Gilgamesh to odysseus around eastern explications

Greek Mythology, Aphrodite, Gilgamesh, Noahs Ark

Excerpt from Essay:

Greek Mythology

When the clay-based tablets that comprise the Akkadian as well as Old Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh had been first pieced together and translated by scholars in the nineteenth century, some aspects of the historical text seemed remarkably familiar. There was, for example , the accounts of a wonderful flood, with only a pair of survivors, Utnapishtim and his partner: “How is it that one guy has saved himself? / No breathing of lifestyle was meant to be kept safe / from its obliteration in the overflow. “[footnoteRef: 0] The initially translators of Gilgamesh were familiar with at least two versions of this story. The first, which will arguably everyone knows (and which in 2014 is about to receive a big-budget Hollywood treatment) is definitely the Old Testament story of Noah’s Ark – and the narrative parallels between Utnapishtim and Noah are several. But the different ancient myth is a Ancient greek language one, the story of Deucalion and Pyrrha, who happen to be similarly aware by a the almighty (in their particular case Zeus) to avoid a flood. Prior to the discovery of Gilgamesh, american scholars had been free to think about whether the Traditional and Hebrew myths weary any relation – generally speaking this type of approach was usually pursued by Christian scholars, who believed that the Bible was authentic, and thus presumed Noah’s ton recorded a historical function, which was dimly reflected in the Greek myth of Deucalion. But the recovery and rediscovery of historical Near East texts altered this approach. If Greek fable was previously considered a light pagan reflection of Biblical truth, now additional documentary evidence that was contemporaneous with or predated the Old Testament could be adduced, elevating the question of whether or not Greek fable might have been affected by (non-Hebrew) Near Asian source material. A study of the obtainable evidence illustrates that this is most likely the case, even though the interesting query is just how precisely this influence was transmitted. [0: David Ferry (trans. ) Gilgamesh. (New You are able to: Farrar Straus, 1992. ) p74. ]

A survey of mythic parallels between Ancient greek language and Around Eastern resources could fill up an entire publication: some are evident, some are simply suggestive. It truly is worth remembering, however , that a lot of studies have got focused on the first extant Traditional poetry – the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer, along with the alleged “Homeric Hymns, ” and the mythographical sentirse writings (including the Theogony, a genealogy of the Ancient greek gods) of Hesiod. Book Eleven of Homer’s Journey, for example , provides the much-imitated bank account of the ancestry of Odysseus into the Underworld, following the guidance of Circe:

Then came up also the ghost of Theban Teiresias, with his fantastic sceptre in the hand. This individual knew myself and explained, “Ulysses, rspectable son of Laertes, for what reason, poor person, have you kept the light of day and come down to go to the dead in this miserable place? Stand back from your trench and withdraw your sword which i may drink of the bloodstream and respond to your questions truly. inch[footnoteRef: 1] [1: Homer, The Odyssey, Book eleven. (Trans. Samuel Butler. ) Massaschussetts Institute of Technology, Internet Classics Archive. http://classics.mit.edu/Homer/odyssey.11.xi.html]

However one element of the Gilgamesh narrative – one that sits somewhat strangely in circumstance, because it is ambiguous as to just how it relates to the chronology of Gilgamesh’s encounter with Enkidu and Enkidu’s ultimate death – also entails a trip to the Underworld: “He seized an equip and led me for the dwelling of Irkalla, your house of Night, the House of No Go back. “[footnoteRef: 2] In Gilgamesh it is presented as Enkidu’s dream-vision, nevertheless this is not remote from the magical ritual offered in Homer’s Odyssey: in point of fact, the likeness of equally narratives towards the standard consideration of shamanistic experience (that has been referred to by Mircea Eliade among others) shows that in equally cases whatever we may be dealing with is a pretty normal written sort of a ancient religious encounter. It is not required that the writer of the Journey would have see the clay tablets of Gilgamesh, or whatever as immediate as that. Indeed, after the study with the Homeric poems was totally changed by the operate of Milman Parry in the last twentieth hundred years – whom recognized that the Homeric utilization of epithets and tag-phrases to pad out your dactylic hexameter was a indication of dental composition, and can be recognized as a compositional technique of oral poems from other nationalities still being performed in the twentieth century (like the Serbian guslars) – it is an open issue as to whether “Homer” was indeed even Homer, or was literate. As a result, the indication of motifs from the old Near East to Ancient greek mythographic resources was almost certainly folkloric. Robert Mondi summarizes the state of scholarly investigation in 1990 therefore [2: Ferry, s. 42. ]

