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The return of long-lost Sumero-Akkadian heritage and modern disorders: rediscovering Gilgamesh, Victorian tension, and aftermath Abdullah Qasim Safi Al-Hadi 1✉ & Gao Xiaoling1

Much has been said about the paradigms that generated and complexed the Victorian and

post-Victorian tension, but surprisingly enough no sufficient attention was given to the role of

the rediscovery of the Epic of Gilgamesh in this process. This paper first follows the actual

origin, process, and importance of the rediscovery and reception of Gilgamesh since the

second half of the nineteenth century. Second, the paper argues that Gilgamesh controversy

has been central to the great multifaceted tension that defined the Victorian and post-

Victorian periods. Finally, the paper attempts to answer the questions of why Gilgamesh has

been deemed as a subject of great interest and importance for the modern literary and

cultural scholars and general public and what aspects of themselves and their culture they

recognized in the ancient Mesopotamian epic and its hero. Such discussions help increasing

contemporary awareness of the more famous and more notable than all of cuneiform lit-

eratures, the Gilgamesh Epic, and lead therefore to raising awareness of the high richness of

Ancient Near Eastern heritage and the crucial significance of preserving Sumer’s and Baby-

lon’s legacy for future generations.

https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-024-03325-6 OPEN

1 School of Foreign Languages, Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou, Henan, China. ✉email: [email protected]

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Introduction

The new discoveries, including that of the extraordinary third-millennium BCE hero of a Mesopotamian epic, have permeated popular culture, generating cultural memories

of the Ancient Near East that challenge modern history and our memories of the past. Understanding them is just as important as examining the historical records (Collins, 2020, p. x). The general public has turned their attention to the heritage of the Ancient Near East in an attempt to comprehend the significance of this long-lost legacy (Forster, 2016). This reception stems from pop- ular perceptions that ancient Mesopotamia is the source of con- temporary Western civilizations, and is further reinforced by the idea of a shared world heritage (Meskell, 2015). The Gilgamesh Epic has been central to the literary and cultural heritage that defined Sumero-Akkadian identity and compared to the Hebrew Bible, Classical literature, and world mythology. It has become a cultural icon symbolizing the ancient great Mesopotamian scholarship, offering an upbeat perspective on future endeavours to conserve the cultural heritage of Mesopotamia. Considering contemporary dangers to the cultural heritage of Mesopotamia, it is also crucial to acknowledge the importance of preserving the literary and cultural legacies of the cradle of civilizations (Pryke, 2019; Helle, 2021).

The Gilgamesh Epic stands as one of the oldest surviving masterpieces of literature, characterized by universal themes and heroic deeds that well define the literary and cultural legacy of the ancient region now known as the Middle East. For more than two millennia, starting about the first century CE, the epic was lost along with the usage of cuneiform writing. The Gilgamesh stories tell of the great acts and adventures of the ancient Babylonian king who had ruled at the beginning of the third millennium BCE (George, 2003, pp. 3–6). Gilgamesh has become an influential and widely accepted text of Eastern and Western literary canon. Even in its relatively damaged present form, it is an ongoing labour of scholarship and affection for schoolchildren, students of all levels, and scholars of all subjects. The epic is “a relatively new classic” in the canon of comparative and world literature. It prefigures nearly all literary tones and tropes and suggests almost every genre, from lyric to dramatic to epic and chronicle. Its fractures foretell (post)modernism, which it stimulates and nurtures. Its greatness and survival are synthesized from its fragmented text and story. Gilgamesh requires and invites interpretation, con- struction, participation, invention, and conservation. Time and the elements played a role in the epic like no other work because of how it was set down. It was buried for millennia. It has traces of human nature, excavation, and discovery since it was unearthed. It presents and glorifies the age of its composition and its corporeal existence, a relatively partial survival (Schmidt, 2019, pp. 1–4). One secret to Gilgamesh’s success is that the epic has not had time to be “worn down by age” because it “reentered the literary world relatively recently, compared to the Greek and Roman classics” (Helle, 2021, p. vii), another secret is that it continues to concern us because we share its universal themes, especially the hero’s desire for immortality (Rilke and Kippenberg, 1954, p. 192). Gilgamesh is a masterpiece for all ages, an ancient and relatively recent classic, and a thrilling discovery. For a multitude of different reasons, the readers and translators of the epic continue to find it a fascinating subject.

The text of Gilgamesh as it has been descended to us has so many gaps that it has lured not just scholars but also poets, novelists, and dramatists to fill in the lacunae. Even as it exists, the epic contains so many universally valid and attractive themes relevant to the Victorian and post-Victorian readers: critique of tyranny, the desire for splendour, the allure of sex, man’s detachment from nature, the power of friendship, the avoidance of death, and the contentment of human progress. Furthermore,

the epic exposes those issues through thrilling adventures in a storyline that foreshadows the modern bildungsroman or quest novel or postmodern open/projective verse. Gilgamesh also arises as a culture hero who introduces exotic wood to the steppes, digs wells in desert areas, unveils sails and deep-sea exploration, and conducts sacred practices and municipal organization. Moreover, the epic’s high level of ambivalence and saturation has presented it to a variety of critical approaches, ranging from religion, archetypal mythology, and politics to ecological-environment, feminism, and homosexual research, science fiction, and other contemporary approaches. There has been a diversity of Gilga- meshes within the historical and cultural contexts of twentieth and twenty-first centuries (Ziolkowski, 2011, pp. 5–6).

