UNIT ONE: ANCIENT LITERATURE AND ORAL

TRADITION

1.1. Greek Classical literature:

It is known that ancient Rome was one of the biggest empires in human history. Roman art dates
to before 500 BC which were highly influenced by the classical Greek era. The Romans took
everything they could learn from existing methods and then built upon them to develop their
artistic style. Here is a list of the top 3 pieces of ancient Roman art and sculpture that have been
recognized throughout history:

The House of Livia is said to be an almost 2,000-year-old Roman residence that claims some of
the most stunning wall frescoes and floor mosaics one could have…

Philosophers seek to understand individuals in their relationship with God, nature, and other
individuals (God, the world and man) and to determine the meaning of such human ideals as truth,
beauty and goodness, justice, and success. The outstanding Greek philosophers were:

1. Socrates
Socrates (469-399 B.C.) advocated the maxim “Know Thyself.” He sought truth through persistent
questioning-an approach called the Socratic method. Tried and convicted for “corrupting” the
minds of youth, Socrates was put to death by poison. Socrates left no written works. His philosophy
is contained in the writings of his students, especially Plato.

Socrates was heavily invested in actions regarding his philosophical ideologies. He took time to
exercise his philosophies in his daily life. As a deep thinker and an answer seeker, he sometime
roamed the cities and markets seeking for answers through open discussions and meetings. He also
ensured his disciples implemented his philosophies and others in their daily lives and associations
through thinking and using their intellects.

2. Plato
Plato (427-347 B.C.) wrote many fascinating discussions of knowledge, ethics, religion, beauty
and logic, called Dialogues. In the dialogue The Republic, Plato described his ideal governme nt,
not democracy, but aristocracy of intelligence and wisdom trained to rule. His most famous student
was Aristotle.
One among the greatest philosophers of ancient Greece was Plato, a student of Socrates. He was
able to revolutionize the modern world through his teachings. He was able to establish an Academy
in Athens which is identified as Western society’s first institution of higher learning. A great
contributor on the development of western philosophy still being studied and governing actions.
Plato preached his philosophy that was based on a threefold approach, namely, ethics, dialects,
literature and physics. His work ‘The Republic’ is considered Plato’s most influential works till
today as it offers great insight into different fields like ethics, politics, and metaphysics.

Plato’s Thought about Knowledge:

Assumes we can have knowledge;

Primarily interested in what is the true object of knowledge. Refused to believe that truth is
relative; Ethical conduct must be founded on knowledge and knowledge must be founded on
eternal values which are not relative and changing and impermanent but the same for all men and
all peoples and all ages.

Plato and Knowledge of the Eternal

Forms

• Knowledge is always knowledge of something that is.

• True knowledge must be knowledge of the permanent, the unchanging and capable of clear and
scientific definition;

• True knowledge is knowledge of the universal; this is the realm of perfect Forms or Ideas

• The Forms such as Absolute Good, Absolute Beauty, Absolute Justice are real, not simply
intellectual constructs.

The Forms

• Is there a gulf between true knowledge and the real world?

• Is true knowledge, knowledge of the abstract and unreal? For Plato, the universal concept is not
an abstraction; for each true universal concept, there corresponds an objective reality; that
corresponding reality is of a higher order than sense perception; a higher order does not mean a
separate place; the Forms are beyond time and space; they are beyond the material and yet shared
in and participated in; they are transcendent and at the same time immanent; A difficulty for Plato
is determining the precise relation between the particular and the universal.

Dialectic

• For Plato, there are degrees or levels of knowledge.

• The disciplined mind ascends to first principles; this requires effort and mental discipline.

• This process is dialectic.

Education

• Behold absolute truths and values; education aims to save people from the shadow world of error,
falsehood, prejudice and blindness to true values.

• It is not simply academic; it is concerned with the conduct of life, the development of the soul,
the good of the State; the good life is not a product of meditation or simply following rules – it is
a life according to reason.

Plato and the Allegory of the Cave

Plato asks us to imagine an underground cave which has an opening towards the light. In this cave
are living human beings, with their legs and necks chained from childhood in such a way that they
face the inside wall of the cave and have never seen the light of the sun. Above and behind then,
between the prisoners and the mouth of the cave, is a fire and between them and the fire is a raised
way and a low wall, like a screen. Along this way there pass men carrying statues and figures of
animals and other objects, in such a manner that the objects they carry appear over the top of the
low wall or screen. The prisoners facing the inside wall of the cave, cannot see one another nor the
objects carried behind them, but they see the shadows of themselves and of these objects thrown
on the wall they are facing. They see only shadows.

The Cave

• These prisoners represent the majority of mankind, that multitude of people who remain all their
lives in a state beholding only shadows of reality and hearing only echoes of truth. Their view of
the world is distorted by their own passions and preferences, and by the passions and prejudices
of other people as conveyed to them by language and rhetoric. They cling to their distorted views
with tenacity and have no wish to escape from their prison-house. Moreover, if they were suddenly
freed and told to look at the realities of which they had formerly seen the shadows, they would be
blinded by the glare of the light, and would imagine that the shadows were far more real than the
realities.

• However, if one of the prisoners who has escaped grows accustomed to the light, he will after a
time be able to look at the concrete sensible objects, of which he had formerly seen but the
shadows. This man beholds his fellows in the light of the fire (which represents the visible sun)
and is in a state of having been converted from the shadow world of images, prejudices and
passions and sophistries, to the real world, though he has not yet ascended to the world of
intelligible, non-sensible realities. He sees the prisoners for what they are, namely prisoners,
prisoners in the bonds of passion and sophistry. Moreover, if he perseveres and comes out of the
cave into the sunlight, he will see the world of sun-illumined and clear objects (intelligib le
realities), and, lastly, though only by an effort, he will be able to see the sun itself, which represents
the Idea(Form) of the Good, the highest Form, “the universal cause of all things right and beautiful
the source of truth and reason.”

