Gilgamesh among Us: Modern Encounters with the Ancient Epic

Conclusion

Conclusion Our representative survey of the reception of the Gilgamesh epic during the past century and a half has revealed an astonishing number and variety of works from many Western countries and in manifold media and genres. (See the chronological list of works in the appendix.) If we compare this phenomenon to the reception of other masterpieces of world literature, it is difficult, if not impossible, to find anything remotely analogous . While Homer’s Achilles and Odysseus, Virgil’s Aeneas, the figures of Minoan Crete, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and the biblical myths have all continued to leave their imprint on our time, nowhere have they had such a varied and pervasive cultural impact as has the Sumerian hero.1 The phenomenon may be viewed in one sense as a late episode in the general Western fascination with the Near East that has existed in various forms since antiquity. Cultures identify themselves in part by their uses of the past. The United States has turned repeatedly in its history to Rome in its search for self-definition: from the theory of translatio imperii (the shift of empire from East to West) that inspired the Founding Fathers and 190 Conclusion shaped so many of our institutions, not to mention our federal architecture , but that also triggered millennial fears of a Gibbonian or even Spenglerian decline and fall. Germans of the nineteenth century—see Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle—sought their cultural roots in Old Germanic history and mythology. Artists of the early twentieth century—Picasso, Vlaminck, Modigliani, Matisse—turned away from what they regarded as a decadent EuropeandlookedforinspirationtotheprimitiveartsofAfrica.SirArthur Evans’s discovery of the palace of Minos at Knossos, announced in 1900, captured the imagination of the European public and instigated a wave of artistic and literary works based on Cretan myths.2 The Egyptomania that obsessed Europeans and Americans from the Napoleonic campaigns down to the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922 was exemplified by such works as Verdi’s Aida (1871) or the obelisk form of the Washington Monument (1884), produced in the twentieth century a wave of fiction and films featuring mummies and Cleopatra, and can still be detected today in the awed faces of the visitors to Berlin’s Neues Museum who swarm around the lovely bust of Nefertiti.3 And as we have repeatedly observed, the turn to Gilgamesh among writers, artists, musicians, and thinkers from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries reflects successive waves of concern from generation to generation: we recognize aspects of ourselves in the ancient epic hero. As for the Near East specifically, at least since Herodotus historians have sought to define the West in contradistinction to the ancient East: Greece versus Persia. This contrastive duality continued to occupy thinkers from the time of the Crusades by way of Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (Lettres persanes, 1721) and André Malraux’s The Temptation of the West (La tentation de l’Occident, 1926) down to such contemporaries as Edward Said and Samuel Huntington. That theoretical preoccupation with the East generated a corresponding cultural curiosity.4 Already in antiquity writers were fascinated by the figure of Semiramis, wife of the Assyrian king Samsi-Adad V (9th century B.C.E.), who was renowned as a warrior queen and notorious for her sexual lust.5 Later Dante condemned her (along with Dido and Cleopatra) to the second circle of his Inferno for her licentiousness (canto 5). Writers from Calderon to Metastasio and Voltaire devoted dramas to her life—works that provided libretti for operatic composers from Gluck to Rossini. The work known in French as Les Mille et une nuits and in English as The Arabian Nights has enjoyed since its initial Conclusion 191 collection and translation by Antoine Galland in 1704–16 enormous popularity in every European language and generated numerous translations and retellings—for instance, Richard Burton’s unexpurgated translation, The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments; or, the Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (1885–88)—as well as such variations as Rimsky-Korsakov’s symphonic suite Scheherazade, John Barth’s novel Chimera (1974), and Mary Zimmermann’s theatrical adaptation of The Arabian Nights (2005).6 The 1812 translation by the Austrian Orientalist Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall of poems by the fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafiz (Muhammad Hafez-e Sirazi, Divan) inspired not only Goethe to his West-Eastern Divan (1819) but also volumes of Persian ghasels (Ghaselen) by such younger German poets as August von Platen (1821) and Friedrich R...