Any attempt to depict the astounding array of cultural and literary productions that have been passed down to us from ancient Mesopotamia would almost certainly end up being descriptions of an embarrassing wealth of riches. However, the Epic of Gilgamesh is arguably more famous and notable than any of these productions. It is widely regarded as one of the greatest works of literature from ancient Mesopotamian civilizations and as one of the greatest works of all time. The literary figure of Gilgamesh holds immense importance for ourselves today because he tackles universal concerns about human existence through his story of hope and sorrow, which transcends the cultural gap separating us from the ancient Mesopotamians. As Ackerman put it, “what makes Gilgamesh a masterpiece is its ability to speak across the ages and across the globe to each of us as we attempt to make peace with the knowledge that we can have only a fraction of that which… life had seemed to offer and which… we had childishly assumed we could achieve” (2005, p. 35); or as Helle put it, “Gilgamesh has done so exceptionally well, making it an ideal starting point for understanding how literature moves through time—and how it changes with time” (2021, p. 124). It is this ability to pass through the ages that makes the Epic of Gilgamesh an exemplary of world literature.

The reception of the Epic of Gilgamesh, both in ancient and modern times, is significant and worth exploring. As a matter of fact, the reception of Gilgamesh in modern times is huge and argumentative, as it will be detailed later in this paper. However, the reception of the epic in the ancient world remains a relatively debate question. As Pryke puts it, “[t]he nature of the Epic’s impact on other great literary works of the ancient world is a leviathan area of scholarship, with widely divergent views in the academic community regarding the scope, type, and significance of its influence” (2019, p. 189). Therefore, it is worthwhile to briefly consider the classical influence of the epic. As a matter of fact, the sceptics brought up a number of questions and tentative answers in this regard. For example, Pryke suggests that because Assyriology originated in the Victorian Age, a time of tensions and discoveries, the field focused primarily on identifying potential links between Babylonian and Assyrian scholarship and the Hebrew Bible. Therefore, the topic remains controversial (2019, p. 191). Others also see that due to circumstances sur- rounding the scene, a modern tendency has emerged to dominate methods to the ancient Mesopotamian epics and the Hebrew Bible (Lambert, 2016, p. 216; Sonik, 2024) or other regions that have been considered having direct contact with Babylonian and Assyrian scribes, such as ancient Canaan, modern-day Israel and/ or Palestine (Horowitz and Oshima, 2006, p. 18). However, this tendency continues to the present day, despite the expansive development in the field of Assyriology and many new discoveries (Tsumura, 1994, p. 52). A few innovative studies also could raise scepticism. For example, the Atrahasis story, one of the earliest masterpieces of Akkadian literature (Pettinato, 2005, p. 598), includes an account of the Great Flood (McKeown, 2008, p. 16);

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therefore, Gilgamesh is not the only candidate to be the first epic poem (Helle, 2021, p. 125). Pryke reviewed several intellectuals that took a generally sceptical view of this phenomenon. Such sceptical views included: the similarities between Gilgamesh and Genesis did not “result from cultural contact or any direct contact between the texts;” the similarity between Gilgamesh and the Book of Giants in terms of characters, “prophetic dreams,” and “the Flood” are not enough to affirm influence; and the indirect traces of Gilgamesh in ancient literature is more subjective than objective (2019, pp. 196–198). Although some of the materials of Gilgamesh circulated over the ancient world, nothing was copied from the epic and pasted to Genesis (Helle, 2021, pp. 136–137). Different texts rework the same materials for different ends. Since there are several contextual and cultural distinctions between Gilgamesh and the Homeric epic literature or religious texts, these variances are not surprising. Nor is it necessary for the contact to be direct.

Some studies suggest that the Epic of Gilgamesh itself failed to survive the cuneiform writing and was not passed down outside of the cuneiform tradition (George, 2003, pp. 53–55; Jean, 2014, pp. 111–114). In the same way that Gilgamesh’s fame vanished with the death of cuneiform script, it returned with the redis- covery of that script. Of course, there are a number of affirma- tions of the resemblances between Gilgamesh and other ancient texts. These included motifs, characters, and other details. However, such studies reach overcautious conclusions, avoiding any affirmation or denial relating to direct influence. Nor are these affirmations convincing to the sceptics who propose the necessity of further restrictions. These restrictions, according to Jean, one of the sceptical readers, included: Motifs, themes, and the psychological forces underlying character behaviour must occur in the same sequence; characters must demonstrate the same potentials; characters or places should share origins and forms; and the text must share various details (2014, pp. 111–114). However, such restrictions should be understood as a way of avoiding misleading suppositions and making the task more challenging. Even George Smith’s diligent discovery of the Epic of Gilgamesh in 1872 never yields to misleading conclusions. As Smith put it, “[o]n reviewing the evidence it is apparent that the events of the Flood narrated in the Bible and the Inscription are the same, occur in the same order; but the minor differences in the details show that the inscription embodies a distinct and independent tradition” (1873, p. 232). Studies also began to be aligned with both positivism and humanism simultaneously in order to verify the hypothesis of affinity between the Mesopota- mian epic and biblical or classical texts. For example, a recent study made both qualitative and quantitative analyses to analyse the affinity between Gilgamesh and the Bible. While the method of intertextuality revealed an affinity between the flood in the Bible and the eleventh tablet of Gilgamesh, quantitative techni- ques like association rule mining and word cloud could verify the interrelationship (Kang and Kim, 2022, pp. 371–392). Smith’s discovery opened to us a new field of study, and the tendency to re-examine the similarities between Gilgamesh and the Homeric epics, as well as Gilgamesh’s influence on post-cuneiform litera- ture, is gaining diversity and prominence as time passes. Only time will tell if they succeed to produce a satisfactory resolution.

Since the discovery of the Epic of Gilgamesh, there has been a literary explosion re-examining the originality of ancient Western and Eastern literary and cultural legacies. Among the conclusions was that the Sumero-Akkadian epic was widely known in Greek or pre-Christian times, and it has long been believed that Gil- gamesh has similarities to the Homeric heroes. The analysis of similarities between Gilgamesh and the texts attributed to Homer sparked academic curiosity almost immediately after the Meso- potamian poem became accessible in a stable and reliable form

(George, 2003, pp. 55–57; Sallaberger, 2008, p. 122), “other Mesopotamian poetry and narratives have received less attention. Addressing this imbalance is a developing field of scholarship” (Pryke, 2019, p. 198). A number of assertions have also been made on the influence of the epic on ancient texts. These included the stories found in the Hebrew Bible about the deluge and the creation of Enkidu from clay and the heroes’ adventures in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey (Forest, 2002; Gresseth, 1975). The Mesopotamian epic was once called “the Odyssey of the Baby- lonian” (Heidel, 1963, p. 1) or the Eastern Iliad (Wolff, 1969, p. 393). It “combines the power and tragedy of the Iliad with the wanderings and marvels of the Odyssey” (Abusch, 2001, p. 614). Its impact can also be seen in later Near Eastern literature, including The Arabian Nights (Irwin, 1994; Dalley, 1997). In short, Gilgamesh has been felt to have an impact on both Western and Eastern perspectives and identities, either directly or indir- ectly (Pryke, 2019, p. 5; Kendall, 2012, p. xvii; Ziemann, 2019, p. ii). Interestingly, Hesiodic and Homeric reception of Gilgamesh came to be assimilated to the postmodern reception of the Mesopotamian epic (Ziemann, 2019, p. 311). Comprehensive studies on such influences and ancient reception include Ste- phanie Dalley’s (ed) The Legacy of Mesopotamia (1998), Walter Burkert’s The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age (1992), M. L. West’s The East Face of Helicon: West Asian Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth (1997), and John M. Hobson’s The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization (2004), which are widely cited today for their ground-breaking reinterpretation of academic thinking about the problems relating to cross-cultural effects in historical traditions. But at the time when Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle dominated the scene, the popularity of the Gilgamesh Epic waned for a variety of reasons, including Orientalism. The last known cuneiform edi- tions were created circa 130 BCE, and it did not happen to the epic to be translated into Greek or Latin. The remarkable non- Western epic from the ancient world, with astounding velocity, vanished completely from history for more than two millennia.

A growing number of scholarly works, including books and essays, have been published recently to trace how the Epic of Gilgamesh has been received in modern times. Such popularity can help to write an extensive evaluation of the place of Gilga- mesh in the arts and popular culture, the contribution of the text’s discovery to the formation and development of relatively new fields of study, and the tendency of some authors to situate themselves outside the Western thought tradition, instead dwelling inside the Mesopotamian world to inform their inno- vative theories. According to Pryke, the excavations in Iraq, which resulted in the discoveries of the Mesopotamian epics and other artefacts are important historical events that led to the emergence and development of Assyriology, an academic field of study that is basically devoted to the exploration of Mesopotamia (2019, p. 190; see also Finkel, 2014). To exemplify the tendency of rejecting Western ideas and taking from the Mesopotamian thought tradition as an alternative, consider Charles Olson, a postmodern poet and essayist in post-war America, rector of the well-respected Black Mountain College, and a central figure for postmodern experimental poetry. Expanding upon the spec- ulative prehistory that he outlined in “The Gate and the Center” (1951), “Human Universe” (1951) and Call Me Ishmael (1947), Olson writes that the present presses toward the old concept of Sumerian order, which is dissimilar to the cosmos-logos- dominated world from the sixth century BCE to the twentieth century CE. We must, therefore, return to that concept of order, the old cosmology of the pre-sixth century BCE. The time of Western humanism (the sixth century BCE to the early twentieth century CE) is marked by its loss of ancient Mesopotamian stories (1970, pp. 47–51). Olson writes that “we [Olson and his

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contemporaries at Black Mountain College] have completely cleaned ourselves of the biases of [W]esternism, of [G]reekism… we have squared away at historical time in such a manner that we are able to see Sumer as a point from which all ‘races’ (speaking of them culturally, not, biologically) egressed” (1968, pp. 97–98). The poet found it increasingly important to expand his American civilization to the origin, to Iraq, to the Sumerian civilization and their open/projective writings (the open verse of the Mesopota- mian poems perhaps could help Olson to write his theory of “Projective [Open] Verse” (1950)). Allusions are commonplace in Olson’s works. In “Logography,” an essay written under the influence of Ignace Jay Gelb, an American-Polish ancient his- torian and Assyriologist who led the way in the scientific inves- tigation of writing systems, Olson alludes to Uruk, the ancient city of Sumer before and during the Bronze Age of Mesopotamia (1974, p. 26). In “Causal Mythology” (1965), he would be the Sumerian god Enki’s Prometheus and expressed his admiration for prehistory, especially the Gilgamesh stories (Olson, 2010, pp. 116–124). Olson also discussed the importance of Sumerian logograms (1966, p. 96). Olson’s works are full of allusions to ancient Mesopotamian culture and literature where Gilgamesh becomes a leitmotif. Such allusions are Ziggurats, from the third millennium BCE; the ancient Mesopotamian goddess Inanna, originally worshipped by Assyrians, Babylonian, and Akkadians under the name Ishtar, and an important character in Gilgamesh; and the Mesopotamian mythological world-tree (see Olson, 1997, p. 173; 1978, pp. 38–39, 46). One point is Olson’s refusal of the Greek system: his insistence, “I am no Greek, hath not the advantage/And of course, no Roman” (1960, p. 10);” his refusal to Ezra Pound for the latter’s staying “inside the Western Box” (1966, p. 129); his refusal to T S Eliot because “tradition was too organized with him;” and “There is no strict personal order / for my inheritance. /No Greek will be able/to discriminate my body” (1983, pp. 184–185). The other focus is his choice of the Sumerian system as an alternative. Olson opens “TOMORROW”, a poem written in 1941, with “I am Gilgamesh, /an Ur world is in me / to inhabit” and concludes it with “They called me Gilgamesh /and gave me Ur /where I dwell” (1997, p. 9). The early excavations in Assyria in the 1840s and 1850s and the discovery of the Epic of Gilgamesh in 1872 took place alongside various new-born con- texts, issues, and fields of study, including cuneiform studies, Near Eastern Archaeology, Oriental studies, and art movements, to mention but a few. This co-occurrence allowed for Mesopo- tamian engagements.

