The Epic of Gilgamesh: An English Verison with an Introduction (Penguin Classics) | 
 enlarge | Author: Anonymous
Creator: N. K. Sandars
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Category: Book
List Price: $9.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  37 reviews
Sales Rank: 818
Media: Paperback
Edition: Revised
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 128
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 7.5 x 5 x 0.4
ISBN: 014044100X
Dewey Decimal Number: 892.1
EAN: 9780140441000
ASIN: 014044100X
Publication Date: December 30, 1960
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Amazon.com
This edition provides a prose rendering of The Epic of Gilgamesh, the cycle of poems preserved on clay tablets surviving from ancient Mesopotamia of the third mi llennium B.C. One of the best and most important pieces of epic poetry from human history, predating even Homer's Iliad by roughly 1,500 years, the Gilgamesh epic tells of the various adventures of that hero-king, including his quest for immortality, and an account of a great flood similar in many details to the Old Testament's story of Noah. The translator also provides an interesting and useful introduction explaining much about the historical context of the poem and the archeological discovery of th e tablets.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 32 more reviews...
 Eye Opening Epic March 11, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
It will be obvious that plagerism is not a recent phenomenon. When you are aware of Gilgamesh, the supposed wise sages of books like the Torah, Bible, what ever the Arabs call their drivel, you will realize that you have been duped as the authors of those works merely ripped-off the Greeks, Egyptians and other cultures that pre-dated them. I, for one, have no wish to perpetuate the supposed divinity of Middle-Eastern religions. I never quite got the vengeful God only to later take anger management classes and become a loving God thing! There is definitely something more to the Universe than random chance, but Mankind does not yet have a handle on that knowledge, certainly not the rediculous, violent, crimes against Humanity, Middle East.
Great epic poem December 21, 2007
Gilgamesh is a great epic poem, particularly for me as a "theology hobbyist" it is pretty interesting to understand how other semitic cultures lived in the days before and after Noah, befor Abraham. It's also thought provoking in respect to how much it relates to various biblical accounts. The author does discuss this briefly in the introduction. Essentially, it has expanded my horizons...
The tale of the evolution of storytelling that reveals shared mythology in religions October 18, 2007
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
This version is a very popular adaptation of the Gilgamesh story because it contains N. K. Sandars' crucial introduction which is just as important as the translation itself because it includes information about the discovery of the tablets in Assyria dating back to the third millennium BC and then goes on to explain the difficulties that scholars have had in rediscovering the story from these artifacts and how during this long laborious translation process found themselves actively engaged in evolving the story, and thus the mythology, which had developed from other sources and had certainly influenced ancient hero epics that proceeded it. There is no one version of Gilgamesh. There are very many. Having a good introduction like this makes reading the story even better because we understand its significance beyond being just a very old fable.
The story of the translation of the epic of Gilgamesh is every bit as important as the epic itself and maybe more so because of its relevance to modern questions about the authenticity of the accounts held by popular traditional sacred texts. It is impossible to ignore the resemblance the epic of Gilgamesh has to Greek mythology as well as to the Judeo-Christian Islamic religions. Elements of the story such as Gilgamesh being part god part man, the flood story which is vertically identical to the one in Genesis and the underlying quest for immortality will peak interest and is probably the main reason why most people want to read the epic of Gilgamesh. The discovery of the tablets only increased popular scholarly opinions that religions have their roots in mythology and here is yet more evidence to back that position. Thus the epic of Gilgamesh and the story behind it is an essential classical text for ancient storytelling and how they evolve with time through the civilizations that come in contact with them. The Epic is not just Gilgamesh but the gradual progression of important themes in life that humans deal with by developing these legends and fables.
Sandar's work also contains an important treatment of the story and an explanation of the role of the gods which are essentials to understanding what the story is about. Gilgamesh is hard to read without these initiations because the era and the setting in which the story was written must be dealt with or else the plot which contains abundant and rapid interactions between the gods, their attributes and the consequences, will not make any sense to the reader. The ancient ways, and we are talking ancient going back some 5000 years at least, are not our ways. Here gods are superabundant and are responsible for every aspect of life and with an outcome, such as the setting of the sun by scorpions, there is also a god who is bringing the fiery ball down into the underworld where two more gods are there to catch it and who influence our lives somehow.
Gilgamesh is another world, almost alien, giving us a glimpse into how our ancestor's explained themselves and the world they found themselves in. It goes to show how far our modern understanding of why we are the way we are and why things are the way they are, has gone.
