Oral Tradition Long before people learned to write, they made up and told stories; they composed and sang songs. Because people who have not learned to write must develop a retentive and accurate memory, such stories and songs could be preserved for generations in something like their original form or could be improved, expanded or combined with other material to be passed on.

Written Medium Oral traditional literature can be irrevocably lost if it is not transferred to a written medium. Writing, which has preserved some ancient literatures for us, was not invented for that purpose. The earliest written documents we have contain commercial, administrative, political, and legal information.

Ancient Civilization Ancient civilization was based on agriculture in regions such as the valleys of the Nile, Euphrates and Tigris rivers. It was in the region of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers that writing was first developed; the earliest texts date from around 3300 to 2900 B.C. The characters were inscribed on tablets of wet clay with a pointed stick; the tablets were then left in the sun to bake to hardness. The original characters were pictographic.

Cuneiform By 2800 B.C. scribes began to use the wedge-shaped end of the stick to make marks rather than the pointed end to draw pictures. The resulting script is known as cuneiform, from the Latin word for wedge. By 2500 B.C. the texts were no longer confined to lists; they record historical events and even material that could be regarded as literature. This writing system was not, however, designed for a large reading public. The wedge-shaped signs, grouped in various patterns, denote not letters of an alphabet, but syllables– consonants plus a vowel– and this meant that the reader had to be familiar with a very large number of signs. It was, however, the most efficient system yet devised, and it stayed in use for two millennia.

Cuneiform Tablet

Gilgamesh It was on clay tablets and in cuneiform script that the great Sumerian epic poem Gilgamesh was written down, in differing versions and in different languages, only to disappear in the ruins of the cities and be totally forgotten until modern excavators discovered the tablets and deciphered them.

Writing Evolves After Cuneiform, the Egyptians created hieroglyphics, a pictographic writing system often seen on the walls of temples and tombs. However, while these symbols remained open to view for generations, they defied interpretation until 1799. Napoleon’s army, digging the foundation for military redoubt in Egypt unearthed a large block of basalt, the Rosetta stone, on which was inscribed a text in three different versions- two Egyptian, and the other in Greek (providing a key for interpretation of hieroglyphic writing).

Egyptian Hieroglyphs

Alphabetic Writing There was only one ancient writing system that, unlike cuneiform and hieroglyphic was destined to survive, in modified forms, until the present day. The Hebrews used the system to record in a collection of books—part of which became what Christians call the Old Testament—their history; their sorrows and triumphs; and above all, their concept, unique in the polytheistic ancient world, of a single god.

Hebrews The Hebrew people were never very important historically or politically in the region where they lived. They were constantly being captured and enslaved by larger more powerful nations. They became a people of Diaspora, the “scattering”: religious communities in the great cities of the ancient world who maintained local cohesion and universal religious solidarity but who were stateless. The Hebrews were a people of Diaspora until the mid-twentieth century when the state of Israel was established.

Why? The Hebrew belief system was informed by an attitude different from that of any other nation of the ancient world. It is founded on the idea of one God, the Creator of all things, all-powerful and just– a conception of the divine essence and the government of the universe so simple that to those of us who have inherited it, it seems obvious. But in its time, it was so revolutionary that it made the Hebrews a nation apart, sometimes laughed at, sometimes feared, but always alien.

Hebrew Writing The consonantal script in which the Hebrew literary legacy was handed down to us was a great step forward from the hieroglyphic and cuneiform systems because many people could learn to read and write it. But is was still unsatisfactory because the absence of vowels made for ambiguity and possible misreading. For example the name for God, Jahwey, now translated to Jehovah, was originally written as YHWH, so we have to guess what the vowel sounds were meant to be. The Greeks added vowels to the Hebrew alphabet in the 8th or 9th century B.C., and the first alphabetic writing system was born.

Hebrew Alphabet

Roman Alphabet The Romans, who adapted the Hebrew alphabet for their own language, carved their inscriptions on stone in the same capital letters that we still use today.

The Epic of Gilgamesh

Partial graphic Novel of Gilgamesh

Enkidu is tamed by the Harlot.

Gilgamesh the Poem Gilgamesh is a poem of unparalleled antiquity, the first great heroic narrative of world literature. The poem was famous in the ancient world. For reasons that scholars have not yet fathomed, the literature of the cuneiform tablets was not translated into the new alphabets when they emerged, and the poem vanished from memory. No one realized how important the story was to our collective world view until one portion was accidentally rediscovered and published in 1872, revealing that the biblical story of Noah and the Great Flood was neither original nor unique. The poem developed over a period of nearly a thousand years. The epic narrates the legendary deeds of Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, but it begins with a prologue that emphasizes not his adventures but the wisdom he acquired and the monuments he constructed at the end of his epic journey.

Gilgamesh the Character The prologue tells us that Gilgamesh was endowed by his divine creators with extraordinary strength, courage, and beauty. He is more god than man. The prologue suggests that Gilgamesh himself has written this account and left the tablets in the foundation of the city wall of Uruk for all to read. In our first view of him, Gilgamesh is the epitome of a bad ruler: arrogant, oppressive, and brutal.

Enkidu The people complain to their gods about Gilgamesh, and the gods create Enkidu to be a foil or counterweight to Gilgamesh. His coming is announced to Gilgamesh in the first of a series of important dreams. The two form a deep bond of friendship and journey together to attain glory and fame.

Importance In retrospect, we can see that Gilgamesh explores many of the mysteries of the human condition for the first time in our literature—the complex and perilous relations between gods and mortals and between nature and civilization, the depths of friendship, and the immortality of art.