Rediscovery of Gilgamesh and the Victorian tension The loss of cuneiform writing resulted in the absence of ancient Mesopotamian literature, primarily in Sumerian and Babylonian (Akkadian). The text of the Epic of Gilgamesh, like many other texts, was inscribed on cuneiform clay tablets. The thing about clay is, if you bake it, it lasts longer. So burning it actually helped. Whatever they had written on parchment was destroyed. But the clay tablets survived. And 2000 years they sit underneath this mound of earth anonymously. One of the greatest achievements in the humanities is the process of rediscovering these literatures. It started in the mid-19th century and is still going on now. Under the sponsorship of the Louvre museum, the Frenchman Paul Émile Botta began excavating the site of Khorsabad in 1842 and discovered the palace of Assyrian king Sargon II, built in the eighth century BCE. Mistakenly believing that he had found the famed ancient city of Nineveh, the discoveries were published under the title Monument de Ninive (1849). Meanwhile, Austen Henry Layard made his way across the Middle East and India, Persia, and so on, Kashmir and down to Ceylon. He wandered around, spent some time in Turkey, then in Greece, then in the

Levant. And then Layard started to hear there were mysterious mounds in what is now known as Iraq―maybe some stuff of biblical and/or historical interests (Bohrer, 2003, p. 68). In 1845, Layard and his assistant, Hormuzd Rassam, decided to excavate the city of Nineveh, the capital of the ancient Assyrian empire in the eighth and seventh centuries BCE, close to Mosul in modern- day Iraq. They went to Mosul and started digging a tunnel beneath the ruins of an Assyrian palace, uncovering the famed library of Assurbanipal, with the Gilgamesh tablets inside. This was an extract from the Neo-Assyrian empire archives, that dominated the vast majority of the Near East in the seventh century BCE.

But Layard knows that if he wants to do more of this digging, he has to raise money somehow because no one cares about these ruins in the middle of nowhere. His finding was neither Greek nor Roman sculptures, therefore he could not get funding. No one in Europe or the Middle East really cared about these old pagan relics of the pre-Islamic times. So Layard cannily resolved to write an adventure story Nineneh and Its Remains (1848–1849), and then go back and complete his excavation. Describing Layard’s documented adventure, Kendall writes that “this book [Nineneh and Its Remains] and the others that fol- lowed betray the prejudices of a nineteenth-century colonialist mentality, mingling the ancient and the orient with the exotic” (2012, p. iii). Layard’s discovery sparked curiosity and innovation, and his new publication became one of the archaeological best- sellers (Layard, 1849). Layard continued publishing works on his excavations at Nineveh until his death in 1894. But Layard’s and Rassam’s attempts to decipher the tablets were fruitless, sending them to the British Museum along for further study by Henry Rawlinson and others (see Damrosch, 2007, pp. 9–114; Lewis, 2021, p. 24).

Since the early Assyrian discoveries of Layard and Rassam, there has been such a realization that such archaeological treas- ures will be of great importance with regard to the art as well as to overall knowledge of ancient literacy. In 1846, Henry Rawlinson wrote that “[t]he marbles of Nimrod will be, in my opinion, an honour to England, not in the exclusive department of art, but in that more worthy field, a general knowledge of the early world” (quoted in Jenkins, 1992, p. 156). The subject also was of focus for commentators. In 1853, an anonymous commentator noted that “Assyria has risen from the grave of centuries, within our own period, to add its important quota to the history of sculpture, and form the connecting link between Egypt and early Greece” (“Museum of sculpture at the new Crystal Palace,” p. 210). The reception of Assyrian art coincided with a number of Victorian contexts and critical issues, including museums popularity, bib- lical and history paintings, Orientalism, and the revival of the ancient world, to mention but a few. The British Museum was characterized by a particular interest in classical art. Seymour writes that an important part of the museum’s role was “the presentation of humanity’s very finest artistic achievements to connoisseurs and students of fine art” (2013, p. 180). In 1846, Layard regretted that the Assyrian sculptures were inferior to the Roman and Greek secondary sources. However, he praised his Assyrian discoveries because they overweigh the Greek works as well as Egyptian discoveries in terms of ancientness, originality, and superiority (Layard, 1849, pp. 285–318). Layard’s findings caused discussions within the British Museum. These discussions centred on whether the artworks’ aesthetic aspects or their his- torical developments should be highlighted while presenting them, resulting in providing the Assyrian antiquities with a spe- cial place in the museum (Bohrer, 2003, pp. 111–122; Jenkins, 1992, pp. 56–70). We can notice an enthusiastic reception of Assyrian artworks during the Victorian Age. The story started with the bas-reliefs recovered and relocated to the British

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Museum during the mid-nineteenth century. The discoveries made in 1845 and the return of the Epic of Gilgamesh in 1872 marked a relatively exceptional rebirth that had no longer history, unlike the rebirth of Egypt, which began with the ancient Romans. Until the early nineteenth century, Western sources for ancient history were exclusively the Bible and classical world literatures, including Diodorus Siculus’s Bibliotheca historica and Herodotus’s Historica. This does not mean that there were no other sources for ancient civilizations, because Mesopotamia appeared in classical and biblical texts as well, presenting, how- ever, a counter-world to that shaped by biblical and classical traditions. Nevertheless, there were a few exceptions to this Western methodology. For example, there was a pre-modern Western fascination with civilizations of the Ancient Near East, as in the case of Egypt, though Western views of ancient Egypt are ambivalent. But, by the mid-nineteenth century, the Western reception of the Ancient Near East quite significantly changed.

