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when Austen Henry Layard discovered the clay tablets on which Gilgamesh is written, nobody could read them

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he brought them back to the British Museum

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gradually people start to study them

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Sir Henry Rawlinson (1810-1895)

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was in the British service in Persia

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got interested in inscriptions

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found inscription in Behistun which turned out to be by Darius I (550-486 BCE), in three different scripts

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copied the inscription onto paper

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spends 20 years learning how to translate it by comparing the scripts

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by the 1870s, there is a rudimentary knowledge

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George Smith (1840-1876)

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first to decipher part of the Gilgamesh cuneiform

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had never been to college or high school

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gets interested in Biblical history

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his firm was in walking distance on his lunch hour to the British Museum

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got hired by the museum

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published what they had of Gilgamesh and publishes it under The Chaldean Epic of the Deluge

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Chaldea is the region of Southern Iraq today

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where the Babylonians came from

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published the book The Chaldean Accounts of Genesis

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in the 12 tablets of Gilgamesh, one tablet is about the flood story

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George Smith persuades the British Museum to send him to look for more tablets

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died when he was 36 after writing 8 books and establishing the field of Assyrian studies on a new basis

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what does it mean for a work of world literature to enter the world

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Gilgamesh made a career for George Smith but this interest also led to his death in a sense

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after he wrote to the British Museum that there was tribal warfare, diseases, the British Museum told him to keep looking for it, and so he stayed two more months and died

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Hormuzd Rassam (1826-1910)

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first important Iraqi archeologists

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was a friend and then rival of George Smith

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found a number of the tablets

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wrote the book, "Asshur in the Land of Nimrod"

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Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)

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claimed this was the greatest ancient work he has ever read

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Saddam Hussein authored a book: "Zabibah and the King"

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written in 2000, is a novel that the CIA believes was written by Saddam Hussein, probably with the help of some ghostwriters

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the plot is a love story about a powerful ruler of medieval Iraq and a beautiful commoner girl named Zabibah

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she comes to the city to restrain and educate the headstrong monarch

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as Enkidu comes to Gilgamesh

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Zabibah's husband is a cruel and unloving man who rapes her

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the book is set in 7th or 8th century Tikrit, Hussein's home town

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Joan Lunden

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Australian novelist

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heroine goes on a quest

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Gilgamesh is relevant in the world today but comes from such a different world 3000 years old

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a Sumerian king who has everything

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the gods dispatch a wild man to teach him his place

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the plan goes awry when they become best friends

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they set out together to see the world

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they become so arrogant that the gods condemn the wild man to the Underworld

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bereft, the king makes one last effort to achieve immortality but fails

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he stands before the walls of his great city

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he knows his story will be his only lasting testament

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format

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has an ancient epic formality

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rather dramatic but has a formal pace

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history

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1200 BCE priest Sîn-lēqi-unninni remade the text an adventure story into a story about a quest for ancient knowledge

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so this story is about seeking antiquity to find a modern lesson

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no one ever lived in antiquity

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everyone always lives in the present

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the oldest texts we have are already talking about an antiquity that they're reacting against

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delivery of poem

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when spoken in Akkadian

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measured, formal progress

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much alliteration

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half lines and then couplets

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points which allow the one reciting it to catch their voice