If someone, after ascending to the sunshine, went back into the cave, he would be unable to see
properly because of the darkness, and so would make himself “ridiculous”; while if he tried to free
another and lead him up to the light, the prisoners, who love the darkness and consider the shadows
to be true reality, would put the offender to death.

3. Aristotle
Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) wrote extensive learned treatises on philosophy, science, government and
literature. His encyclopedic works strongly influenced European thinking for almost 2,000 years.
Among his important books were Logic and Politics. Aristotle served as personal tutor to the young
Alexander and stimulated the future leader’s interest in Greek culture.

Aristotle made sure to categorize knowledge into different fields such as Physics, biology, ethics
and math. He was an influential philosopher and excelled greatly in math, astronomy, biology and
philosophy. Aristotle based all his findings on factual data which were gathered from his real- life
experiences. He is also famously known as Plato’s disciple.
 1.2. The Anglos Saxon period
The Anglo-Saxon period in the history of English literature covers the period from the middle of
the 5th century CE to the Norman Conquest of 1066. Around 450 CE, three major Germanic tribes,
the Jutes, the Saxons and the Angles entered the British Isles. These invaders gradually adapted to
the local culture of the Celts whom they had displaced, leading to the production of a language
that came to be known as Old English. Later invaders from Denmark, Norway and Sweden, the
Scandinavian Vikings, made different parts of England their home and led to further modifica tio n
of the language. These Germanic Anglo-Saxon tribes embraced Christianity in the 7th century and
developed a literature in the written form. This literature is known as Anglo Saxon literature or
Old English literature.

Anglo-Saxon literature is a synthesis of many different linguistic groups that successive ly

occupied or conquered the British Isles. The earliest were the Celts which consisted of the Gaels
and the Britons. The Gaelic people did not exert much influence on English literature in the early
period as they settled in the Scottish Highlands. The Britons inhabited the present region of Wales
and England and were subsequently conquered by the Anglo-Saxons. However, many of them
intermarried with the conquerors and influenced Anglo-Saxon literature. The influence of the
Britons on Anglo Saxon literature can be said to consist of two main characteristics: the first is a
vigorous emotionalism exhibiting vivacity, love of novelty, bravery, yet an impractical nature. The
second characteristic is the exhibition of a delicate sensitivity to beauty and fantasy. These
characteristics are clearly depicted in the story Kilhwich and Olwen. Here, we find beautiful
descriptions of the hidden charms of nature like hills, forests, and the pleasant breeze, the flowers
in the meadow, and graceful young maidens and youth. The characteristic imagery of the literature
of the Britons range from different hues of rich color to descriptions of whatever took their fancy
like attractive objects, sights, sounds, movement and the like, which were all woven into
supernatural romances or fantastic tales. The imagery conjured up by these tales probably inspired
the fairy scenes of Shakespeare and the lyrical poetry of Tennyson in the later period. In the first
century CE, the Romans conquered the British Isles and introduced Roman civilization and later,
Christianity to the Britons of the towns and plains. With them, came the Latin language and for
nearly three hundred years, it was the language of the ruling elite. However, the Romans do not
appear to have influenced Old English literature. By the beginning of the fifth century, harassed
by the invading Anglo-Saxons, the Romans abandoned Britain and by the middle of the fifth
century, the Jutes, Angles and Saxons who came in successive bands, established permanent
settlements on the island. These Anglo-Saxon tribes were barbarians and led a semi-pastoral life
and basic agricultural practices.

They were war-like and many earned their livelihood through piracy, and looting and pillaging.
By nature, they were also ferocious, cruel, strong, courageous and deeply loyal to their chiefta ins
or kings, and comrades.

These qualities found a strong expression in their literature. The Anglo Saxon conquest of the
British Isles took place over a period of nearly 150- 200 years. While the earlier invaders initia lly
settling on the eastern and southern shores, they gradually made in-roads into the interior of the
island by defeating the early Roman invaders. In course of time, the Angles settled in the east and
north, the Saxons in the south, and the Jutes, who were numerically smaller, in the region of Kent.
They established separate kingdoms which were often at war with one another as well as with the
Britons. The Britons tried in vain to resist the onslaught of the Anglo-Saxons and by the seventh
century, the Anglo-Saxons occupied almost the entire region that is present day England.

The Anglo-Saxon conquest virtually destroyed the earlier Celtic and Roman civilization. They
burnt cities, slaughtered the inhabitants and occupied the land. Establishing themselves as masters
of the farmlands, these barbaric warriors were surrounded by bondsmen and slaves drawn from
among the defeated people. It is believed that many Britons were kept alive as slaves and wives.
In course of time, the Anglo-Saxons transformed into a race of farmers and developed a flouris hing
trade with the European continent. Towards the end of the sixth century, Christian missiona r ies
from Rome had arrived and in 597 CE Saint Augustine landed in Kent and converted the kingdom.
By the middle of the seventh century, after fierce fighting, Christianity had been established in
most of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms located in the southern half of the island. In the northern part,
in Ireland, meanwhile, Christianity had already been established by simple missionaries although
it was not patronized by Rome. The Christian faith propagated by the Romans, brought with it
imperial architecture, music, education, and the zeal which over time, would establish the
supremacy of the Roman Catholic Church in the Western world. When the king of North Umbria,
the most powerful Anglican kingdom, decided in favor of the Roman church as against the Irish,
it resulted in the supremacy of the former over the island of Britain. This had far-reaching
consequences in the medieval period when a common religion bound Britain with Rome, resulting
in spiritual efflorescence. This was mainly due to the establishment of a network of monasteries
that became centers of learning and literature.

