Give an account of the recovery of The Epic of Gilgamesh and discuss the problems presented by the fragmentary and alien nature of the sources?.
The Epic of Gilgamesh is the oldest written work to have survived into the modern era. The Epic was written in Sumerian cuneiform, the oldest written language and dates back to 3200 BCE. The oldest poems date from Ancient Iraq. In 1839, an aristocrat by the name of Sir Austen Henry Lanyard on his way to Ceylon (modern day Sri-Lanka) in order to serve in the British civil service, rediscovered the ancient ruins of Nineveh which included the palace of Sennacherib, the King of Assyria (705 BC) and his library of Ashurbanipal where the all-important text of the Epic of Gilgamesh was found, written on 20,000 cuneiform tablets (Damrosch, 2007). These were sent to the British Museum.
This essay will first provide an account of the recovery and translation of the Gilgamesh tablets from the 19th century to the present day, highlighting some the challenges encountered in undertaking a work of this magnitude and examining the factors which impeded this endeavour. It will then consider some of the problems presented by the nature of the extant sources.
It was not until over thirty years after Lanyard's discovery of the tablets that the first translations of the Epic were produced. This slow progress was due, in the main, to the lack of Assyriologists with knowledge of the Akkadian language. It took until 1872 for George Smith, then the Senior Assistant in the Assyriology Department of the British Museum whose job was to sift through the vast amounts of cuneiform tablets and make sense of them, to discover, translate and publish the Great Flood story that resembled one in the biblical book of Genesis (now known as the eleventh tablet of the Epic). This brought him fame and political attention in Victorian Christian England where there was growing interest in the establishing the veracity of Biblical events to counter Darwin's evolutionary thesis (On the Origin of the Species, 1859).