Full Thread: Gilgamesh the Hunter
View Single Post
Old October 26th, 2004 #2
Abzug Hoffman
Senior Member
 
Join Date: May 2004
Posts: 3,483
Default Why pagans and atheists show their stupidity when they piss on the bible

Longer article on this. It's all pretty iffy. Still shows that the Bible is a good cross reference to other ancient myths.

http://www.indigogroup.co.uk/edge/gilgamsh.htm

Bob Trubshaw

'The Epic of Gilgamesh is alive and wriggling. You might as well try and catch hold of an eel in the water as imagine you can get hold of the Epic.' [1]

So starts Robert Temple's attempt to restore the oldest story in the world. Set in what is now Iraq, the Epic of Gilgamesh has its origin in the Sumerian era c.3,000 BCE. What has come down to us are various clay tablet fragments written around 1,800-1,600 BCE onwards in the Akkadian cuniform script, from which academics argumentatively put together a more-or-less coherent whole. How far back the tales stretch into oral tradition we can only speculate, but the enormities of time are overwhelming. Undoubtedly, this is the world's oldest surviving story.

Arguably it is the world's best selling story, too, as the Epic remained in circulation for at least 1,500 years. Judging from the numbers of fragments of tablets in different places, it seems to have been the standard text for training pupils in the Akkadian scriptoria. Gilgamesh's saga develops into those of Hecules or even Odysseus in Classical Greece. Aspects of Plato's writings can also be seen to have been seeded by the Sumerian saga. Furthermore, in the Gilgamesh legends is the story of a Deluge and a carefully constructed cubic ark of sacred measurements - the prototype of the Biblical tale, although the cuniform tablets predate the biblical tale by at least a millenia and a half.

While the Gilgamesh tale still unfolds as a cracking yarn, we would be better seeing the fragments of baked clay as originally being the aide memoirs of actors. This epic was drama - undoubtedly sacred drama - rather as the earliest Greek theatre was also a dramatised ritual. Indeed, it is reasonable to suppose that there was an unbroken tradition between the performances of the Epic and the Bacchae.

Gilgamesh - the name means 'Gilga the hero' - seems to have been a historical king and priest of Urek, although direct confirmation is lacking. Yet, at the same time, he is purely mythical. One text states 'Gilgamesh is Nergal, who resides in the underworld.' Likewise, Hercules was also depicted as Nergal. Gilgamesh also gets woven into the Sumerian beliefs which held that their civilisation was founded by beings that were half fish and half men. They, too, were a persistent part of middle eastern myth and were still featured in literature 2,000 years after the Gilgamesh tales were first recorded....