Notes for Translating the Epic of Gilgamesh

© 1995-2001 Untangle Incorporated
Last Updated: Monday, October 29, 2001

The Epic is not one story written one time by one person. It was many different stories (Tigay, Chapter 1) which were brought together and extensively rewritten so as to make a story. When was this done? It seems that in what scholars of the area call the old Babylonian period (2000-1600 years ago. Tigay pp 11).

The first tablets found contain what has become the Standard Version of the Epic. These are Babylonian tablets written in Akkadian, found in the remains of the library (668-627 B.C.) at what used to be a city of Ninevah in what is now Iraq. They were found by A.H. Layard in 1839 (Saunders, pp 9) and no one could understand then what they said at all.

From other tablets listing the Kings of Sumer (Jacobsen pp 84-89 & Pritchard pp 266) we find Gilgamesh listed as a king of the city of Ur-uk about 2700 B.C. So the story occured at least 2000 years before the tablets were in the library in Ninevah.

The earliest Sumerian tablets are about 3100 year ago, or about 400 years after Gilgamesh reigned. According to Tigay these early stories were about Gilgamesh the man and heroic king. The standard version has revised these entertaining stories into generalized statements about mankind illustrated by Gilgamesh's life.

The difficulties in translating is given in Explaining Translation

There are several careful transliterations and grammar only translations. There are also translations that take the grammar only translations and converts them into literary translations so they sound smooth and entertaining. At every level, tranliteration, translation by grammar and literary translation there are controversies. Hayes, Jacobsen, Tigay, and Thomsen all describe the many problems and uncertainties there are in the translations in any of the forms of the Epic that you wish to cite ( I mean transliteration, grammar translation or literary translation, but there are controversies in each published translation as well. ).

The MythHome translation was done by Yanita Chen who was in Middle Eastern Studies in 1994. Her translation was from the printed cuniform plates of Sumerian, Old and Middle Babylonian tablets. From this grammar translation she produced the literary translated text shown on the Gilgamesh pages of MythHome.

SOME SOURCES
I.M. Diakonoff, "Ancient Writing and Ancient Written language:Sumerian", 1982
"Sumerian", T. Hayes, 1997
Jacobsen, Thorkild,"The King List", 1939
Jones, T.,"The Sumerian Problem" 1969
Tigay A., "The Evolution of the Gilgamesh Epic",1982
Kramer S.N., many books but for this page we read "Gilgamesh and the Huluppa Tree",1938 Text and Translation chapter 1
Pritchard J.B., ed. "Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament", 1969
Saunders, N.K. "Gilgamesh: The Epic of Gilgamesh", 1972 (this is a literary translation)
Thomsen, M. "The Sumerian Language", 1984