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The Imprint of Immortality

by Rachel Galvin

The Babylonian king Gilgamesh was said to be one-third human and
two-thirds god. He ruled the city of Uruk on the Euphrates River more
than four thousand years ago in what is now Iraq. According to legend,
the gods sent him a series of ordeals, starting with the wild man
Enkidu, who challenged the king and reformed his abuses of power. Once
reconciled, the two embarked on a quest to fell all the cedar trees of
southern Iran and slay Humbaba, the demon residing there.

So begin the tales of Gilgamesh. The heroic exploits of the king are
recounted in cuneiform tablets that date as early as the second
millennium B.C. and are currently held in the British Museum. Seminal
Mesopotamian texts such as these are now being reunited in an online
collection that makes them available to anyone with Internet access.
"We are assembling a virtual repository of 120,000 cuneiform tablets
from the third and fourth millennium B.C. in Babylonia," says Robert
Englund, director of the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative, or
CDLI, at the University of California, Los Angeles. "Someone from San
Jose should not have to go to the British Museum to look at these
tablets, but should be able to look at them at home."

The CDLI will be a database of digital images, transliterations, and
translations. With support from the National Endowment for the
Humanities and the National Science Foundation through the Digital
Library Initiative, Englund is collaborating with the Max Planck
Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. By visiting the CDLI,
users will be able to browse through the cuneiform collections of the
British Museum, the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, the Louvre in
Paris, the State Museum in Berlin, Yale University, and the University
of Pennsylvania--all at one central site.

Invented by the Sumerians for the purpose of bookkeeping, cuneiform
uses shapes pressed into clay to represent grain, sheep, and cattle.
Early marks depict objects, numerals, or personal names. Some tablets
measure only an inch in length, while others are the size of a large
Bible; some can weigh several tons. Most are made of unfired clay and
are highly fragile. Unlike their neighbors the Egyptians, who wrote
with ink on degradable papyrus, Sumerians used squared-off reeds to
make marks in clay tablets. Sumerians held the belief that writing
would bring renown and assure immortality, and used the same word, mu,
to signify both "name" and "fame." By creating inscriptions and
documenting their feats, Sumerian kings attempted to establish mu
dari, or an "eternal name," for themselves.

The desire for eternal life is a driving force in the Epic of
Gilgamesh. After many adventures, the king's companion Enkidu provokes
the wrath of the deities and is sent to the House of Dust. Gilgamesh,
in deep mourning, sets off alone to seek immortality. On his journey
he encounters a siren-like innkeeper, a demon, a mysterious ferryman
at the Waters of Death, and finally, Utanapishtim, the one man to
survive the Great Flood--and the keeper of the secret of eternal life.

The similarities between the flood episode in Gilgamesh and the
account from Genesis are striking. When George Smith of the British
Museum rediscovered the Epic of Gilgamesh in the nineteenth century,
its flood story became a sensation. Tablets had been arriving from
archaeological expeditions near the Tigris river since 1854, and
Smith, a bank note engraver and self-trained Assyriologist, had been
working to decipher them. The London Daily Telegraph got wind of
Smith's efforts and sponsored an archaeological expedition to find the
fragment that would complete the account of the deluge. In 1873, on
the fifth day of excavation, Smith found the fragment. He published
his findings--including a description of creation, the deluge, the
tower of Babel, and the destruction of Sodom--in Chaldean Account of
Genesis, which became a best seller.

"George Smith was able to recognize that you have the precursor to the
Biblical story," says Englund. "We know that Assyrian scribes were in
Palestine at about the time these stories should have been developed.
There are some motifs, such as the birds let go from the Ark to find
land--those are things that I don't think you can ascribe to any kind
of chance, that have to be direct borrowing. . . .There was a lot of
contact amongst those who would have best been able to do a cultural
transfer of the idea of writing and literary traditions."

As in the biblical episode in Genesis, the Sumerian flood caused great
devastation and left one devout man--with his wife and some
animals--to carry on the human race.

"According to Sumerian religion, the flood came to eliminate the noise
makers--not the sinful people, but those who were making noise so the
gods couldn't sleep," says Englund.

In Gilgamesh, the Sumerian Noah figure is named Utanapishtim, which
means "he has found everlasting life." He offers Gilgamesh the secret
to immortality on the condition that the king pass a trial. The king
fails, but Utanapishtim takes pity on him and gives him a plant of
rejuvenation that will return his lost youth. When Gilgamesh hesitates
to eat the plant, a snake makes off with it, shedding his skin as he
slinks away, and the king must return home empty-handed. The epic
concludes in a cyclical fashion, reiterating the verses with which it
begins: adulating Gilgamesh's achievements, the walls of the city, and
the words of the epic.

The quest for immortality is recast in many of the Gilgamesh tales,
says Steve Tinney, professor of Sumerian at the University of
Pennsylvania. "At the beginning of one of the tales, he looks over the
wall and sees bodies floating down the river. He's unhappy and he asks
what it is all for, what is the meaning of it all, and the meaning
turns out to be that you can escape death by defeating a monster and
setting up your name on a monument forever. So immortality comes to be
represented by writing your name forever."

The kings of Mesopotamia believed that by having certain texts
inscribed, they would leave a legacy in perpetuity. But they also used
writing to authenticate their rule while still in command. "I would
call the priests the court propaganda ministers of the kings, because
they would write up the justification of the king while he was in
power," says Englund.

