History and pre-history

We ponder a very old story, and something that could have been an old story.

Prompted by a reference, our tutoring consultant recently reread an old story, one he’d bought long ago and had mostly forgotten: The Epic of Gilgamesh.  It’s a shortish paperback, in the current edition.  The really remarkable thing is that we have it at all.

The original was written in Sumerian, an ancient language used in Mesopotamia.  It was among the first written languages in the world, appearing roughly 3,000 BC; maybe Egyptian hieroglyphs are older, but one can argue the point.  It’s a dead language, meaning no one now learns it as a native tongue.  Indeed, if there’s a step beyond being merely dead, Sumerian is there.  While Classical Latin and Greek have been spoken by scholars (at least) down through the years, and Hebrew has achieved the remarkable feat of going from dead to revived, Sumerian completely disappeared.  No one learned it for a couple of thousand years or so, and it had no daughter languages, as Old English did in the form of Middle and Modern English.  The languages that replaced it, Akkadian and Aramaic, are Semitic and thus related to Hebrew and Arabic; Sumerian was an isolate, with no known relatives.  It was only reconstructed from cuneiform tablets in the nineteenth century.  The version in our paperback is an Akkadian translation of the original Sumerian (parts of it also exist on Sumerian-language clay tablets).

Here, in the third millennium AD, we can read a story probably composed in the third millennium BC.  We would expect it to be primitive, as befits something from the Dawn of Time.  It is nothing of the sort.  It has well-developed elements of epic and tragedy, as practiced by the Greeks more than a dozen centuries later; characters with feelings and flaws, identifiably human.  In a real sense, the world was already old when it was written.

But we are left with the feeling that this epic, and indeed the whole library of cuneiform tablets (vast as it is), forms just a spotlight amid the surrounding darkness.  Much went on that was never written down.  As an example we recall archaeological evidence of a major battle in (what later became) Germany in the 13th century BC.  That was a time between the composition of the original Gilgamesh and the version we have; if there was a historical Trojan War, it would have been roughly contemporary.  The effort required to mobilize and deploy armies of thousands of fighters must have been tremendous, for a Bronze Age society.  It would have deserved a whole cycle of epics, to say nothing of tragedies.  But from it we have nothing.

All the more reason, then, to value what we’ve got.