Some of the major literary forms

Anglo Saxon Poetry

Early Anglo-Saxon poetry exhibits pagan characteristics as it was composed before the conversion
to Christianity. It consists of epic poems and ballads of fierce warriors that reflect the life of the
Anglo-Saxons before they conquered the British Isles. The Anglo-Saxons believed in the efficacy
of magical charms and their ballads developed through story-telling among groups when they
probably retold and re-enacted achievements in hunting or war. These popular stories were passed
down orally from one generation to the next. The professional minstrels or bards known as scopes
or gleemen who were adept storytellers had popularized these ballads of brave deeds by wandering
from village to village interacting with different tribes.

Their storytelling was often accompanied by the harp. They also began to compose formal poetry
and many minstrels also entertained at the courts of the barbarian chieftain or king or warriors
during feasts with tales of heroes and battles and the achievements of their patron. Although, the
majority of these popular ballads have been lost over time, some of them fired the popular
imagination and developed into formal epic poetry. Very often, the minstrels composed these epics
by stringing together different ballads that deal with the exploits of a single hero or with a single
event. One of the most popular surviving epic is that of Beowulf. Beowulf consisting of about
three thousand lines is one of the most well-known Anglo -Saxon epic poems. This poem had its
origins in the European continent and was carried to England in the form of ballads by the Anglo -
Saxons. Portions of this epic are of Scandinavian origin probably brought to England by Danish
or Norwegian pirates. It developed into a formal epic poem during the seventh and eighth century.
This powerful poem narrates the story of the hero Beowulf who comes from the sea to the aid of
King Hrothgar and delivers him from the monster Grendel.

Following this, King Hrothgar and his people are confronted with the wrath of Grendel’s mother
who seeks revenge. Ultimately, the latter is also killed by Beowulf. A triumphant Beowulf returns
home and his heroic deeds are rewarded by his tribe, who make him their king. However, his
kingdom is threatened by a fire-breathing dragon. Beowulf dies a hero’s death while killing the
beast and saving his people from harm.

The picture presented in Beowulf of the life of the upper caste warriors belonging to the northern
Germanic tribes is incomplete. One sees only glimpses of the later period of barbarism of these
tribes in England and the larger continent. It is nevertheless an interesting description. War,
feasting and hunting seem to be the chief occupations of Hrothgar and his lot, if the depictions by
the poets/bards of his life are anything to go by. The poem maintains a grim and somber mood
throughout its deployment and very rarely betrays traces of delight in the beauty that the world has
to offer. For the greater part of the poem, hardy satisfaction at performing well as a warrior and
protector with a fierce natural environment providing impediments along the way, take center
stage. Beowulf is hardly the correct place to look at for finer artistic graces and the structural
subtleties characteristic of later literary periods. Thus one finds more dramatization than clarity in
the narrative. The characters are mostly two dimensional, tailored by the poet(s) to suit the
demands of an audience that was presumably not very perceptive or attentive to the minutiae of
details. But the sheer power and virile barbarism that the epic poem exudes make it a memorable
one, especially if one does not forget that it was the product of a long period of poetic evolution.

In the kingdom of Northumbria, located in present Yorkshire and southern Scotland, the capital
city York and its various monasteries became the chief centers of learning and culture in Western
Europe. The Anglo Saxon poetry produced in this region exhibits like Beowulf, a certain Pagan
spirit. Its other characteristics are ingenious and skillfully developed riddles in verse form,
representing an early form of popular literature like the ballads and charms. The surviving
specimens of Pagan lyrical poems are pensively melancholic- dealing with the harsh and tragic
aspects of life, and the power of oceans and storms, the inevitability and dreariness, banishme nt
and the separation of friends. Some Celtic influence is discernable in the common tender notes of
pathos. The majority of this Anglo-Saxon poetry of the Northumbrian period was the product of
the Christian monasteries or under monastic influence.

The earliest Christian writer was Caedmon, who rendered portions of the Bible in Anglo -Saxon
verse, towards the end of the seventh century. Another scholar was Bede, a Christian monk whose
forty Latin prose-works summarized most of the knowledge of his time. Cynewulf was another
important poet whose religious poetry in the Anglo Saxon language deals with Christ, Christian
apostles and heroes. Thus, much of the Anglo Saxon prose and poetry of the Northumbrian period
display the lingering of the Pagan heritage and consist of powerful narratives of sea voyages,
battles, acts of vigor and passion and an adventurous life. The Christian influence is seen in the
religious beliefs of Providence and dependence on God and Christ, where the latter replaced the
kings of old.

Anglo-Saxon Prose, the West Saxon Prose Period

This period is marked by the attacks on the Anglo-Saxons by the non-Christian Danes or Northmen
who hailed from the Scandinavian Peninsula and the neighboring coast. In the ninth century, the
Danes repeatedly attacked and looted England, conquered North Umbria, destroyed the churches
and monasteries, resulting in an almost complete destruction of learning. King Alfred (871-901
CE) of Wessex, the region of the West Saxons, tried to negotiate peace by ceding to the Danes the
entire northeastern part of the island. Following the restoration of peace and stability, Alfred
worked hard to restore learning in his kingdom. He himself translated manuals of history,
philosophy and religion from Latin into Anglo Saxon. His greatest work was the Anglo Saxon
Chronicle, a series of annals starting with the Christian era, kept at various monasteries that
recorded the most important historical events mainly of England up to the eleventh century.

