HEAR THE EPIC OF GILGAMESH IN AKKADIAN
It’s the oldest quest of meaning in a universe born of chaos, dark skies and dark waters, and ruled by capricious gods.
It predates all myth. It births all myth as it bore the very stories that are the foundation of Judaism and Christianity.
In fact, without Sumer, without Gilgamesh, there is no bible. There is no Noah. Or paradise. No Adam and no Eve. Perhaps there still would be later suffering and moral teachings, but that poetry, that magnificent symbolism and depth – that is all Sumerian literature.
The very first word of the Bible, in Genesis: ‘and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters’, that is all Enlil – air acting on chaos to make order. In Sumerian mythology, the beginning is a soup of primordial waters – that’s Nammu. Enlil is the air/wind who cleaves Nammu’s heaven and earth apart so the world can exist between them. Enlil is who sends a flood to wipe out a failed humanity, after which only one man, his family and animals survive. Gilgamesh’s quest for eternal life take him to that man – Utnapishtim – only to find out that death is the inescapable fate, a boundary beyond god.
To hear the epic in Akkadian is to taste the dust of Uruk, to see what cannot be seen.
‘It was he who crossed the ocean, the vast seas, to the rising sun, who explored the world regions, seeking life.’
There are many names for Gilgamesh, but the one we love the most is ‘HE WHO SAW THE DEEP’ or ša nagbu amāru. In Akkadian, the word nagbu means – 1. The Deep, The Abyss and also 2. All Things, Totality. For Gilgamesh that means meeting Utnapishtim and finding the ‘unknown’, finding the realm of Ea, which contains the cosmic and the eternal.
Download a text version of the epic here.
In case you missed the sound link:
