I was actually quite surprised by how familiar the text was and how easy to read and identify with the story which while having the supernatural element remains concerned with primarily human concerns around mortality and how life is lived. I had no proper idea of the epic before reading it and did not know what to expect. Not being an expert in the subject, and not wanting to have to become one, I wanted a modern annotated version of the tale with notes. The Epic of Gilgamesh seemed like a good place to start.
I had come across a few references to the Epic of Gilgamesh - the "oldest written chronicle in the world" - in other things I had read and had also come across the Sumarian civilisation in a number of contexts. Having never really read any of the ancient works of early humans I decided it was time to start to right the omission. It is the essence of their wisdom, for they are speaking from a mind that is entranced with what psychologists call the unconscious, those thoughts and experiences that are instinctive or elemental or profoundly personal. In its dream-like quality, a deliquescence of thought, wherein reality and state of mind liquidly exchange and what is real is symbolic, and what is symbolic becomes what is this state of magic is natural to these tales. It is the “other world” where what is human is strange, what is human lacks normal power or significance. Gilgamesh belongs to the tradition of all mythical heroes whose adventures take place in a reality that transcends us or that in another sense is always present. Like epic poems, the central figure is admired for his prowess and power he is a heroic warrior, whose greatest adventure is here recounted. References to Gilgamesh in daily speech were commonplace.The Epic of Gilgamesh is called an “epic” in the tradition of the Greek Iliad or the medieval Beowulf. For untold centuries, even into the last millennium before Christ, the children of what is now Iraq learned to read and write by copying Gilgamesh, just as once Greek children learned to read and write by copying the Iliad and just as before the 20th century in Europe and America children learned to read and write from the text of the Bible. The text is revered, and the hero is an icon of Mesopotamia, equal in tradition to the Jewish hero David as told in the Bible or the Greek hero Achilles as told in the Iliad, both of which it precedes as literature and in some aspects it anticipates. It tells events in the life of a king in an ancient city of Mesopotamia.
The Epic of Gilgamesh is the oldest written chronicle in the world, composed three to four thousand years before Christ.
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