The Assyrian discoveries should be situated inside the box of the origin of Orientalism and considered as a major material for Orientalist studies. According to Kennedy, Orientalist studies during the Victorian era were deeply rooted in some critical aspects of the time: Europe’s allure for The Arabian Nights; the Romantics’ fascination with the Orient, and their depiction of opium obsession (2017, pp. 1–89). However, we may add, and this is not generally digested, the Victorian reception of Assyrian discoveries. During a visit to the British Museum in 1850, the Pre- Raphaelite poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti selected the statue of a winged bull from Nineveh, which had just been hoisted into the museum, as the focus of his musings. This incident set the poet’s mind in motion, inspiring his poem “The Burden of Nineveh” (1856), in which he presented the Oriental exotic theme in an interesting way. The arrival of Assyrian relics such as “A winged beast from Nineveh” “In our Museum galleries” caused the narrator to move from the antithesis between the immortality of the artistic foundations of Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians and “the London din and dirt” to speculations about treasures from Nineveh and Babylon. The narrator is stunned by the Assyrian relics (“And there was life in Nineveh?”) because they will bring into question the authenticity, accuracy, and reliability of modern history, and the narrator stays uncertain, awaiting for more explanations about the identity, time, and civilizations of these discoveries. The narrator then travels into the future of London and speculates on the statue and its new function as a treasure from the past in the British Museum. He predicts that when “Some tribe of the Australian plough” unearth the enormous Assyrian bull-god artwork from the British Museum and the ruins of London, they will consider it as an artefact of “London, not of Nineveh” and that Ancient Britons revered it as a symbol of London’s religious and cultural heritage. The narrator criticizes the cultural colonialism that the Nineveh stature might suffer from in the future and predicts the collapse of Western civiliza- tion (see Rossetti, 1913, pp. 21–30).

Both the turn to the Bible and the new discoveries of Layard and others took place alongside the art movements of Pre- Raphaelitism of the 1850s and Aestheticism of the 1860s, pro- vided a context for Assyrian engagements. Moreover, the rise of Assyrian archaeological explorations created a desire to con- textualize the Bible within that prehistoric setting. As McGeough put it, “[i]t was no longer sufficient to treat the Bible as stor- ies―now these stories had to be contexualized within an his- torical framework” (2012, p. 405). The Victorian painters, poets, and playwrights derived some of the titles and themes of their works from the Bible and Rossetti’s “The Burden of Nineveh,” in the eye of many, is a generally digested example. But as we can see here, Rossetti could be inspired by the Assyrian discoveries and the narrator’s explanation took us to different ends. Rossetti is a

co-founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a representative of the Aesthetic movement, and has a significant impact on Vic- torian works of art and poetry (see Ghose, 1977; Tobin, 2002). For future studies, one might search for some thematic or structural aspects does “The Burden of Nineveh” share with Rossetti’s other poetic works, looking for the overall aesthetic and meaning of his poetry. And further, one might also relate Ros- setti’s poetry to his visual artefacts, such as The Wedding of Saint George and Princes Saba (1857). Importance references could be Shawn Malley’s From Archaeology to Spectacle in Victorian Britain (2012) and Bohrer’s Orientalism and Visual Culture: Imagining Mesopotamia in Nineteenth-Century Europe (2003).

Of course, there were works of literature and/or art before 1845, but they mostly focused on the fate of Assyria, which was seen as the mother of whores and obscenity (Espesito, 2011, pp. 3–6; Frahm, 2006). Such works included: William Blake’s paint- ing The whore of Babylon (1809); the paintings of John Martin: The fall of Babylon (1819), Belshazzar’s feast (1821), and The fall of Nineveh (1841); Edwin Atherstone’s poem “The Fall of Nine- veh” (1828); and Alfred Lord Byron’s The tragedy of Sardana- palus (1821). Byron’s Sardanapalus, for example, followed the fate of the last Assyrian king Sardanapalus. However, after the Assyrian discoveries made by Layard, Byron’s play was updated by Charles Kean in his Sardanapalus (1853). Kean provided the Victorian audience with a more reliable version, attempting to stage the play on the basis of Mesopotamian sculptures excavated by Layard and described in his Nineveh and Its Remains. As Kean put it in the preface, “until the present moment, it has been impossible to render Lord Byron’s Tragedy… upon the stage with proper dramatic effect, because, until now, we have known nothing of Assyrian Architecture and costumes.” Moreover, Kean connected his version of Sardanapalus with Mesopotamia: he “borrowed designs” from the Mesopotamian artefacts at the British Museum and other museums (1853, pp. 3–4). While Byron’s play is based upon the classical writings of Diodorus Siculus, Kean’s edition is designed by both primary sources as well as secondary sources. According to Malley, Kean’s version of Sardanapalus has the authenticity of Byron’s version and the celebration of the British successful excavation at Nineveh and the connection between Mesopotamia and Briton (2007, p. 142). Kean’s work was significant in the reception of Northern Meso- potamia in Victorian Britain because it was perhaps the first example to have combined elements from actual Assyrian treas- ures and modern artworks themselves designed by Assyrian heritage in classical writings, therefore, a better insight into the life of the Assyrian civilizations. Another example where issues in the nineteenth century were interplayed and fused with Assyrian sources, consider the historical painting The Babylonian marriage market in 1875 by Edwin Longsden Long at the Royal Academy summer exhibition of 1875. It was a quite significant and con- sequential moment in the reception of Mesopotamia and a cele- brated picture of Victorian Britain as well, termed by Bohrer as “key monument” ((2003, pp. 196–198), where a Mesopotamian theme derived from Herodotus and fused with Mesopotamian artefacts from the British Museum. The painting, as well as the exhibition as a whole, was described as a classic example and authentication of the fantasies of sexual transgression (Seymour, 2013). Long made a detailed study of the Assyrian sculptures of the British Museum and the project took him two years to complete. According to the brief description available in the Picture Gallery at Royal Holloway, University of London, Long’s source for The Babylonian Marriage Market was Herodotus’s account of how Babylonian women were sold at auction. How- ever, Long also depended on his personal travels as well as his visits to the British Museum, where its Assyrian antiquities “Assyrian bas-relief sculptures in the background” are accessible

