Talk:Epic of Gilgamesh

Reconcile references

Hi guys. I just want someone to verify all of my recent cleanups starting here, out of being cautious. Specifically, there are apparently some redundant instances of what might be the same reference.

In an inline citation: <ref name="Epic, AG trans">{{cite book | title= The Epic of Gilgamesh: the Babylonian Epic Poem and Other Texts in Akkadian and Sumerian |first=Andrew R. |last= George |date=2003 |origyear=1999, 2000 |edition= Third |location= London |publisher= Penguin Books |series= Penguin Classics |oclc=901129328 |isbn=0-14-044919-1 |url= https://books.google.com/books?id=eCZRK_61adMC&printsec=frontcover |accessdate= October 8, 2017}}</ref> worldcat

In the bibliography section: {{cite book |last=George | first=Andrew R. | editor-first1=Andrew R. | editor-last1=George | others=translated by Andrew R. George |date=2000 |title=The Epic of Gilgamesh; The Babylonian Epic Poem and Other Texts in Akkadian and Sumerian. |publisher=Penguin |location=England |isbn=0-14-044721-0}} worldcat

Are those two the same book? They have different ISBNs but the same title and author. I think it obviously is a reprint, but please verify as per the given Worldcat links. I think I also consolidated a third instance.

Please check that "Mesopotamia: The Good Life" is the name of a chapter, because I don't know what it is.

Is the book called "The Bible in the British Museum" actually this one listed here and here? I don't see one from 1988, as the original citation in this article states.

In The great wild bull is lying down, is the character's name supposed to be spelled "Bilgames"? I googled it, and I see different versions that say "Bilgamesh" with an "h" so I wondered if that's just an issue of consistancy. I don't know, because I'm not a scholar but a general editor.

We have variously formatted mentions of Standard Akkadian version, "standard version", "The standard Akkadian version". That's not actually a title, right? It's just a typical prose-based reference to a title. So it shouldn't be italicized?

Should this article utilize an infobox like template:infobox poem? — Smuckola(talk) 01:33, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

In reference to your first question, I am fairly certain that those are the same reference. Your guess that one of them is a reprint of the other seems to be accurate by my judgement. I did not put either of those references there and I do not have a copy of the book, but the Wikipedia article for Andrew R. George says that he "is best known for his edition and translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh," which implies that he only made one translation. Since I do not have the book, obviously, I cannot say whether the chapter title given is accurate or not. You may be able to find out on Google Books.

As for your second question, once again, your initial hunch sounds correct. The title is unique enough that I highly doubt there is more than one book with it. I suspect that the citation in the article simply has the wrong date.

For your third question, there are actually various ways of transcribing the Sumerian name; the most common variants seem to be "Bilgamesh" and "Bilgameš." I would recommend selecting one of these two spellings and implementing it uniformly throughout the entire article every time the Sumerian version of the name is referenced.

You are also correct that "Standard Akkadian version" is not a title and it should not be italicized.

You can implement Template:Infobox poem if you like. I do not have a problem with infoboxes and I think they are usually helpful, but you should probably be warned that there are a lot of seriously militant iconoclasts out there who despise infoboxes with every fiber of their being; when I first started editing here at Wikipedia I went around implementing infoboxes wherever I felt they were useful, and I may have fallen slightly afoul with a few of them. I have generally tried to avoid adding infoboxes ever since because even talking about infoboxes seems to be a surefire way to get a lot of people angry.

By the way, I really appreciate all the work you are doing here with this article. I have not had time to do very much with it because I have been largely preoccupied elsewhere and I am glad to see that someone is tending to it and tidying it up a bit. --Katolophyromai (talk) 01:58, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

@Katolophyromai: Yeah buddy and that's the only reason I do it, because you're so nice and cooperative. As long as you carefully double-check everything I do. :) — Smuckola(talk) 03:26, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

