Literature and history

history come.

Hello and welcome to literature and history.

Episode 3, He Who Saw the Deep.

This show covers the most famous piece of writing from ancient Mesopotamia, the Epic of Gilgamesh.

If you haven't read the Epic of Gilgamesh before, you are in for a treat. For 2,700 years, the story of Gilgamesh, the mythical king of

Urak, circulated in the ancient world. the Rivers, a hundred generations heard and read the mythical king's story and found something

that spoke to them.

Episodes and poetry from Gilgamesh can be found in the books of Genesis and Ecclesiasties.

And upon its discovery in 1853 and first English translation by George Smith in 1872,

the world looked on in awe. Physical copies of a story older than Islam, older than

Christianity, older than Buddhism, older than the Old Testament Patriarch Abraham, had been found in what was then the Ottoman

Empire. It was one of the most important discoveries in literary history.

When translator George Smith first began to read one of the central tablets of the incredible story, a contemporary wrote, quote,

setting the tablet on the table he jumped up and rushed about the room in a great state of excitement and to the astonishment of those present began to undress himself close quote

and I can promise you that if it doesn't actually make you want to publicly disrobe,

the Epic of Gilgamesh is still going to knock your socks off.

It would have been nice if the whole epic had been found in one place, preserved intact, like the

pyramid texts carved onto the walls of the tombs at Socara in Egypt.

But the story exists in dozens of different cuneiform tablets found scattered around

Mesopotamia and Anatolia, and the tablets themselves are frequently broken, chipped,

scarred, and otherwise time-worn.

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