The Super Fresh Gilgamesh (and other Sumerian musings)

Oral knowledge plays an important role in every culture. What made dealing with the Mesopotamians especially interesting for me is that, according to this researcher, it is believed that the early Mesopotamians literally invented oral knowledge and the concept of writing (which we’ll deal with in a future unit). “The words of proto-Sumerian are fundamentally different from those of proto-Indo-European. However, because the proto-Sumerians appear to be unique in having started with vowel-only words, they have a good claim not just to having invented a complete spoken symbol system, but to having originated the concept of such a system. Non-speaking populations could have invented their own systems once they had been exposed to the concept of speech (this is not to deny that multiple populations could have invented the concept of speech independently, cf., the use of clicks in Africa). A good parallel example is how the Sumerian invention of the concept of writing appears to have inspired the creation of very different forms of writing in Pre-Dynastic Egypt and the Indus civilization of Pakistan and India.” The newfound ability to verbally communicate a common language facilitated the expansion of shared knowledge.

Ancient Sumer was first settled in about 4500 to 4000 B.C. Widely considered to be the first real civilization, it’s what I learned about first in my World History course during high school (and thus saith Mr. Holmes).

Once they had developed the concept of speech, some of the very first orally transmitted subjects were creation and flood myths/legends. These stories were spread throughout the region, and many other similar stories proliferated. The Epic of Gilgamesh is a text comprised of seven cuneiform tablets, the writing system of the Sumerians. Each tablet deals with these various parts of the legend:

• The stage is set for the story. The various gods represent aspects of the physical world. Apsu is the god of fresh water and thus male fertility. Tiamat, wife of Apsu, is the goddess of the sea and thus chaos and threat. Tiamat gives birth to Anshar and Kishar, gods who represented the boundary between the earth and sky (the horizon). To Anshar and Kishar is born Anu, god of sky, who in turn bears Ea. These "sons of the gods" make so much commotion and are so ill-behaved that Apsu decides to destroy them. When Ea learns of the plan, he kills Apsu and with his wife Damkina establishes their dwelling above his body. Damkina then gives birth to Marduk, the god of spring symbolized both by the light of the sun and the lightning in storm and rain. He was also the patron god of the city of Babylon. Meanwhile Tiamat is enraged at the murder of her husband Apsu, and vows revenge. She creates eleven monsters to help her carry out her vengeance. Tiamat takes a new husband, Kingu, in place of the slain Apsu and puts him in charge of her newly assembled army.
• Tiamat represents the forces of disorder and chaos in the world. In the cycle of seasons, Tiamat is winter and barrenness. In the second tablet, to avenge the murder of her husband Tiamat prepares to unleash on the other gods the destructive forces that she has assembled. Ea learns of her plan and attempts to confront Tiamat. While the tablet is damaged, it is apparent that Ea fails to stop Tiamat. Then Anu attempts to challenge her but fails as well. The gods become afraid that no one will be able to stop Taimat’s vengeful rampage.
• Anshar’s minister Gaga is dispatched to the other gods to report the activities of Tiamat and to tell them of Marduk’s willingness to face her. Much of this tablet is poetic repetition of previous conversations.

And etc…the full text of the Epic can be found here.

           As I read the first two tablets, the mental image that formed immediately in my mind came from the book Eragon. In the book there is a local storyteller that the town gathers to listen to. If my memory serves me correctly, there was also a festival with a heavy focus on story telling. So, in my mind, I imagine storytellers from the various Sumer city-states traveling around, each telling a version or a segment of this tale.

Part of the Epic of Gilgamesh on a Cuneiform tablet

          However, the only reason this oral knowledge has survived, is due to the written system of cuneiform. Somebody decided the tale was worth preserving, so they unified the stories into the Epic of Gligamesh. 

         “Akkadian gradually replaced Sumerian as a spoken language somewhere around the turn of the 3rd and the 2nd millennium BC (the exact dating being a matter of debate),[4] but Sumerian continued to be used as a sacred, ceremonial, literary and scientific language in Mesopotamia until the 1st century AD. Then, it was forgotten until the 19th century, when Assyriologists began deciphering the cuneiform inscriptions and excavated tablets left by these speakers” (from this article)

          This language and the stories from the Epic of Gilgamesh, would have been lost forever if it weren’t for writing. It thus becomes hard to see oral knowledge ever surviving very long on its own. If there were no written record of the Sumerian language, and yet one family had "preserved" the language by speaking it to their children, I do not believe the language would have been truly preserved. Languages evolve and can only be fully appreciated in the context of a larger society.

         What we know about the Sumerian language we only know from deciphering texts such as the Epic of Gilgamesh. We have not found “Sumerian for Dummies” on any cuneiform tablets. Because of this, I believe that our knowledge on the subject is already from secondary sources. This is why the study of languages is so painstaking, especially for ancient languages; there’s nobody speaking the language to learn from.

         However, certain things were preserved without the aid of writing.

• The concept of speech itself (see the first quote)
• The legends of creation and the flood. (These stories, or ones similar, survived to reappear in many other locations. We see the evidence of these legends in script, but I believe the main ideas of the stories themselves would have been preserved without written record.)

And so in these ways oral knowledge was successful. However, the preservation of the Sumerian language was due mostly to the topic of the upcoming unit, written knowledge.