The Epic of Gilgamesh Review

What’s “epic” about a story that’s only 58 pages long?!

Ok, before I sound like a complete idiot, let me qualify what I’m about to say by first saying:

It’s amazing that we found this at all. The Epic of Gilgamesh is the oldest known story in human history. It’s at least 4 THOUSAND years old and was carved onto clay tablets (maybe if there was an easier way of writing it, it’d be longer?) and dreamed up originally by who knows who - we’ll never know. Most surviving texts from antiquity are, disappointingly, administrative documents that are unreadable, even deciphered, with almost no actual literature to be had. So I fully appreciate the impressiveness of this text’s very existence, from an historical and cultural standpoint.

And, if you look up pictures of the tablets themselves, it’s all the more impressive that anyone was able to translate them into coherent modern language. Even Linear B, a script that was harder to translate than the ancient Sumerian (modern day south Iraq) that Gilgamesh was written in, at least looks like a language. Ancient Sumerian? It looks like funky wallpaper!!

And I appreciate the content for its historical insight into our ancestors who seemed to have the same preoccupations we do today: love, friendship, mortality, and strongman stories (Gilgamesh was the original Superman). And its influence on later religions (the flood myth started here, not in the Old Testament with Noah - unless extreme weather has always been a feature of the planet while humans have been living on it. Hmm…)

Appreciate is the watchword though. I don’t believe anyone who says they loved reading this. I’m not a poetry reader to begin with but even with NK Sandars’ translation and presentation in prose this is not the least bit fun to read. It’s the equivalent of a young child running up to you to breathlessly relay an inane story they’ve dreamt up. “And then me and Enkidu went through a magic forest and we saw a giant bull and he was so hungry he ate everything and caused a flood and then we went home and we had pizza and then I saw a bug and then and then and then…”

Uh huh, you say, and wipe its running nose before shooing them off because they’re boring the toes off you.

(I feel like this should be called The Epic of Enkidu too as it seemed like there was more on this dude than old Gilgy)

I understand that the text is to be appreciated for its historical and cultural significance rather than enjoyed as a work of entertainment but that’s still the rather shallow standard by which I measure what I read. And, yes, I do realise how silly it is to be critiquing the narrative quality of something this ancient, that existed millenia before anything like the concept of literature was even an idea in some blind bard from Ionia’s mind.

But there we go. I was bored by it - I’m not gonna pretend otherwise to seem more deep or thoughtful. I don’t see how anyone could be anything else with a story this clunky and underdeveloped and surface-level. I forgot it as I was reading it - the words and story are that unimpressive and I got no sense of character of who anyone was. Gilgamesh was just a name.

Lots of fake-sounding, performative speeches, lots of bland melodrama - it might’ve done for people who hadn’t read Game of Thrones but not for me! And I tried to read Sandars’ thorough introduction afterwards (which was almost as long as the “Epic” itself!) but found it too dry and scholarly.

So I’m just a philistine basically, and off I trundle back to my pulp fiction which is more my speed!