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1 The Initial Reception (1884–1935) In what follows we shall leave aside, for the most part, the steadily increasing and often fascinating scholarly studies of the Assyriologists and concentrate instead on the popular reception of the epic of Gilgamesh.1 Sometimes, of course, the scholarly conclusions of the Assyriologists have influenced popular conceptions. But other non-academic factors are often involved, as we shall see in the chapters to come. The First Literarization The first literary adaptation of the Gilgamesh legend for a modern—that is to say, Victorian—audience was undertaken by an unlikely author: a young American lawyer and businessman who later worked in Boston as an advertising agent, reporter, and executive secretary of the National Business Men’s League.2 When Leonidas Le Cenci Hamilton (1850–1906) published his Ishtar and Izdubar (1884), he had already written “a general The Initial Reception (1884–1935) 21 sketch of the Republic of Mexico” called Border States of Mexico (1881) as well as Hamilton’s Mexican Laws (1882) and Hamilton’s Mexican HandBook (1883) in the hope of promoting business and mining interests with that country. Hamilton, who was educated in the Greek and Roman classics , had at least a rudimentary knowledge of Akkadian (based on A. H. Sayce’s Assyrian Grammar for Comparative Purposes [1872]) and had studied the principal works of the major English, French, and German scholars.3 He tells us that he began writing his work in 1881 in San Francisco, continued it in New York and Boston in 1882–83, and rewrote it in London in the winter of 1883–84: “The difficulties to be encountered in the reproduction of the great Epic of Babylon, the Iliad of Babylonia, are such as have never existed heretofore in the restoration of any work of literature” (xxii). Some of these difficulties are outlined in the proemium to his work, which begins with a paean to the harmony that distinguishes true poetry; speaks of the problems concerning accentuation in Assyrian; waxes elegiac over lost civilizations; praises Mesopotamia, the home of the biblical Abraham; mentions early visitors to the site of Nineveh while crediting England with the recovery of its past; and cites the leading contemporary scholars in the field of Assyriology, including Paul Haupt, who was just publishing his magisterial edition of the cuneiform script of the epic of Gilgamesh. Hamilton reports that he “availed [himself] of the results of the labours of these great Assyriologists,” including Sayce’s revision of Smith’s Chaldean Account of Genesis (xx). It was his aim “as far as possible to reproduce in our poem all the fragments of the great Epic of Babylon, and fill the blanks, guided by the suggestions and allusions to be found in the text, in the Acc âdian and Assyrian hymns, sculptures, seals, bas-reliefs, and every available data.” Ishtar and Izdubar is heavily indebted to Smith’s translation and to various works that Hamilton cites in his notes, but his concerns are quite different from Smith’s. He does not even include the story of the deluge in his version, which focuses primarily on the love interests. (He planned to include the stories of the creation and fall, the flood, and the tower of Babel along with other myths in a second volume, as advertised at the back of volume 1, but he never completed it.) Hamilton’s poem is not so much a translation as an extremely free adaptation “constructed from translations of the great Accadian epic and the legends of Assyria and Babylon, found in cuneiform inscriptions of tablets lately discovered on the site of the ruins 22 Chapter 1 of Nineveh, and now deposited in the British Museum [ . . . ] restored in modern verse” (title page). It expands the three thousand fragmentary verses of the original to some six thousand lines of often clumsy rhymed couplets in forty-eight cantos, which through their very form change the tone of the work from a heroic epic to a poetic romance—influenced no doubt by the current popularity of Edward FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (the first four editions of which appeared from 1859 to 1879) and by Edwin Arnold’s recently published life of Buddha entitled Light of Asia, or the Great Renunciation (1879), whose “sweet and tender lines” Hamilton praises glowingly in his proemium (xi). He invented a number of new episodes (arranged by “Tablet” and “Column” but with no relation to the original) and altered the character of...

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