An epic with its central idea being man’s search for immortality had been in the oral tradition of Mesopotamia for thousands of years before the Christian era. Then, nearly 4,000 years ago, the anonymous verse was inscribed in clay tablets. The Epic of Gilgamesh - the earliest surviving literature of the world written in cuneiform script, was rendered into Tamil as Gilgamesh Kaviyam by city-based author and translator K Stalin and published by Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Letters, a couple of years ago.
An epic with its central idea being man’s search for immortality had been in the oral tradition of Mesopotamia for thousands of years before the Christian era. Then, nearly 4,000 years ago, the anonymous verse was inscribed in clay tablets.
The Epic of Gilgamesh - the earliest surviving literature of the world written in cuneiform script, was rendered into Tamil as Gilgamesh Kaviyam by city-based author and translator K Stalin and published by Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Letters, a couple of years ago.
In an age when the novel coronavirus is claiming thousands of lives across the globe every day, The Epic of Gilgamesh reminds us of man’s relentless search for immortality even in the dim and distant past.
“Clay tablets were used as a writing medium in ancient Mesopotamia, the home of early civilization. People of the yore inscribed their ideas using the cuneiform characters on wet clay and dried it in the sun or hot kilns. One such literature imprinted on such clay tablets was 'The Epic of Gilgamesh,” says Stalin, who translated the ancient classic from English to Tamil.
An ardent reader of Greek and Roman classics and former Assistant Director of All India Radio, Stalin has already translated several western classics into Tamil and got published into books.
The epic centers around Gilgamesh, the king of Uruk, who looks for the possibility of attaining immortality after his foe-turned-friend Enkidu, is killed by the gods. Gilgamesh later meets Utnapishtim, to whom the gods granted the boon of eternal youth and immortality — a character similar to Noah in The Old Testament.
Utnapishtim gives Gilgamesh two experiments to achieve eternal youth and immortality. The first experiment is that he must not have a wink of sleep for six nights and five days. Though Gilgamesh fails in the first task, he emerges successfully in the second one, where he has to pluck a thorny plant with beautiful flowers growing under a sea. Utnapishtim tells Gilgamesh that he would achieve eternal youth if he ate the leaves of an aquatic plant. Though Gilgamesh obtains the plant after great efforts, a serpent takes it away later. The climax of the epic indicates the impossibility of a man achieving immortality.
The epic, inscribed on clay tablets ages ago, was first discovered by Austen Henry Layard, a twenty-two-year-old English man who was on his way to Sri Lanka to become a British civil servant. But, Layard wandered about Persia and Turkey, looking for the artifacts of Mesopotamia.
In 1847, he unearthed as many as 20,000 clay tablets in the famous library of Ashurbanipal, the king of the Neo-Assyrian Empire (668-627 BCE), who was famed for his collection of cuneiform documents in his royal palace in Ninevah (A region in modern-day Iraq).
The two other British archaeologists who played a vital role in discovering the literature on clay tablets and deciphering its cuneiform script were Sir Henry Rawlinson and George Smith. George Smith, who was from a working-class family in Victorian England, could not acquire formal education. At the age of fourteen, he was apprenticed to the London-based publishing house of Bradbury & Evans as a banknote engraver.
Nevertheless, he had a passion for studying the publication on the cuneiform tablets and spent his lunch hours in the British Museum, where the clay tablets excavated by Austen Henry Layard and Sir Henry Rawlinson kept documented.
In 1872, George Smith achieved worldwide fame for his translation of the Chaldean Account of the Great Flood - a chapter in The Epic of Gilgamesh.
He read it before members of the Society of Biblical Archaeology. And one among the audience was William Ewart Gladstone, the Prime minister of the United Kingdom.