These chronicles are characterized by brief accounts bereft of any details except for the spirited
narrative that deals with the exploits of Alfred, where the narrator is sometimes roused to the verse
form. The two important extant pieces of Anglo Saxon poetry of the West Saxon period were
written in the tenth century. These describe the two great battles against invading Northmen at
Brunanburgh and Maldon.

The West Saxon period has produced literature of relatively little significance. Most of the writing
that survives this period is generally didactic and riddled with exaggerated symbolism, in the form
of religious prose – hagiographies, sermons, biblical and monastic literature. Meanwhile, several
wars ravaged the country. Post Alfred’s death, within fifty years, his descendants had managed to
seize back England from the Danes (most of whom till the land today comprise a large segment of
the ‘English’ race).

However, towards the close of the tenth century, the Danish again emerged from the Baltic lands,
unleashing death and destruction upon the Anglo Saxons. By the eleventh century, many had
entered the Christian fold. And in the beginning of the twelfth century, Canute a Christian Danish
king began to rule over the region (for twenty years). In such times, understandably little of
literature could flourish.

Thus, early Anglo-Saxon literature was the product of different racial groups that exhibited Pagan,
as well as, Christian influences. The Norman Conquest at the Battle of Hastings in 1066 marks the
end of this early Anglo Saxon literature which would now enter into a new phase after the death
of King Harold, the last Anglo-Saxon ruler. William of Normandy brought fresh new influe nces
from France, which replaced the earlier Pagan traits, which will be discussed in the following
paragraphs.

Anglo Norman Literature:

The Norman Conquest put an end to serious literary works in Old English language and gave the
rise to Anglo-Norman literature, commonly dated between 1100/1200 and 1350s, and considered
to be the first phase in the development of English literary phenomena during the Middle Ages.

The starting point is taken to be the Hastings Battle of 1066, marking the beginning of the Norman
Conquest, and for almost two centuries the further development of English society, culture, and
literature was dependent on French politics, French culture, French literary productions, and
French language. With the Norman Conquest, ‘French’ emerged as the language of the elite.
Initially, Norman and Latin were the official languages, also permeating all of literature. However,
by 1350, English was re-established as the dominant court language, and consequently that of
courtly literature. With this adoption, the native language flourished in the form of varied literature.
Literary writings provided both instruction and amusement.

Much of the Anglo-Norman literature is given to experimentation, with poetry emerging as the
most prevalent form- encompassing themes on divinity, history, as well as, science. Layamon’s
Brut is a remarkable text produced at this time. Other significant works include narrative poems
like “Sir Gawain and the Greene Knight”, and lyric poetry like “Blow, Northerne Wynd”. Christian
symbolism pervaded most of these texts. Anglo-Norman poetry is functionally categorized into
three major groups: chronicles, religious and didactic verse, and the romances.

The verse chronicles are marked by ingenuity in style, where romances were passed off as works
of history. Brut is marked by its use of assonance, rhyme and similes. Robert of Gloucester’s
untitled verse chronicle amounted to almost twelve thousand lines. Robert Mannyng of Brunne
wrote, The Story of England in 1338, which though highly unoriginal, is known for its alexandrine
couplets. With the founding of several abbeys during this period in time, religious and didactic
poetry flourished, mostly written in French, some in English. The Ormulum by Orm, an
Augustinian monk, was intended to explain to “the ignorant” the Gospel and its interpretatio ns.
The much popular debate-verse The Owl and the Nightingale was written in octosyllabic couplets,
and draws from the classical eclogue of Virgil and Theocritus. The poem is said to be an allegory
of the clash between pleasure and asceticism – symbolized by the nightingale and the owl
respectively. It has also been seen as an allegory for the clash of literary forms of courtly love
poetry and religious didactic poetry. William of Waddington’s Handling Synne discusses among
other things, the Ten Commandments, the Seven Deadly Sins, and sacrilege with well- la id
examples. The anonymous poem “Cursor Mundi” provides a spiritual history of the world from
the Creation to Doomsday. Middle English Romances were written in French and catered to the
upper class. The use of English in this literary form commences only from the mid-thirtee nth
century. The romances are distinguished by the tales of knights, the supernatural, where love spurs
on or acts as an excuse for the adventures of the hero.

The earliest romances were always in verse, ranging from one thousand to six thousand lines,
sometimes even longer, characterized by eight syllable couplets and the use of tail rhyme – these
share some similarities with the epic, but do not follow much unity of action, with the characters
reduced to types. Classical history and legends provided sources for these romances. The Matter
of Britain, The Matter of Rome, and The Matter of France are significant texts of this category
Arthur and Merlin and Le Morte Arthur were other significant texts, the latter almost ballad- like
in its narrative. From about 1360 to 1400, England experienced one of its most turbulent phases in
its entire history. The Black Death which began in 1348 resulting in tremendous suffering while
Kentish peasants under Wat Tyler rose up in protest resulting in the Peasants’ Rebellion of 1381.
However, it is during these years that a truly English literary tradition began to develop, poetry
with vitality and energy emerged in stark contrast to the bleak sociopolitical realities at its
backdrop. It was also the time when the East-Midland dialect was accepted as ‘standard’ Englis h
and its status was firmly established by poets such as Langland, Gower and most importantly,
Chaucer.
Although the Anglo-Saxons fought among themselves, they had a great deal in common.