Apparently, there are various misconsceptions in this section. First, the translation by Andrew R. George published by Penguin in 1999 is not the same as in the edition of the Gilgamesh texts published by Oxford University Press. The translations published by Penguin is aimed at a general readership. The two-volume edition by Oxford University Press contains the Sumerian and Akkadian texts; the translation included in that edition is aimed at Assyriologists. Second, the article misinterprets the phrase "Standard Babylonian version" (or "Standard Akkadian version"): "standard" does not refer to "version" but is part of the name "Standard Babylonian" (as in Standard Chinese); the entire article needs to be edited to correct this error. — ChristopheS (talk) 12:46, 5 April 2020 (UTC)

@ChristopheS and Katolophyromai: That is also the kind of answer I wanted, and I bow to your superior research and comprehension. WP:RS says that we must cite where we read it, but I haven't read it and I wouldn't understand it as a mere advanced wikignome. Do you have access to the source text, so that you can nail the citations uniformly? Even if you don't feel like doing the wikignoming in wikicode, I'd be glad to do that for you if you make an exact list of numbered citations to unify into one exact source publication or the other. We must look at the physical book and at worldcat.org, to ensure that the citation metadata is exactly correct, especially with ISBN and edition and whatever. We need to ensure that the whole article could be rebuilt by a new reader. Thank you. — Smuckola(talk) 08:14, 6 April 2020 (UTC)

@Smuckola: I have access to both the Penguin translation (2003 reprint, ISBN 978-0-140-44919-8) and the Oxford University Press edition (2003, ISBN 0-19-814922-0 for the two-volume set) and I have noted that the references to **George 2003** that use Roman numerals don't always match what I found in the Penguin text. Strictly speaking **George 2003** is ambiguous, since it can refer to both the 2003 reprint of the Penguin text (originally published in 1999) and the two-volume text edition published by Oxford University Press. Since I don't have access to searchable versions of these text, it will take a bit of time to fix those references (hopefully next weekend). For example, "George 2003, p. ii" (Reference 11) is a page in the front matter without useful content. — ChristopheS (talk) 18:13, 6 April 2020 (UTC)

Incomplete sentence in the introductory section?

"However, because of his great building projects, his account of Siduri's advice, and what the immortal man Utnapishtim told him about the Great Flood." What is this supposed to mean? Jrobinjapan (talk) 01:38, 3 October 2018 (UTC)

@Jrobinjapan: I think the period at the end of that sentence was supposed to be a comma and the next sentence was supposed to be another clause in that same sentence. I have now corrected this error. --Katolophyromai (talk) 01:43, 3 October 2018 (UTC)

No Reference for First Sentence

"The Epic of Gilgamesh is an epic poem from ancient Mesopotamia, regarded as the earliest surviving notable literature and the second oldest religious text, after the Pyramid Texts."

There is no reference where it says this is earliest surviving noble literature, and second oldest. How are these empirical numbers found? These should be changed as not stating anything as "earliest", "second oldest" etc. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Datta (talk • contribs) 11:48, 19 June 2021 (UTC)

The Epic of Gilgamesh (is an epic poem from ancient Mesopotamia, regarded as the earliest surviving notable literature and the second oldest religious text, after the Pyramid Texts

There is no reference for these kind of statements that state "earliest", "second oldest religious text". These should be completely removed. --Datta (talk) 11:55, 19 June 2021 (UTC)

Bilgamesh?

In the more recent editions of Andrew George's translation, the Sumerian stories use the name Gilgamesh just like the Standard Babylonian version. Does that mean Andrew George's claim in the older editions that the Sumerian stories used "Bilgames" was incorrect? -- NetSpiker (talk) 14:21, 15 August 2022 (UTC)

No, Bilgames is the Sumerian form; see the sources cited at Gilgamesh. Furius (talk) 15:34, 15 August 2022 (UTC)

Then why was Bilgames changed to Gilgamesh in the more recent editions of the Sumerian translations? If Andrew George wanted to switch to using the more familiar Babylonian name throughout the book, then why were other Sumerian names like Huwawa, Inanna and An left unchanged? --NetSpiker (talk) 04:07, 16 August 2022 (UTC)

You would have to ask Andrew George those questions, assuming he doesn't explain why in the newest editions or elsewhere. Ultimately, there's nothing we can do until reliable sources publish about it. Inferring anything from George changing (only) "Bilgamesh" to "Gilgamesh" would be original research. Woodroar (talk) 21:18, 16 August 2022 (UTC)

who is his husband?

