Questions on Gilgamesh

At our meeting on Monday, January 23rd, we will discuss the questions on pp. 58 and 59 in Great Conversations I, and take a close look at these sections of the work:

The Killing of Humbaba: Tablet IV (columns iii and iv)
The Spurning of Ishtar: Tablet VI (columns ii and iii)
The Death of Enkidu: Tablet VII (columns i, iii and iv)

And here's a bonus question:

Since the "Epic of Gilgamesh" is a title given by modern redactors of this work, if you could assign an alternate title, what would it be?

See you on the 23rd!

Epic of Gilgamesh

We usher in 2012 with the Epic of Gilgamesh, famous in the popular imagination as the oldest written epic of any civilization (at least as far as we know). The modern-day text comes to us via clay tablets painstakingly translated by British archaeologists in the nineteenth century.  Versions of the saga have since been discovered in various places in the Middle East. In approaching this text, I found a need to suspend my strong curiosity concerning the context of the Gilgamesh epic, and just enjoyed the story of Gilgamesh the king and demi-god who visited the "other" world and returned to tell the tale.

Cunieform table containing famous Gilgamesh epic version of the flood.

Statue of Gilgamesh at University of Sydney, Australia (credit: D. Gordon E. Robertson)

9th century BC orthostat relief found in Kapara's palace, Tell Halaf, depicting "Gilgamesh Between Two Bull-Men Supporting a Winged Sun Disk".