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to everyone (“The Victorian Web”). Following his travels to the Middle East in 1874 and his studies in the British Museum, Long’s artistic approach considerably changed. He developed a deep fascination with the Middle Eastern archaeology and pain- ted oriental scenes such as The Gods and Their Makers (1878) and The Egyptian Feast (1877). Long’s The Babylonian Marriage Market represents a sensation painting that the Victorians felt in a novel and thrilling way. According to Gilmartin, although Long had been exhibiting at “Associates of the Royal Academy” since 1855, it was not until his 1875 painting that his career took a turn for the better. His applications to study at the Royal Academy schools were rejected and his repeated attempts to join the “Associates of the Royal Academy” resulted in failure. However, The Babylonian Marriage Market made a drastic change: “It was enormously popular, ecstatically praised… and was the key to his gaining the rank of Associate of the Royal Academy the following year” (Gilmartin, 2008, pp. 1–2). Layard was largely responsible for the fascination with ancient Mesopotamia started in the 1950s, and Long’s The Babylonian Marriage Market in 1875 was the publishing fascination of the year.

The press followed Layard’s findings and the related events closely. Among the journals that ardently supported the dis- coveries were the Illustrated London News, The London Times, and the Chronicle Morning. The Illustrated London News com- missioned illustrations of Layard’s Assyrian lion, Nimroud Sculptures, and Kean’s staging of Lord Byron’s Sardanapalus, to mention but a few, and on 26 October 1850, the magazine wrote that “we hasten to describe… the large shipment which arrived at the British Museum some days ago… in order to afford the public the earliest opportunity of judging these extraordinary, thought- stirring sculptures,” promoting itself as an alternative museum for people who could not make it to the British Museum (“Nimroud Sculptures,” p. 331). The Mesopotamian discoveries were used by the press to spread new knowledge of human history, allowing Victorian readers to experience historical climates. As Hvattum put it, “[b]y means of vivid descriptions and large, beautiful images,” the press “transported the reader back to an imaginary past” (2017, p. 2). Kean’s Sardanapalus was produced at the Princess’ Theatre on 13 June and played till 2 September 1853. On 18 June 1853, the Illustrated London News reported its fas- cination, especially with the way Kean’s version could “replete with poetic feeling, connects itself with the most astonishing of modern archaeological discoveries” (“Princess’ Theatre,” p. 593). On 14 June 1853a, a critic in The London Times praised Kean for his inclusion of “those Assyrian antiquities of which Lord Byron never dreamed” (“Princess’s Theatre,” p. 7). On 11 October 1853b, another critic in the Morning Chronicle admired the new production, which took “hold on the public imagination” with “panoramic series of illustrations to ‘Layard’, a strange and interesting revivification of the friezes and reliefs of old Nineveh, and the bringing back of the pomp and glitter of the splendour- loving and warlike Assyrians” (“Princess’s Theatre,” p. 5). The focus on the reception of new discoveries made the press key to understanding the changing perspectives of art and literature in the nineteenth century.

After almost two decades, George Smith, an early English scholar of Assyriology who was self-taught in Biblical and Near Eastern Archaeology, could decipher the Gilgamesh tablets dis- covered by Layard. Smith was diligently searching for fragments that might contain materials from the Old Testament, taking from the British Museum as a home, refuge, and inspiration for his innovative talents. When he discovered the flood tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh, he immediately connected this flood story to the biblical Deluge, and in a few months, he announced his discovery. The intersection of Smith’s discovery and the Bible sparked theological debate as well as considerable excitement. The

first person in Victorian Britain who was stunned by the dis- covery was Smith himself. Recounting the rise and development of Assyriology, Budge writes that Smith’s discovery “produced in him an almost incredible state of mental excitement… he said, ‘I am the first man to read that after more than two thousand years of oblivion.’ Setting the tablet on the table, he jumped up and rushed about the room in a great state of excitement, and, to the astonishment of those present, began to undress himself!” (1925, pp. 152–153). The Deluge (1872) The Daily Telegraph, 14 November announced in advance that “The Deluge–An impor- tant discovery in Biblical Archaeology has been made by Mr. Geo Smith, of the British Museum, who has, among the Assyrian records, met with an account of a deluge similar to that recorded in Genesis. Mr Smith will read a paper on the subject before the Society for Biblical Archaeology in the course of next month” (“The Deluge”). On 18 November 1872a, the Belfast News-Letter announced that new evidence of the Old Testament would be presented by a fresh Assyriologist (“Editorial”). The discovery was boasted as a life-changing experience that would change Smith’s perspectives, and those of many others (Smith, 1873, p. 213). The event was also excitedly announced by Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper on 17 November 1872a (“Chaldean Account of the Deluge”), the Birmingham Daily Post on 19 November 1872b (“Editorial”), the Aberdeen Journal on 20 November 1872b (“Chaldean Account of the Deluge”), the Newcastle Courant on 22 November "1872c" (“Chaldean Account of the Deluge”), and the Pall Mall Gazette on 22 November 1872 (“Reuters Telegrams”).