 They used a common language

 They shared a heroic ideal
 They had a set of traditional heroes.
 They were loyal to their leaders and tribe.
 They held a belief of fierce personal valor.
 They admired men of outstanding courage.
 Persons of rank were received with grave courtesy.
 Rulers were generous to those who were loyal
 They had a democratic habit of mind.
 They were hardy and brave
 They had a passion for fine ornaments.
 Literature and the Arts began to evolve during this period.
 Anglo-Saxon poetry was an oral tradition.
 Caedmon was considered the first English religious poet.
 An Anglo-Saxon poet was called a scop.
 He was the memory and historian of the tribe.
 The two most important traditions of Anglo-Saxon poetry were the heroic and the elegiac
tradition.
 “The Seafarer” is a good example of an elegiac poem. The most important single poem
from the Anglo-Saxon period is the epic Beowulf.

1.3. Ancient epics

The Epic

 Epic poems were a very common form of Anglo-Saxon Literature

 An epic is a long, narrative poem that celebrates a hero’s deeds
 Epics were told in the tradition of oral storytelling (many people could not read or write)
 Characteristics of oral storytelling Stock epithets: adjectives that point our special traits of
particular people or things
 Kennings: a descriptive phrase or compound word that substitutes for one word.
Example- Grendel = “sin-stained demon” is used in place of Grendel’s name.
Characteristics of an Epic

 The hero of an epic is called the epic hero

 The hero is usually a male of noble birth/high position and is historical or Legendary.
 The hero’s character traits reflect the ideals of his society and his actions (often courageous
and superhuman) reflect the values of his society
 The hero’s actions often determine the fate of a nation of people
 The setting usually covers more than one nation
 The poet uses formal diction (word choice) and serious tone
 Major characters often deliver long, formal speeches
 The plot is complicated by supernatural beings/events and usually involves a long,
dangerous journey through foreign lands
 The poem reflects timeless values (courage, honor, etc.)
 The poem covers universal themes (good vs. evil, life and death, etc.)
 Present day epics: Lord of the Rings & Star Wars Beowulf.

1.3.1. Be wolf
Beowulf is an epic. The poem begins in Media Res, or “in the middle” of the action, common for
epic poetry of the Anglo-Saxon era. Beowulf is the epic hero in the story; he travels great distances
to prove his strength and has super-human powers. The events described in the story take place in
the late 5th Century. In the story, Hrothgar, king of the Danes, and his people are terrorized by the
monster Grendel. Beowulf, a hero of the Geats, comes to Hrothgar’s aid, fighting Grendel and
Grendel’s mother.

The Beowulf epic is the great and magnificent sample of poem in old English Literature. Beowulf
is a Scandinavian hero who battled and fought with Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and the Dragon.
He was not only a champion, but also the Savior and supporter of people. This (the Savior) is what
the vast majority of Old English Literature is devoted to in ancient time. Actually, Beowulf epic
depicts the heroic deeds of a human that is larger than life. Beowulf prominently occupies a place
in the national lore of the people that created it (Horobin & Smith, 2002).

1.3.2. The Epic of Gilgamesh

The name ‘Epic of Gilgamesh’ is given to the Babylonian poem that tells the deeds of Gilgames h,
the greatest king and mightiest hero of ancient Mesopotamian legend. The poem falls into the
category ‘epic’ because it is a long narrative poem of heroic content and has the seriousness and
pathos that have sometimes been identified as markers of epic. Some early Assyriologists, when
nationalism was a potent political force, characterized it as the ‘national epic’ of Babylonia, but
this notion has deservedly lapsed.

The poem’s subject is not the establishment of a Babylonian nation nor an episode in that nation’s
history, but the vain quest of a man to escape his mortality. In its final and best-preserved version,
it is a somber meditation on the human condition. The glorious exploits it tells are motivated by
individual human predicaments, especially desire for fame and horror of death.

The emotional struggles related in the story of Gilgamesh are those of no collective group but of
the individual. Among its timeless themes are the friction between nature and civilizatio n,
friendship between men, the place in the universe of gods, kings and mortals, and the misuse of
power. The poem speaks to the anxieties and life-experience of a human being, and that is why
modern readers find it both profound and enduringly relevant.

The Epic of Gilgamesh tells of the odyssey of a king in quest of immortality. To humanize his
tyrannical reign, the gods respond to the subjects’ adjurations by creating Enkidu, a wild man,
initially living among the desert animals,

With the gazelles he feeds on grass,

With the wild beasts he jostles at the watering places,

With the teeming creatures, his heart delights in water.

Later civilized into urban life, and finally befriended by the king. This epilogue introduces us to
their swashbuckling and derring-do, such as the killing of Huwawa and the ‘bull of heaven’. The
latter had been sent by Ishtar, the goddess of Uruk and ‘a woman scorned’, to kill Gilgamesh for
repudiating her fickle love with a set of unflattering similes:

The oikoumene of the ancient Middle East embraced the regions from Iran to Egypt and from
Anatolia and the Aegean Sea to the Arabian Peninsula through the years 3000 to 330 BC. The
word means the inhabited world and signifies a distinct historical and cultural continuum. From
the dawn of civilisation the area constituted a far-flung house (oikos, house) until Alexander’s
empire replaced the intimacy of the ecumene. Architectural, ceramic, metallurgical and other
products radiated from the first civilisations to their younger contemporaries. Just as the secular
crafts were monopolised by professional guilds, so were other-worldly services concentrated in
priest-guilds. The mobility of guilds disseminated ceramic as well as religious forms: sacrifice in
Mycenaean (Late Bronze Age) Greece mimicked the Hebrews, its memory preserved to this day
in ritual Jewish slaughter. Merchants and priests were equally to be found rubbing shoulders in
ancient Ugarit on the Mediterranean coast of northern Syria as in Israel or hobnobbing at the
Mesopotamian gateway at Alalakh in what is now modern Turkey. The Greek world, in the late
Bronze Age, thereby, drew on the inventory of the Middle East, material, cultural and spiritual, to
stock its corresponding warehouses rendered virtually native, by such exchange, to the Levant.

Thus, the consecutive occupation of the divine throne by Uranus, Cronos and Zeus, in
Hesiod’s Theogony, appears to be the reflex of the successive theocracies of Anu, Kumarbi and
the storm god in a Hittite version of a Hurrian myth. The court of Hattusa was the royal school of
chariotry for Achaean princes, and the empire, no doubt, proved equally dexterous in the art of
diplomacy.

The Epic of Gilgamesh, inferring from the number of copies discovered in the Levant, enjoyed the
status of a bestseller. And it would not be stretching a commercial analogy overmuch to suggest
a parallel between the piracy on the Mediterranean and the influence of the epic on Homer. In both
the odyssey of Gilgamesh and the Odyssey, the representation of the joys of this-worldliness in an
attempt to suspend the hero’s journey to the netherworld devolves, respectively, on the divine
bargirl, Siduri, lodged as inn-keeper amidst the garden of the sun-god near the ocean, and Circe
and Calypso on their mythical isles. Both in the Gilgamesh epic and the Iliad, friends die their
surrogate deaths for the heroes, Patroclus for Achilles, Enkidu for Gilgamesh, both to return and
report on the nothingness of death.

The analogies, however, dramatize the disanalogies. Gilgamesh’s monomaniacal quest for
immortality cursorily dismisses the sanity of Siduri’s advice, while Odysseus’ uncompromis ing
humanity spurns a goddess’s gift of eternal life. The death of Patroclus has the opposite effect on
Achilles as that of Enkidu on Gilgamesh: the one shuns, the other chooses, his friend’s fate, to
avenge it.

Without doubt, such difference in outlook, subsisting with so much similarity in execution, gives
pause to thought, and occasion for reflection. Prima facie, the ineluctable conclusion stares the
querying mind –the West is essentially secular, the East quintessentially other-worldly. The
phenomenon thus compartmentalized, the tired mind rests from further labor. Henceforth, all
subsequent surprises cease to be so, going into one of two boxes: The Greek, heroic and the
Mesopotamian, pathetic view of life.

Thus, even minds belonging to such as Thorkild Jacobsen asseverate: “The Epic of Gilga mes h
does not come to a harmonious end; the emotions which rage in it are not assuaged; nor is there,
as in tragedy, any sense of catharsis, any fundamental acceptance of the inevitable.”

The average barbarian, therefore, is a religious sycophant. The political development of Hellas and
that of the ‘barbarians’, indeed, diverged sufficiently to constitute two schools. Their
distinguishing characteristic was a ‘break of study’ in the former case, and an uninterrupted
curriculum in the latter. From 3000 BC, Egypt experienced uninterrupted government down to the
present day, and Mesopotamia for more than 3000 years until its terminal illness - the combined
canker of the absence of national, and presence of alien, government (and peoples). Their slightly
younger contemporary, the Minoan, and its mainland successor, the Mycenaean, civilizations of
Greece were as monarchical as their eastern sisters. Thus, around 1400 BC, the ecumene exhibited
a sorority of monarchical states, urban or unified.

Discovery and recovery

The literatures of ancient Mesopotamia, chiefly in Sumerian and Babylonian (Akkadian), were
lost when cuneiform writing died out in the first century ad. Their recovery is one of the supreme
accomplishments in the humanities; the process began in the middle of the nineteenth century and
continues today. In 1850 the gentleman adventurer Austen Henry Layard tunnelled through the
remains of an Assyrian palace at Nineveh, near Mosul in modern Iraq, extracting the limesto ne
bas-reliefs that lined its rooms. He stumbled across a chamber knee-deep in broken clay tablets
bearing cuneiform writing. This was part of the archive of the Neo-Assyrian kings, who ruled most
of the Near East in the seventh century BC. Layard was unable to read the tablets, but shipped
them back to the British Museum with the bas-reliefs. Sixteen years later a young man called
George Smith began to read the tablets. By 1872 he had sorted many into categories. Already
discrete literary compositions were emerging, among them what he called the Poem of Izdubar.
This was the Epic of Gilgamesh; the hero’s name was not correctly read until 1899. Smith’s
translation gained wide readership because the poem included a story of the flood very similar to
that of Noah in Genesis.

Smith died soon afterwards, but his translation led German scholars to study the Assyrian tablets.
Within fifteen years Paul Haupt published the cuneiform text of Gilgamesh, which he called the
Babylonian ‘Epic of Nimrod’.

The title was a reference to the great hunter of the Bible, who many supposed was based on the
Babylonian hero. Alongside the Assyrian tablets this book included a single Babylonian tablet.
This was the first of many Babylonian manuscripts of Gilgamesh to be identified among the huge
number of tablets that the British Museum acquired by purchase and excavation in Babylonia,
south of Baghdad, in the 1870s–90s. Haupt’s cuneiform text did nothing to make his discoveries
known to the larger public, but in 1900 Peter Jensen’s anthology of Akkadian narrative poetry
transliterated the text into Roman characters and translated it into German.