The Sumerian king list, a chronology of dynasties of Mesopotamian
kings, is an example of such a document. "It is a native
historiographic text that attempts to organize a list of kings who
ruled Sumer from deepest antiquity, before the flood, to the
experience of the writers in the present day," explains Tinney. "Most
of these kings are genuine historical rulers of the cities in question
and often had control over more than their own cities."

The list was intended to substantiate the uninterrupted rule of
Sumerian and Akkadian kings. It divides the succession into two
periods, antediluvian and postdiluvian, with the great flood--around
the turn of the second millennium B.C.--marking the shift from the
mythological to the historical epoch.

The king list manipulates the accession of rulers and smoothes it into
a seamless sequence. "The view that it presents is definitely in
contradiction to what we know from other historical texts, which show
us that in much of the south and middle of Mesopotamia, cities were
competing for control," says Tinney. "In a few cases the list has one
king following another when we know they were synchronous. One very
substantial city, Lagash, was omitted--either as political propaganda,
or because by the time it was written down it was no longer an
important city. So they have their own view of the historical
sequence."

Another text called the Curse of Agade, contained in tablets dating to
2000 B.C., tells the story of the fall of the Akkadian dynasty. "The
dynasty's fall occurred in 2150, in recent memory, but the text
brazenly claims that the dynasty fell and the city was destroyed
during the earlier reign of Naräm-Sîn," says Tinney. "It's likely that
it was a backlash against Naräm-Sîn declaring himself a god. They were
not shy to rewrite history for their own ends."

The ancient Mesopotamian desire to leave a legacy meant that not only
did rulers memorialize incidents by documenting them, but deposits
containing inscriptions were also directly incorporated into the
foundations of monumental buildings. Later generations renovating
those constructions would search out the foundation deposits and
integrate them into their own inscriptions, thereby linking themselves
with their ancestors.

"We're looking back at people looking back," Englund says. "They
thought they were members of an historical community that reached back
many thousands of years. And they believed that future civilizations
should have access to what a person had to say in his time."

From the Old Babylonian period onward, or from about 2000 B.C.,
Sumerian was no longer a spoken language. The priesthood preserved it
by continuing to copy Sumerian texts onto new tablets and employ the
language in sacred rites. According to Englund, it was maintained much
in the way that Latin was kept alive in the medieval monasteries of
Europe. "Babylonians remained very interested in Sumerian, because
they knew its cultural force and the great history of the Sumerian
kings in literature," he says.

Modern decipherment of Sumerian was aided by an 1854 rediscovery of a
trove of literature in a ruined library at Nineveh, on the east bank
of the Tigris river. The Assyrian king Ashurbanipal, who reigned
during the seventh century B.C., was a patron of the arts and an avid
reader. At the king's command, copyists had compiled more than twenty
thousand literary, religious, medical, epistolary, and administrative
texts, creating the first cataloged library in the region. A
twelve-tablet version of the Epic of Gilgamesh, was found at Nineveh,
written by the first known author in history, Shin-eqiunninni. The
library also contained copies of creation stories and folk tales such
as "The Poor Man of Nippur," a forerunner of The Thousand and One
Nights. Only fourteen years after the king's death, Nineveh was sacked
and the library destroyed. It took twenty-four centuries for its
treasures to be found again.

"Thousands of the tablets in Ashurbanipal's library were
bilingual--that is, ancient scribes translated them from Akkadian into
Sumerian or vice versa," explains Tinney. The bilingual tablets helped
scholars crack the ancient language, but as of today, a complete
Sumerian dictionary has yet to be published.

The first attempt to create a comprehensive Sumerian dictionary began
in 1976, when Åke W. Sjöberg established the project at the University
of Pennsylvania with support from NEH and other foundations. Tinney,
Sjöberg's successor, says his team expects to link their databases to
the CDLI this fall and release a preliminary dictionary on CD-ROM in
2004. "The dictionary will represent a state-of-the-art combination of
lexicon and primary corpora," says Tinney. "We will provide a catalog
of words and their definitions, similar to a conventional dictionary
such as Harrap's French dictionary, but augmenting that by linking
words with the corpora, so it will be a very powerful research tool."

The dictionary is configured as a flexible database with a range of
entry points. "If somebody wants to find out what the word is for
chair in Sumerian, and they find the word guza, they can then click on
examples of guza and look at the text in which it occurs, and they can
read about the kind of people who sit on the guza, which is a special
kind of a chair--a throne," he says. "You can find administrative
texts from the CDLI corpus, which give accounts of the kinds of wood
you use to make a guza, or whether you're using leather, or whether
it's also decorated with golden bits."

"I see the dictionary as a gateway to the culture," says Tinney. "That
is the larger, enduring value of the project."

"Everyone in the field looks toward Philadelphia and what the project
there is going to offer us in the near future," Englund says of the
Sumerian dictionary. "The philological tools we have developed, but
also the digital tools we're developing, help us to better understand
these ancient texts--and how ideas and concepts moved from one culture
to the next."

The Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative has received $650,000 in NEH
and NSF funding through the Digital Libraries Initiative. The Sumerian
dictionary project has received $2,544,429 in NEH support and $711,000
in matching funds since 1976. For more information on the CDLI, visit
[1]http://cdli.ucla.edu.
_________________________________________________________________

Humanities, September/October 2002

References

1. http://cdli.ucla.edu/