On 3 December 1872, Smith made his discovery public at the Society for Biblical Archaeology in London, introducing the Standard Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic to the English-speaking world. Smith opened his stunning presentation with “[a] short time back I discovered among the Assyrian tablets in the British Museum, an account of the flood; which… I now bring before the Society.” Then Smith made reference to the Epic of Gilgamesh as a whole: “These tablets were originally at least twelve in number, forming one story or set of legends, the account of the Flood being on the eleventh tablet” (Smith, 1873, p. 213). He then moves on to describe the style of the writing, the characters, the theme of immortality, the eleventh tablet, concluding that the Babylonian account of the deluge is with parallels to the biblical and Greco-Roman accounts of the flood stories. Gilgamesh, or Izdubar as he was called in Smith’s presentation, corresponds to “Nimrod of the Bible” and “the Greek Xisuthrus” (1873, pp. 213–234). The audience was amazed and bewildered by his boast that these accounts have shared origins and meanings in the ancient Chaldea, awaiting further research. Smith received the praise of the audience, including scholars, reporters, and Prime Minister William Gladstone. Gladstone, for example, encouraged Smith to get funding for further excavations at Nineveh and join the Society for Biblical Archaeology. Gladstone appreciated the discovery not only because of the inclusion of the flood story but also because of the references Smith made to the ancient Greek tradition. Gladstone published several works on Homer, showing a scholarly interest in the ancient Greek poet. The discovery of Gilgamesh was reported the next day, 4 December 1872, by the London Times (“Chaldean History of the Deluge”), which brought Smith’s innovative discovery worldwide attention. Overnight, new thought-provoking questions were in the public domain, leaving the Victorians pondering. Such questions included: Have you heard about the great discoveries at the British Museum? Was not culture born in Greece? Which flood tradition was older and more authentic? When and how was the flood tradition transmitted? Were not ancient Mesopotamians different from us? (see Finkel, 2014). One important point is that Smith’s aston- ishing discoveries were announced from a very public platform, causing an immediate sensation, propelling the discoverer into

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the public eye, and earning him worldwide fame. Another point is that from the very start of its modern existence, the Epic of Gil- gamesh has been interpreted in comparison to Homer and the Bible.

The discovery was reported on by international media and Gilgamesh’s adventures were discussed in scholarly publications during that time period. According to the reports published in the periodicals and newspapers, the story of the deluge, used as a source for Genesis, sparked religious controversy and public curiosity. On 5 December 1872, the event was reported by the Daily Telegraph as a “[s]trange scene” that put on public view “the reverse side of the picture. We have the leading statesmen and scholars of England assembled to discuss an account of the Deluge, scratched with a wooden style on a tablet of damp clay by some Chaldean scribe” (“On Tuesday Evening Last”). On 6 December 1872, the Daily Telegraph also reported on “[a]n extraordinary public interest” that had been stimulated by the Mesopotamian account by Smith (“An Extraordinary Public Interest”). On 27 December 1872, an editorial published in the New York Times reads that until the discovery made by Smith, “[h]istory was jealous of Romance.” Yet, “suddenly she gave to the world, by the marvellous skill of a scholar in the British Museum… Mr. George Smith… With what a magic spell those strange, broken sentences carried our minds backward! How far backward? Nobody can safely answer that question” (“The Flood; Reading of the Chaldean Story of the Deluge”). The new dis- covery was also reported in detail by the Daily News on 4 December 1872 (“Society of Biblical Archaeology”), and on 5 December 1872 (“The Chaldean Account of the Deluge”); The Glasgow Herald on 6 December 1872 (“The Chaldean Story of the Deluge”); the Manchester Times on 7 December 1872 (“Chaldean History of the Deluge”); and the North Wales Chronicle on 14 December 1872 (“Chaldean History of the Deluge”).

In January 1873, the Daily Telegraph reported that the cunei- formist Smith obtained its funding for a new excavation in Iraq in order to discover more cuneiform records of the Flood. The excavation has resulted in the discovery of a tablet of Atrahasis, another Akkadian/Babylonian epic, which also includes the story of the deluge. The British Museum later sponsored more exca- vations by Smith, resulting in the publication of Smith’s Assyrrian Discoveries (1875) (see Damrosch, 2007, pp. 34–48). However, the pioneering cuneiformist died in 1876, leaving his ambitious project incomplete. Over the following years, the responses to the discovery were diverse. The news stories partly focused on the intellectual life of Smith (“What We Know of Assyria,” 1872) as well as his career at the British Museum (“The Late George Smith,” 1876, p. 183). Smith was responsible for the categorizing of fragments related to the Ancient Near East discovered by Layard and Rassam. “For convenience of working, I had divided the collection of Assyrian tablets in the British Museum into sections, according to the subject matter of the inscriptions” (Smith, 1873, p. 213). Smith also was a considerable source of richness for “The Department of Oriental Antiquities at the British Museum.”

As a matter of fact, the discovery of the Epic of Gilgamesh got a lot of attention from the press, and the mass media of the time, more popular than books. However, academic biblical scholarship and fiction were other key features of Victorian print culture. Thus, the discovery of Gilgamesh received various intellectual responses as well. Such responses included: The Gilgameshian affirmation of the authenticity of the Bible (Edersheim, 1890, pp. 14–15) and the importance of the accuracy of the cuneiform translation in determining the level of trustworthiness of the account (Bennett, 1873, p. 156). On 22 December 1872, the New York Times published its view of the discovery: “Chaldean inscription… may be regarded as a confirmation of the statement

that there are various traditions of the deluge apart from the Biblical one, which is perhaps legendary like the rest” (“Noah’s Log”). On 11 December 1875, a review published in the Examiner reads that the Chaldean scholarship “is now destroying the inveterate error which has so deeply and injuriously affected the creeds, the legislation, the sympathies, the entire habits of life and thought of the modern world” (“The Chaldean Genesis”). The initial reception was ambivalent, greeted with enthusiasm which was followed by critique. While the press was enthusiastic about the discovery, the editors received many letters from sceptics. For example, a letter appears in the Daily Telegraph on 10 December 1872, asking for some additional discussion of how the discovery, “as bearing upon our received and accepted theological traditions, is regarded by the literati” (“Letter to the Editor—Chaldean Story of the Deluge”). In conclusion, the Victorians were, to some extent, convinced that the biblical account of the Flood was not the only source of knowledge, that it was derived from earlier traditions, and that Gilgamesh had demonstrated the existence of these traditions. However, none of this information was necessary to address the question of the overall reliability of Genesis.

