Background to The Epic of Gilgamesh

The Epic of Gilgamesh is one of the earliest surviving literary works and comes from Mesopotamia.  The epic comes in many versions but the best known (and the one I'll be reading) is the version titled, 'He who saw the Deep.'  This version spread throughout Babylonia and Assyria in the first millennium BCE.  The Babylonians believed this version to have come from a scholar of Uruk named Sin-liqe-unninni (yeah, don't ask me to pronounce that).  Sin-liqe-unninni is believed to have lived around the years 1300-1000 BCE.  However, scholars know that 'He who saw the Deep' is actually a revision of one or more earlier versions of the poem.  The oldest surviving part of the epic is a work down by an unknown Babylonian poet who wrote more than 3700 years ago.  The Babylonian epic was composed in Akkadian, but its writing lie in five Sumerian poems written even earlier (information provided by the Penguin version of The Epic of Gilgamesh that I will be reading).

The story focuses on Gilgamesh, a king of Uruk who is two-thirds god and one-third man.  I don't want to give any spoilers away until I discuss the tablets on later posts, but the epic is action-filled and way more exciting than the short history of the text I provided, so if you're dozing off a little, WAKE UP because this is going to be a fun week discussing heroic battles and even, DUN DUN DUN, death! Gasp!  Isn't literature fun?

The following will be a schedule for the week and the readings I'll be discussing.

6/4:  Summary of Tablets I and II and importance to the classroom
6/5:  Summary of Tablets III and IV and importance to the classroom
6/6:  Summary of Tablets V and VI and importance to the classroom
6/7:  Summary of Tablets VII and VIII and importance to the classroom
6/8:  Summary of Tablets IX, X, and XI and importance to the classroom
6/9:  Final post

As you can see, things are pretty structured with what I'll be blogging about:  the tablets and their importance to the classroom.  Each post will have a different discussion revolving around writing style, theme, and characters and why those are all important to teach.  This is going to be way better than SparkNotes (no offense to SparkNotes).   

Hopefully, you'll enjoy my fun-filled discussion of The Epic of Gilgamesh. 

Tablets I and II await!

Cassy