 It was horrible. August 7, 2007
2 out of 27 found this review helpful
I had to read it for a summer reading book. It was horrible. I mean, who wants to read all about the Ancient Sumarians?
Yet another Gilgamesh. July 24, 2007
3 out of 7 found this review helpful
I was reading these thirty-some reviews of The Epic of Gilgamesh, starting the old Sanders one in prose, which isn't half bad. Almost none of translations and/or reditions (translation made from other translations, rather than from the original Akkadian in cuneiform alphabet)...none are really bad, but you certainly can get different slants on the story, and twisted episodes, and missed tone, and so on.
The scholarly translations by Assyriologists (A.George, Foster, Kovacs, Dalley, and so on) are usually too scholarly, and interrupt the read with all the problems that still abound. (Almost a third of the epic is still missing, for example.) The renditions, poets and wanna-be's like Jackson and Ferry, tend to wander off into their own thing; John Gardner (Grendel) included: he's sexy, but he ain't Sin-leqi-unnini (the supposed 'Homer' of the version found in an ancient library in 600 BC). Stephen Mitchell, a great Rilke translator, doesn't let on that he doesn't really read the Akkadian, so that's a rendition without your knowing whose versions he worked from. There's a lot of fudging going on in the Gilgamesh racket. It's a whole sub-story to the epic itself, and almost as much fun.
But if you wanted to get as close to the original text as possible, dig up the 1948 translation by Alexander Heidel (whose text seems sympathetically ancient: the book's typeface makes it look like a dissertation from that era, font by Underwood). But Heidel is closest to what the original sounds like: The Gilgamesh Epic and Old Testament Parellels: "A translation and interpretation of the Gilgamesh Epic and related Babylonian and Assyrian documents."
But really everyone named above, and maybe three times that many in print today, all take it beyond Heidel's crude (albeit with an ancient beauty, almost like an artifact) level, but I think they all err, in going too far, or not far enough, or getting too far from the original, or just keeping a good read going. The politics of getting to the original tablets, by the bye, and the technology of reading the ancient clay fragments covered in cuneiform script three to four thousand years old, is a worthwhile epic in itself. There are 'Gilgamesh wars' out there that you'll never hear about, having to do with careers, withheld translations, transcriptions, etc. And why not, the stakes aren't really that small: this is the very first of work of literature, predating Homer by a thousand years and much longer if you look at earlier versions, the Old Babylonian and the Sumerian mess. Why indeed not lock in the 'definitive translation'?
But enough of human ambition; one final suggestion: if you want to read a version that stays quite close to the original, whatever that is/was, but brings the sensory dimension up to modern taste, and teases out a good deal of the humor that's arguably in the original but which most translations miss, then I'm pleased to inform you that there is yet one more Gilgamesh cropping up in of all places, at Lulu dot com, as a graphic novel. The cartoonist has added his own humor--it feels like/looks like it's for 14 year olds some of the time--but he's also brought out the intrinsic humor of the original, has certainly rendered the scenes vividly, keeps his own contribution distinct from 'the original', and the text for the pure epic reads as well as the best ones above and keeps the reader forefront, not the scholarship. Check it out at Lulu.
Qualifier: It's not finished, but two out of three installments are there, through about Tablet IX (a total of 12), where Enkidu falls sick and then Gilgamesh sets out bereft and alone on his quest for immortality, learning lots of secrets as he goes, including that of the story of the Flood. This is Noah's arc, but written down some one to two millenium before Genesis. When one George Smith first cracked the code, in the 1872, there were riots. It was Darwin all over again, to the literalists of faith, of which there were then as now, many.
A neat new book (2006) on all that is out, listed here in amazon: David Damrosch's The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh.
Back to the graphic version:
A comic book reviewer, former editor at DC Comics, one 'Occasional Superheroine,' begins a pretty favorable revew with something like: Ancient Sumeria meets Krum... This is about right: the epic bleeds through in all its strength and Sumerian-Babylonian wonder and feeling, and the cartoons provide a tongue-in-cheek commentary that's much more sophisticated than it at first appears, with its Ally-Oop hero and his hirsute side-kick. The Bull of Heaven, the giant monster Humbaba, Shamhat and Enkidu out there on the steppes unchaperoned, spoiled little vindictive Ishtar... it's really worth a gander.
Curious note: the artist and writer seem to be brothers, or a father-son team. And in the interest of Full Disclosure, one of them's me!
Occasional Superheroine recommends it; so do I.
~"Sam"
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