Another early translation, by Arthur Ungnad, publicized the existence of the poem more widely
and finally brought it recognition as a masterpiece of world literature.

Meanwhile, more pieces of the poem had been identified in the British Museum, both Assyrian
tablets from seventh-century Nineveh and slightly later pieces from Babylonia. Much older tablets
soon began to appear on the antiquities’ market but the British Museum had ceased collecting so
voraciously and the bulk of tablets offered for purchase went elsewhere. These included three
Gilgamesh tablets of Old Babylonian date (eighteenth century bc) from Babylonia, which ended
up in Berlin, Yale and Philadelphia. At the same time archaeological exploration increased
dramatically.

German expeditions found a Gilgamesh tablet of the late second millennium at Hattusa (Bog˘azko¨
y), the Hittite capital in central Anatolia, and a Neo Assyrian tablet at Asshur, on the Tigris
downstream of Nineveh. Both the market and excavations also began to yield tablets that contained
poems about Gilgamesh in the Sumerian language. Thus the decade before the First World War
saw a growing diversity in the provenance and period of tablets of Gilgamesh, and their diaspora
to Europe and America. The sources for the Babylonian poem were next collected by R. Campbell
Thompson, who published a verse translation in English in 1929, and cuneiform and transliterated
texts a year later.5 The second book fell short of the highest contemporaneous standards in
Assyriology but, despite its poor reception, endured for more than seventy years as the only critical
edition of the Babylonian Gilgamesh. By the 1960s the lack of a modern and authorita tive
treatment was everywhere deplored. By the end of that decade thirty- four pieces were known in
addition to those edited by Thompson, twenty of them in cuneiform only. By the turn of the
millennium any scholar wishing to read the poem from original sources had to consult a dossier of
over thirty different publications. The absence of an up-to-date critical edition of the Epic of
Gilgamesh in the latter part of the twentieth century produced a boom in translations. Some of
these translations were faithful renderings by people who could read Babylonian; others were less
authoritative. At present, only three translations include the Babylonian poem in its most complete
form: my own (1999), and those of Benjamin Foster (2000) and Stefan Maul (2005).6 Foster’s and
my books also include the Sumerian poems of Gilgamesh.

In 2003 I brought together all the known sources of the Babylonian poem then accessible. The
progress made in the recovery of the text across the preceding seven decades can be measured in
the number of sources: where Thompson’s edition was based on 112 manuscripts, mine utilizes
218 pieces. Another improvement in knowledge can be seen in the division of the material.
Thompson interpolated the four second-millennium sources then extant into his edition of the first-
millennium poem. I separate the sources into four periods and treat the versions of each period as
distinct stages in the poem’s evolution, showing that there is no single Epic of Gilgamesh: parts of
different versions survive, spread across eighteen hundred years of history. The recovery of the
Epic of Gilgamesh continues, as does the recovery of Babylonian literature generally. Since 2003
no fewer than ten pieces of the poem have become available. Some have already been published.
It is certain that more will accumulate, adding to our knowledge in ways unsuspected as well as
suspected, and eventually necessitating another critical edition.

Literary history

The oldest literary materials about the hero-king Gilgamesh are five Sumerian poems. These are
known from tablets of the Old Babylonian period, especially the eighteenth century bc, but they
probably go back to a period of intense creativity under the patronage of King Shulgi of Ur (2094–
2047 BC). The Sumerian poems report some of the same legends and themes as parts of the
Babylonian poem, but they are independent compositions and do not form a literary whole. The
Sumerian and Babylonian poems shared more than just a common literary inheritance, whether
that was oral (as seems likely) or written. They are products of a bilingual literary culture that
displayed a high degree of intertextuality even between compositions in different langua ges;
neither, however, is a translation of the other. The oldest Babylonian fragments of the epic are
contemporaneous with the Sumerian tablets. Would-be scribes demonstrated their competence by
copying out texts from the scribal curriculum. The Old Babylonian curriculum consisted almost
entirely of Sumerian compositions, and we possess multiple copies of most of them. Literary
compositions in Babylonian were not copied in the same numbers, so many fewer fragments are
extant. Eleven pieces of Gilgamesh survive from this period, all from Babylonia itself. Some of
them are fine copies of large sections of the poem; prominent among these are a pair of tablets
now in Philadelphia and Yale (OB Tablets II–III), and a tablet from northern Babylonia (OB VA
þ BM). Other pieces are short excerpts, some poorly executed, and were the work of juniors, either
as set exercises or as extemporized writing. Altogether these eleven Old Babylonian manuscr ipts
provide several disconnected episodes in a little over six hundred lines of poetry. Some of these
lines are from passages that describe the same episode slightly differently, so it transpires that the
eleven manuscripts are not witnesses to a single edition of the poem, but to at least two and
probably more. There is not enough shared text to determine how extensive the differences are,
but it is already clear that we can fairly speak both of distinct recensions (where the differe nces
are minor) and of distinct versions (where the differences are major).

The version represented by the tablets in Philadelphia and Yale (OB Tablets II–III) went by the
name of its opening phrase, ‘Surpassing all kings’. We do not yet know whether the titles of other
Old Babylonian versions differed. The complexity of the written tradition in the eighteenth century
suggests that by then the poem was a composition of some antiquity; in the absence of older written
sources it seems justified to postulate an oral prehistory extending over several generations of
singers. There is therefore no sign of any one author who might have been responsible for the
poem’s original creation.