• cought*

31.47.11.97 (talk) 18:55, 10 December 2023 (UTC)

Translations

Revise list of translations

The section on translations at the bottom of the article still lists N. K. Sandars' translation, which was last revised in the 1970s. The issue with this is that Gilgamesh translations become outdated for two reasons: (1) the knowledge of Babylonian language in general improves as new clay tablets and fragments are discovered and deciphered, and (2) new fragments of the Gilgamesh epic are discovered (like the "monkey tablet" a few years ago) and older translations don't contain this new content. For this reason, I suggest we remove Sandars' translation and replace it with newer ones, i.e. the translations by Andrew George (Penguin, 1999) and Benjamin R. Foster (Norton, 2nd edition, 2019). I would also list translations of the Old Babylonian version and the Standard Babylonian version separately. ChristopheS (talk) 21:49, 5 April 2020 (UTC)

Revise/undo the revision

The fact that translations are outdated has no bearing on their existence. Currently, the article is pretending that Gilgamesh first began influencing modern culture with an Arabic translation in the '60s, which is patent nonsense. Add the "outdated" "wrong" translations back, definitely including the first into a modern European language and the first into English and any other major ones. Regardless of how "wrong" they were, they are part of the history of this work and its influence on modernity, which the article itself currently states was already occurring by the WWI era.

As a single example, "flower of immortality" is a clearly mistaken invention of translators that doesn't appear in the original texts. It's still extremely common in discussion of the work and there's no way from the current article to go find the touchstone (mis)translations that produced it. If the list gets long enough it's UNDUE and needs its own separate subarticle... that would be great. Blanking content was a huge mistake and disservice. — LlywelynII 17:49, 12 September 2024 (UTC)

Flower of Immortality

Speaking of which, given its importance to the story, scholarship on the story, and its cultural relevance more generally, we should be including the actual name of (G|B)ilgamesh's miracle cure in translation, cuneiform, and transcription and have a sourced {{efn}} note on at least the two most common mistakes about it, pointing out that "flower" appears nowhere in the text and that naming it "Old Man Who Becomes Young" was a misparsing of (G|B)ilgamesh's plan to see if his guinea pig old man became young or not, after which he was planning to take it himself. — LlywelynII 17:57, 12 September 2024 (UTC)

Alexandrines & snakes

The article currently sources

The first is that Gilgamesh seeks the plant of youth whereas Alexander seeks the water of life. The second is that the motif of the snake shedding its skin in the Gilgamesh legend is replaced in the Alexander legend by a fish returning to life upon being washed in the fountain. The reasons for these differences was due to the Christianizing force involved in the adaptation of the Gilgamesh legends.

to a JSTOR article, which is fair enough. Whether the misreading and inexactness is the scholar's or the editor's, though, (a) there is no "plant of youth" in the text. There's a heartbeat plant or medicinal agent credited with restoring youth. Again, we should have the plant/agent's actual name from the text and then use a form of it consistently in the article in place of inexact glosses or inaccurate loose translations and mistranslations. If it varies across sources, note that and use the most standard one. (b) The Alexander Romance wasn't Christian, even if versions of it were later Christianized. Unless these particular plot points only appeared in later Christian editions (which should be noted) they shouldn't be credited to Christian allegories, even if a single scholar can be found overstating that case. (c) Very pointedly, the medicinal plant in Gilgamesh is found under water and the involvement of Abzu was likely directly related to its supposed potency. The plant needing to be pearldived should be at least mentioned in any discussion of a transfer of the magical power from the plant to the body of water itself. — LlywelynII 18:18, 12 September 2024 (UTC)

(c2) Ishtar’s Descent into the Underworld and other early Levantine myths already have waters of youth/immortality themselves, presumably without reference to Christian allegory. — LlywelynII 18:46, 12 September 2024 (UTC)