is just a                who goes down to the underworld, Gilgamesh brings him back
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there is an early form of the epic in what is called the        Babylonian Period
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around 1600 BCE
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fragments survive of this
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more straight-forward
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more of a rock-'em, sock-'em tale
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400 years later we get this            version
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it takes a tradition to raise a masterpiece
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Gilgamesh masterpiece
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one thing that is striking is that it is much                than the Odyssey or the Iliad
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it's very                          constructed, very dramatic
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one difference from the epics we know from the Greek tradition that are much more
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elaborate
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longer
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Gilgamesh was 3,000 lines long
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we have 2,000 lines surviving
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relatively short, e.g. 50 pages as opposed to 300 pages for the                epics
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and the Sanskrit epics are vastly larger than the Homeric epics
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Gilgamesh has all the epic qualities
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a quest
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a foundation of a         
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relation between          and humans
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it's the longest story in the Ancient Near East that we know about
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earlier traditions were all shorter poems
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300-500 lines
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earlier stories are reincorporated
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           story
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different cultures emphasize different           
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what mattered in the Near East were lyric poems and omen texts
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interpreting dreams
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interpreting what you find when you slaughter a sheep and read the signs in its                     
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                        's library had many of these
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for Homer, there was little                        of a written sort
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it was elaborated much by             
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if you are in the Assyrian or Babylonian court, you have masses of            to draw from
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the              to some degree shapes the form
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