The Epic of Gilgamesh has directly inspired many manifestations of literature, art, music, and popular culture throughout history. It was extremely influential during the Bronze Age and Iron Age in the Middle East, but gradually fell into obscurity during classical antiquity. The story was rediscovered in the 19th century, and began to regain popular recognition and influence in the 20th century.
According to historian Wolfgang Röllig, the Epic of Gilgamesh addressed many basic concerns and important themes of human culture such as creation, death, friendship, enmity, pride, arrogance, humility, and failure. These subjects have remained of importance to humans throughout time, explaining the story's impact and popularity.[2] The Epic of Gilgamesh gradually emerged from the 3rd millennium BC as a collection of tales concering the figure of Gilgamesh. These stories were eventually compiled into a single text by Sîn-lēqi-unninni, though different variants of the compilation continued to circulate. The best-known version of the compiled epic stems from the Neo-Assyrian Empire; this text is also the most important basis for the modern versions of the text.[3] The epic was mainly spread by oral tradition which makes it difficult to gauge Gilgamesh's exact influence on popular culture in ancient times; however, written fragments of his tales were discovered across the Middle East, suggesting that different versions of the epic were widely circulated.[4] It is also likely that tales about Gilgamesh influenced various other stories, including the Bible, Illiad, and Odyssey.[5]
Even though the Epic of Gilgamesh was rather popular, it remained tied to Cuneiform and was seemingly never translated into languages using other writing systems such as Ancient Greek or Old Aramaic. Accordingly, the decline of Cuneiform coincided with the disappearance of Gilgamesh from public consciousness.[6] The story was eventually rediscovered by archaeologists in the 19th century, and many of its elements and sub-stories gradually became popular subjects in arts and popular culture.[7]
It was only during and after the First World War that the first reliable translations to modern languages of the epic appeared.[8] For instance, the first German translation by Albert Schott was published in 1934.[9] These translations were the first that reached a wide audience, and it was only after the Second World War that the epic of Gilgamesh began to make itself felt more broadly in a variety of genres.[8] As identified by Theodore Ziolkowski in the book Gilgamesh Among Us: Modern Encounters With the Ancient Epic (2011), the epic became increasingly influential from this point onward.[8][10] In the years following World War II, Gilgamesh, formerly an obscure figure known only by a few scholars, gradually became increasingly popular with modern audiences.[11][12] The Epic of Gilgamesh's existential themes made it particularly appealing to German authors in the years following the war.[12] In his 1947 existentialist novel Die Stadt hinter dem Strom, the German novelist Hermann Kasack adapted elements of the epic into a metaphor for the aftermath of the destruction of World War II in Germany,[12] portraying the bombed-out city of Hamburg as resembling the frightening Underworld seen by Enkidu in his dream.[12] In Hans Henny Jahnn's magnum opus River Without Shores (1949–1950), the middle section of the trilogy centers around a composer whose twenty-year-long homoerotic relationship with a friend mirrors that of Gilgamesh with Enkidu[12] and whose masterpiece turns out to be a symphony about Gilgamesh.[12]
The Quest of Gilgamesh, a 1953 radio play by Douglas Geoffrey Bridson, helped popularize the epic in Britain.[12] In the United States, Charles Olson praised the epic in his poems and essays[12] and Gregory Corso believed that it contained ancient virtues capable of curing what he viewed as modern moral degeneracy.[12] The 1966 postfigurative novel Gilgamesch by Guido Bachmann became a classic of German "queer literature"[12] and set a decades-long international literary trend of portraying Gilgamesh and Enkidu as homosexual lovers.[12] This trend proved so popular that the Epic of Gilgamesh itself is included in The Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature (1998) as a major early work of that genre.[12] In the 1970s and 1980s, feminist literary critics analyzed the Epic of Gilgamesh as showing evidence for a transition from the original matriarchy of all humanity to modern patriarchy.[12] As the Green Movement expanded in Europe, Gilgamesh's story began to be seen through an environmentalist lens,[12] with Enkidu's death symbolizing man's separation from nature.[12]
Theodore Ziolkowski, a scholar of modern literature, states, that "unlike most other figures from myth, literature, and history, Gilgamesh has established himself as an autonomous entity or simply a name, often independent of the epic context in which he originally became known. (As analogous examples one might think, for instance, of the Minotaur or Frankenstein's monster.)"[13] The Epic of Gilgamesh has been translated into many major world languages[14] and has become a staple of American world literature classes.[15] Many contemporary authors and novelists have drawn inspiration from it, including an American avant-garde theater collective called "The Gilgamesh Group"[16] and Joan London in her novel Gilgamesh (2001).[16][12] The Great American Novel (1973) by Philip Roth features a character named "Gil Gamesh",[16] who is the star pitcher of a fictional 1930s baseball team called the "Patriot League".[16] Believing that he can never lose, Gil Gamesh throws a violent temper tantrum when an umpire goes against him[16] and he is subsequently banished from baseball.[16] He flees to the Soviet Union, where he is trained as a spy against the United States.[16] Gil Gamesh reappears late in the novel as one of Joseph Stalin's spies[16] and gives what American literary historian David Damrosch calls "an eerily casual description of his interrogation training in Soviet Russia."[16] In 2000, a modern statue of Gilgamesh by the Assyrian sculptor Lewis Batros was unveiled at the University of Sydney in Australia.[1]
Starting in the late twentieth century, the Epic of Gilgamesh began to be read again in Iraq.[14] Saddam Hussein, the former President of Iraq, had a lifelong fascination with Gilgamesh.[17] Hussein's first novel Zabibah and the King (2000) is an allegory for the Gulf War set in ancient Assyria that blends elements of the Epic of Gilgamesh and the One Thousand and One Nights.[18] Like Gilgamesh, the king at the beginning of the novel is a brutal tyrant who misuses his power and oppresses his people,[19] but, through the aid of a commoner woman named Zabibah, he grows into a more just ruler.[20] When the United States pressured Hussein to step down in February 2003, Hussein gave a speech to a group of his generals posing the idea in a positive light by comparing himself to the epic hero.[14]
