Field Notes
008
Beneath the Watery Deep
The Recovery of the Gilgamesh Epic’s Opening Lines
The Gilgamesh epic has been pieced together from clay tablets found around the Fertile Crescent. But these tablets, inscribed with cuneiform characters, are extremely fragmentary; after almost 150 years of decipherment, about 20 percent of the epic remained missing—including its opening lines.
But Theodore Kwasmann, an American scholar working in Germany, has changed that. In September 1998, after searching among the vast collections of the British Museum (only about one percent of which is on display), Kwasmann joined together two tablets that provide the epic’s initial stanza. According to Andrew George, a University of London scholar and the author of a new translation of Gilgamesh, this miracle of detective work has changed our understanding of the ancient poem.
Written around the beginning of the second millennium B.C., the epic tells of the journeys of Gilgamesh and Enkidu and of Gilgamesh’s quest for eternal life. In the Sumerian king list, Gilgamesh is listed as the fifth king of the first dynasty of Uruk (c. 3500–3100 B.C.), in southern Mesopotamia. Whether or not a king named Gilgamesh actually lived, his story was kept alive for centuries: A number of tablets containing portions of the epic were found—by the British explorer Austen Henry Layard in the 1840s—in the library of the Assyrian king Assurbanipal (668–627 B.C.). The epic was probably even known by the biblical authors, who may have borrowed its description of a vast flood for the Noah story.
After linking up a tablet on display in Room 956 of the museum with one from the museum’s storerooms (the joined tablets are shown above), Kwasmann realized that he had found the long-lost opening of the Gilgamesh epic. He and Andrew George then published the opening lines in Nouvelles Assyriologiques Brèves et Utilitaires:
[sha nagbu iimuru i]shdi maati
[x x x-ti iid]uu kalaama hhassu
[Gilgamesh sha n]agbu iimuru
ishdi maati
[x x x-t]i iiduu kalaama hhassu
George initially felt that the join translated, “He who saw all, who was the foundation of the Land.” But after discussions with Alasdair Livingstone, a cuneiform expert at the University of Birmingham, a new possibility arose.
The first part of the opening line, sha nagbu iimuru, means “he who saw the nagbu.” What is a nagbu? The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary translates nagbu as “totality” or “spring, fountain, or source.” So did Gilgamesh see all of something or the source of something?
The rest of the line provides the answer. Livingstone suggested that ishdi maati, “the foundation of the land,” may refer to the nagbu—so that the nagbu, not Gilgamesh, is the foundation of the land. George offers the following translation:
He who saw the nagbu,
the country’s foundation,
who knew was wise in all
matters!
Gilgamesh, who saw the nagbu,
the country’s foundation,
who knew was wise in
all matters!
Livingstone and George reasoned that nagbu probably refers to something specific—not simply to the “All”—meaning that Gilgamesh sees the source of the land’s foundation. Searching for eternal life, Gilgamesh dives into the ocean, literal or figural, to find its secret.
This watery deep, according to George, is the nagbu: “The Deep (nagbu) is the cosmic domain of the god of wisdom, Ea the source of ancient wisdom that underpins human society and government. Ea civilized mankind.” After the Flood, according to this interpretation, Gilgamesh returns to the land with knowledge of civilized life that he acquired beneath the waters of the Deep.
009
Who was it?
In “Death in Athens” (Field Notes, AO 02:02), we described the life and death of a prominent Greek soldier. Who was he, and what did he die of?
As Athens became the most important city in Greece, Pericles (c. 495–429 B.C.) was its most popular and effective leader. He extended the territories under Athenian control and inspired other Greek city-states to rebuild temples destroyed during the Persian Wars of 480–479 B.C. Pericles commissioned the Parthenon, begun in 447 B.C., along with other projects on the Acropolis and around Athens. In the early years of the Peloponnesian War (431–404 B.C.), he developed the Athenian army’s military strategy. When pestilence broke out in Athens in 430 B.C., however, Pericles was driven from office, tried for embezzlement, and fined. But the Athenians, crippled by the twin scourges of disease and war, soon reinstated him as their leader. A few months later, Pericles, too, succumbed to the plague.
We do not know with certainty what caused the Plague of Athens. Technically, the word “plague” refers to a specific pathogen, Yersinia pestis, the cause of pneumonic and bubonic plague. It does not seem likely that Yersinia pestis was responsible for the Plague of Athens. So what caused the terrible, widespread epidemic that took Pericles’s life?
According to Dr. R. Michael Benitez, of the University of Maryland, the principal contenders are smallpox and typhus (not to be confused with Salmonella typhi). Dr. David Durack, formerly the chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Duke University, has presented a paper arguing that the culprit was typhus, a louse-borne disease somewhat similar to Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. Typhus is known to cause epidemics resulting in numerous deaths, generally under conditions of overcrowding or war.
009
Conservation Watch
c. 62 B.C.
Around 62 B.C., an obscure Hellenistic king named Antiochus I decided to immortalize himself in stone. High atop the peak of Mt. Nemrud, in southeastern Turkey, he ordered the construction of a huge stone funeral barrow and a dozen colossal statues of his people’s gods.
Today, almost no one remembers King Antiochus I, or the kingdom of Commagene that he ruled over from 69 B.C. to 34 B.C., but his funeral monument at Nemrud Dagüi remains one of Turkey’s greatest archaeological treasures. The site is dominated by rows of enormous monumental sculptures, depicting an odd assortment of Greek, Persian and Anatolian deities (including Zeus [above], Apollo [below, shown with the symbol of Zeus, an eagle], Mithras and the not-so-humble King Antiochus himself).
But
Unfortunately, the site’s historic importance has not protected it from the ravages of time, weather and commercial tourism.
Beneath the Watery Deep
The Recovery of the Gilgamesh Epic’s Opening Lines
The Gilgamesh epic has been pieced together from clay tablets found around the Fertile Crescent. But these tablets, inscribed with cuneiform characters, are extremely fragmentary; after almost 150 years of decipherment, about 20 percent of the epic remained missing—including its opening lines.
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