simply no convincing case has yet been made that any job of early on Greek literature is in whole or component a translation, or even an adaptation of your particular Around Eastern textual content. There are, it really is true, infrequent literary parallels between Greek and Asian texts close enough to be suggestive. Achilles and Gilgamesh, for instance, when mourning over their slain companions are in that second both in comparison to a lion grieving above lost cubs; were this kind of mere coincidence it would be an amazing one at the minimum. But such a close and specific parallelism is certainly not common and seldom stretches over a substantial narrative pattern. In light of the oral tranny of early on Greek beautifully constructed wording, we can imagine any influence of Oriental literature on Greek literary activity during this period took the proper execution of a progressive and constant absorption of Eastern fictional themes and motifs into the poets’ repertoire of compositional elements, in which, adapted after some time to their new environment, they will became ultimately an inbedded and partidario part of the graceful tradition.[footnoteRef: 3] [3: Robert Mondi, “Greek Mythological Thought in the Light with the Near East. ” In Lowell Edmunds (ed. ) Approaches to Ancient greek Myth. (Baltimore: JHU Press, 1990. ) p. 150. ]

The ensuing quarter century hasn’t disrupted this kind of scholarly opinion nor revealed any sort of textual smoking-gun, in which a several-thousand-year-old papyrus is discovered with the identity “Gilgamesh” scraped out and “Achilles” drafted over it. Instead the proof of influence needs to be accomplished not directly, as there is no immediate textual borrowings. Scholars need to instead posit the modes of transmission in an common culture (something that is simple to understand when we consider the circulation of folklore possibly in 2014) while taking into consideration the possibility intended for cross-cultural funding. The difficulty is that there can be not any solid and indisputable proof, just (as Mondi indicates) “suggestive” data. But it for that reason becomes a couple of some the law as to which usually ancient Near Eastern parallels are generally accepted, and which are generally declined as educational overreach. One particular fascinating case, which times from the electronic infancy of such mythography and analysis, actually pre-dates Milman Parry and originates from the 1920s – this really is Victor Berard’s study in the Odyssey, through which he offers that the poem incorporates Close to Eastern (specifically Phoenician) familiarity with ocean-going routes, and provides a fairly accurate map of the Mediterranean. Very few (with the different of James Joyce) have accepted Berard’s thesis, but of course it hinges on the mouth transmission of actual knowledge rather than folklore.

We are on more stable ground when it comes to the indication of specifically mythographical content. Although the Homeric poems carry out qualify to a certain degree since mythography – they involve the doings of heroes and gods – they are not designed as faith based, rather than story, texts. This really is one reduction from that which we get in Gilgamesh, where William W. Hallo (an senior Yale professor generally considered the dean of yankee Assyriologists) has claimed that “the impressive is also significant for its proverbial inserts” (Hallo 617). Quite simply, Gilgamesh includes more than the Homeric poems, using their emphasis on brave narrative, and steps in the familiar Biblical genre of “wisdom books, ” through which generalizations can be found to the reader or listener as a means of guiding presentation or underscoring the meaningful of the story. We can change, however , to more certainly religiously-minded Greek texts to get a fuller panoply of parallels with old Near Eastern material – the crucial estimate this smart is Hesiod, roughly contemporaneous with the Homeric poems, as well as the author in the Theogony, a mythographical poem which attempts to give a history and genealogical of the gods. Here Charles Penglase has usefully detailed the ways in which the account presented of the Ancient greek goddess Aphrodite – in Hesiod nevertheless also inside the Homeric Church hymns to Aphrodite – locates a remarkable pair of parallels in similar Near Eastern literary works regarding various goddesses, mainly Ishtar and Astarte. Penglase lays out your case for effect as follows:

1 . The most important characteristic of Aphrodite as the goddess of love, especially of sexual desire and its physical appearance, is exactly parallel with the personality of Ishtar/Astarte as goddess of love.

2 . More specifically, like Ishtar and Astarte, Aphrodite can be androgynous.

a few. Aphrodite is known as Ourania, as Astarte may be the Queen of Heaven, so that as Ishtar is

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