The recessional situation is even more complex in the later second millennium (1600–1000 bc).
From this intermediate or Middle Babylonian period twenty-three fragments survive. The oldest
fragment is probably sixteenth-century, and probably from south-east Babylonia, which makes it
very rare (MB Priv1). It is also remarkable because the names of the poem’s heroes, Gilga mes h
and Enkidu, are replaced by the gods Sıˆn and Ea. The fragment provides the text of an episode
already well known from an Old Babylonian tablet and the first-millennium text, but with very
significant differences.

Other tablets of the intermediate period are Middle Babylonian pieces from Ur and a group from
Nippur, probably from the thirteenth and twelfth centuries. The former tablet (MB Ur) is closely
related to the Standard Babylonian epic of the first millennium. The latter group (MB Nippur)
reveals the poem’s use as a pedagogical tool in the training of scribes; by this time a Babylonia n
curriculum had replaced the Sumerian one. Roughly contemporaneous with these Babylonia n
tablets are manuscripts from Syria, Palestine and Anatolia. Cuneiform writing and the langua ges
of southern were exported to the west from the third millennium bc. Discoveries of tablets from
the fourteenth to twelfth centuries reveal that cuneiform writing was taught from Egypt to Anatolia
using a modified version of the Babylonian scribal curriculum. The Epic of Gilgamesh was part
of this modified curriculum, and parts of it have turned up at Megiddo in Palestine, Ugarit and
Emar in Syria and Hattusa in Anatolia. One of the oldest pieces of this material (MB Bog˘azko¨y
from Hattusa) is remarkably close to the text of the Old Babylonian tablet now in Yale (OB Tablet
III). Among the youngest are two (MB Emar) that are much more like the Standard Babylonia n
text of the first millennium. Several pieces are notable for corruption so severe that in places the
text is no longer meaningful. At this time prose paraphrases of the epic were made in languages of
the north Mesopotamian periphery, including Hurrian and Hittite. Most sources for the poem come
from the first millennium bc: to date about 190. This material can be divided by period into three
groups:

(a) early Neo-Assyrian manuscripts,

(b) Neo-Assyrian manuscripts from Nineveh, and

(c) Neo- and Late Babylonian manuscripts from Babylon, Uruk and other cities of Babylonia
(sixth to second centuries bc).

To start with group (a): recent study in Berlin of tablets excavated at Ashur one hundred years ago
has revealed two fragments of early Neo-Assyrian date, probably ninth century, that belong to a
version of the poem clearly older than that known to the overwhelming majority of first -
millennium manuscripts. This version was probably a Middle Babylonian text imported to Assyria
in the intermediate period, perhaps in the reign of Tukulti-Ninurta I (1243–1207 bc), who is known
to have carried off Babylonian scribal learning after sacking Babylon.

(b) Other tablets from Asshur and Kala¿ (also known as Nimrud, a city south of Nineveh) show
that other remnants of old editions of the poem survived into the seventh century. By far the
majority of tablets and fragments of the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh belong to groups and

(c), and are witness to a single version of the poem called after its opening phrase, ‘He who saw
the Deep’. This composition was divided into twelve tablets, also called the ‘Series of Gilgames h’.
It was associated in Babylonian tradition with the name Sıˆn-leqi-unninni, a scholar-exorcist who
was claimed as an ancestor by scribes of Uruk. Their view that he was the advisor of a historica l
King Gilgamesh immediately after the flood is anachronistic. His name is typical of the late Old
Babylonian and Middle Babylonian periods. This was a time when scholars compiled standardize d
versions of many traditional compositions, bringing order to the multiple versions then extant. It
is assumed that Sıˆn-leqi-unninni was responsible for producing the standardized text ‘He who saw
the Deep’. He probably lived towards the end of the second millennium bc. Pioneers called the
Akkadian language ‘Assyrian’, in reference to the Greeks’ name for the land where the cuneifor m
tablets of Nineveh were discovered. Thompson employed this adjective in his edition, and the first
millennium poem is often still called the ‘Assyrian’ or ‘Neo-Assyrian’ version. Only the script of
the Nineveh tablets is Assyrian; the language of ‘He who saw the Deep’ is a literary dialect of
Akkadian now called Standard Babylonian. Accordingly, I use the term Standard Babylonian (SB)
Epic of Gilgamesh. The SB poem was soon adopted as the authoritative text, and after the seventh
century no copies of variant versions survive. Nevertheless, the text of ‘He who saw the Deep’
was not completely fixed. Variants occur in grammatical form, vocabulary and line-order, even in
contemporaneous manuscripts. More substantial changes, such as the omission and interpolatio n
of lines, are uncommon but the point of division between Tablets IV and V altered over time.
Textual variants do not allow us to distinguish recensions that accord with provenance and date
(e.g. Neo-Assyrian V. Late Babylonian, Babylon v. Uruk). On present evidence, the text was
remarkably stable.

At present the SB poem is about two-thirds recovered; it must once have extended to about 3,600
lines of poetry. Some episodes are well preserved, others less so, but the narrative sequence is now
certain. It is unlikely that future discoveries will much alter the placing of those sections of text
that remain disconnected. Because the SB text is comparatively well established the fragments of
the second millennium can be properly situated in the story. But it is not possible to be sure of the
full extent of any second millennium version of the poem. A synopsis of the poem therefore relies
almost entirely on the SB version.