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