The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh

Binding: hardcover

Number Of Pages: 336

Release Date: 06-03-2007

Details: Product Description


Adventurers, explorers, kings, gods, and goddesses come to life in this riveting story of the first great epic--lost to the world for 2,000 years, and rediscovered in the nineteenth century


Composed by a poet and priest in Middle Babylonia around 1200 bce, The Epic of Gilgamesh foreshadowed later stories that would become as fundamental as any in human history, The Odyssey and the Bible. But in 600 bce, the clay tablets that bore the story were lost--buried beneath ashes and ruins when the library of the wild king Ashurbanipal was sacked in a raid.



The Buried Book begins with the rediscovery of the epic and its deciphering in 1872 by George Smith, a brilliant self-taught linguist who created a sensation when he discovered Gilgamesh among the thousands of tablets in the British Museum's collection. From there the story goes backward in time, all the way to Gilgamesh himself. Damrosch reveals the story as a literary bridge between East and West: a document lost in Babylonia, discovered by an Iraqi, decoded by an Englishman, and appropriated in novels by both Philip Roth and Saddam Hussein. This is an illuminating, fast-paced tale of history as it was written, stolen, lost, and--after 2,000 years, countless battles, fevered digs, conspiracies, and revelations--finally found.


From Booklist
*Starred Review* As astounding as the content of the
Epic of Gilgamesh in which the questing hero travels to the underworld and back, is the manner of its discovery and recovery. The clay tablets on which its text was impressed lay beneath the rubble of the Assyrian city of Nineveh, destroyed in 612 BCE, until they were excavated in the 1850s. The tablets still were mute until a British scholar cracked the cuneiform script and translated the
Epic to sensational acclaim in the 1870s. These are just two of Damrosch's approaches to this ur-work of world literature. Others are the reign of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal, assembler of the library in which
Gilgamesh was preserved; archaeological hints about the real-life Gilgamesh, a Sumerian king from about 2750 BCE; and a vivid retelling of the epic itself. Literature professor Damrosch's summary narrative of the epic excels both in dramatization and thematic explanation, and he's no slouch either when it comes to relaying the adventures of translator George Smith and archaeologist-diplomat Hormuzd Rassam, the central figures in bringing
Gilgamesh to modern light. Combining acuity about cultural contexts with wide-ranging knowledge, Damrosch's account is a superb and engrossing popular presentation.
Gilbert Taylor

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Review


"An altogether compelling narrative of a crucial episode in cultural history. This is a book that vividly demonstrates why humanism matters and how it is enhanced by exercising an unconventionally broad reach."--Robert Alter, author of
The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary, and Class of 1937 Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley