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GILGAMESH EPIC

Perhaps the most famous masterpiece of ancient Near Eastern literature, undoubtedly due to its flood narrative (though this is actually a late addition). Composed in Akkadian, it features the exploits of Gilgamesh, a possible king of Uruk (biblical Erech, Gen. 10:10) in southern Mesopotamia ca. 2700-2600 b.c.e. Various independent Sumerian literary works and traditions about Gilgamesh had circulated as early as the Ur III Dynasty (2100-2000). However, sometime early in the 2nd millennium these assorted works were transformed into a single composition (often referred to as the Old Babylonian Version). Its popularity is attested by the copies, fragments, and adaptations of this version that have been found at such places as Emar in north Syria, Megiddo in Canaan, and µattuša, the capital of the Hittite Empire.

Neither the early Sumerian works or the Old Babylonian Version contained a flood account. This element, however, can be traced from episodic Sumerian beginnings (The Tale of Ziusudra) through successive Akkadian translations and adaptations to the final “canonical” version in 12 tablets (chapters) in what is often referred to as the Standard Version of the Gilgamesh Epic (known mainly from Neo-Assyrian copies [750-612 b.c.e.]).

The overall theme of this integrated version is the (ultimately doomed) quest for eternal life and the “consolation prize” of enduring fame which, in the case of Gilgamesh, has actually been achieved.

But it is Tablet XI of this Standard Version with its Mesopotamian story of the Deluge that is the most familiar of all biblical parallels in the epic. The tablet seems to be drawing in particular from the Akkadian myth of Atra-ḫasis. In this version, the deluge account is put into the mouth of the Flood hero himself (= Noah), known in different versions by different names but here as Utnapishtim (“I have/he has found life”). At one stage of its evolution, Tablet XI was the last tablet of the epic, and concluded with the return of Gilgamesh to Uruk. Subsequently a twelfth tablet was added by straight translation from a Sumerian prototype. It included a vision of the netherworld over which Gilgamesh presided as a deity.

Bibliography. S. Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia (Oxford, 1989), 39- 153; B. R. Foster, Before the Muses, 2nd ed. 2 vols. (Bethesda, 1996); B. R. Foster, “Gilgamesh (1.132),” in The Context of Scripture, ed. W. W. Hallo (Leiden, 1997), 1:458-60; M. G. Kovacs, The Epic of Gilgamesh (Stanford, 1989); J. H. Tigay, The Evolution of the Gilgamesh Epic (Philadelphia, 1982).

K. Lawson Younger, Jr.

Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

GILGAMESH EPIC

Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible (2000)