EDWARD'S LECTURE NOTES:
More notes at http://tanguay.info/learntracker
C O U R S E
Masterpieces of World Literature
Martin Puchner, Harvard University
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C O U R S E L E C T U R E Themes from the Epic of Gilgamesh Notes taken on October 5, 2017 by Edward Tanguay |
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how does Gilgamesh have such an intimate sense to it
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it is the first longer literature text
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you would expect as a first literary text
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an awkward, 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 1200 BCE
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attributed to a scribe 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 historical Gilgamesh in 2500-2600 BCE
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historical Gilgamesh
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his city Uruk is a major center
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very likely the place where full-blown literary writing 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 2000 BCE
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King Shulgi of Ur (reigned 2029–1982 BCE)
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first known patron of literature
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lived not that far away from Gilgamesh's city of Uruk
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Shulgi starts to commission poems about Gilgamesh
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identifies him as a kind of brother figure
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Enkidu is just a servant 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 Old 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 final 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 shorter than the Odyssey or the Iliad
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it's very economically 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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repetitive
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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 Homeric 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 city
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relation between gods 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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flood story
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different cultures emphasize different forms
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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 intestines
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Ashurbanipal's library had many of these
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for Homer, there was little competition of a written sort
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it was elaborated much by memory
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if you are in the Assyrian or Babylonian court, you have masses of texts to draw from
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the medium to some degree shapes the form