Smith’s discovery changed the Victorians’ relationship to his- tory and time. Stories that were supposedly derived from the Old Testament and considered as the origin of human beings and planets were already included in the Mesopotamian epic. The date of the Hebrew Bible is difficult to specify and the topic has sparked more controversy and debate among Historians, Bib- licists, and Hebraists recently. Various dating approaches have been used in order to obtain reliable outcomes in that respect. However, studies turned more to tracing the history of the Bib- lical Hebrew by engaging in scholarly dialogues with linguistic, textual, and literary critics. Consider, for example, Ronald Hen- del’s and Jan Joosten’s How Old is the Hebrew Bible? (2018). The authors, making a comprehensive diachronic analysis of Biblical Hebrew’s evolution, could determine three phases or “chron- olects” of the Biblical Hebrew: Classical Biblical Hebrew (CBH), transitional Biblical Hebrew (TBH), and late Biblical Hebrew (LBH). They could locate the historical context of CBH in the pre-exilic period, while the historical contexts of TBH and LBH were situated in the long sixth century and post-exilic period, respectively (Hendel and Joosten, 2018). However, the oldest texts of the Bible were not written until at least one millennium after the Epic of Gilgamesh. By 2500 BCE, the historical king was revered in cults, deified, and referred to as the king of the neth- erworld. Following the time of the king Sargon of Akkad (circa 2340–2284 BCE), the founder of the Akkadian empire, the so- called Sumerian tales were scripted in Sumerian cuneiform during the so-called “Sumerian Renaissance” around 2100 BCE. Around the time of Hammurabi (1792–1750 BCE), an anonymous author combined these various independently existing tales and legends, creating an aesthetically cohesive whole, written in the Semitic Akkadian language (Schrott, 2001, pp. 12–15; Ziolkowski, 2011, p. 7). During the Middle Babylonian Period (1600–1000 BCE), this Akkadian version was extensively known and was copied and translated into Hittite and Hurrian, among other languages (see George, 2007, pp. 237–254). The Standard Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic reached such a reliable shape by 1200 BCE.

Some of the nineteenth-century discussions that resulted from the translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh show a significant tension in Victorian beliefs about the past, present, and future. As Cregan-Reid put it, “[t]he rediscovery… became the fulcrum for a series of debates about time and history… The oldest epic… contained stories that had been thought to be original to the Old Testament, but Gilgamesh, it was revealed, was written many centuries before even the earliest parts of the Bible” (2013, p. 3). The Mesopotamian deluge account appeared to foreshadow, parallel, and support the Genesis flood narrative, excitedly

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establishing a brand-new field of research in the early period of Old Testament history (Ziolkowski, 2011, p. 55). The resurgence of the Mesopotamian epic revitalized a once-tattered and ruined history. The way the discovery was publicized in the global media and how Gilgamesh’s stories were subsequently used in maga- zines, journals, and geological theories indicate Victorian anxi- eties about history. Had the Victorians assimilated thoughts related to the Orient and deep time, “then the rediscovery of the Epic of Gilgamesh would have been of interest principally to antiquarian specialists rather than the newspaper-and periodical- reading masses” (Cregan-Reid, 2013, p. 4). Turri affirmed that “[t]here was such hype surrounding the rediscovered hero” (2020, p. 199). Some scholars sought, in the discovery, compelling evi- dence of the authenticity of the Bible (Chavalas, 2002; Finkel, 2014, pp. 85–87), while others clearly suggested that the Meso- potamian material could be the foundation on which the Bible was written (Jensen, 1890; Zimmern, 1901). Such press and news releases and scholarly writings increased public awareness and served as the basis for its contemporary popularity. Moreover, our interpretations today are heavily informed by the Victorian contexts of the nineteenth century.

The initial reception of the Epic of Gilgamesh was dominated by religious and scientific concerns: Darwinian paradigms and geological findings disrupted the structures of a Judeo-Christian Western society. Rediscovery of ancient tablets from a prehistoric non-Western culture was enough to call into question even the originality of scientific and biblical scholarship: Shattered tablets were felt by many to have shattered long-standing assumptions. The rediscovery problematized Thomas Burnet’s Sacred Theory of the Earth (1681), Charles Darwin’s The Origin of species (1859), and Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830–33). As Cregan- Reid notes, “it is not possible to speak of ‘the Victorians’ as a homogeneous group. The Victorian intelligentsia may have been cautiously enthusiastic about evolutionary theory… but that does not mean that all ‘Victorians’ had accepted Darwin’s ideas, or indeed Charles Lyell’s” (2013, pp. 4–5). A better understanding of the Victorians’ cultural, artistic, aesthetic, and political paradigms of time and history or what Cregan-Reid calls “historical sublime” can be gained by referring to their fundamental historical context modalities. The Gilgamesh controversy has played a significant role in creating a more grandiose view of history in the late nineteenth century. This would suggest that the Greeks, rather than being the originators of culture, are latecomers in social, intellectual, political, and aesthetic developments. Thus, Gilga- mesh’s rediscovery was a more effective “form of historical evi- dence” of time and history than other paradigms, from Genesis to evolutionary and geological theories, therefore, making the modern tension more complex but interesting (Cregan-Reid, 2013, pp. 3–38). Within this new framework, the chronologies and meanings of the Bible as well classical Western texts were re- tested against other forms of historical evidence. Cregan-Reid suggests that “[t]he Victorians… were persuaded that the biblical account was not the sole source for information on the Flood, that it was constructed from older traditions, and that Gilgamesh proved the existence of such traditions” (2013, p. 58). Such tra- ditions included: Sin against Nature and/or God (the crimes of Adam and Eve are reminiscent of those of Enkidu and Gilgamesh against divinity) and God curses Adam and Eve, just as gods curse Enkidu and Gilgamesh. Both stories narrate how one is deprived of immortality, but they achieved that immortality in another way. Parallels between Gilgamesh and the Hebrew Bible and other biblical and literary works are detailed in a variety of recent works (see Kendall, 2012, pp. ii–1xvii; Milstein and Rezetko, 2016; Farzana, 2020). Turri maintains that the return of Gilgamesh became the foundation for the modern view that the Greek Heroic Age is but a late “stage in the development of

human societies,” following the Sumerian Heroic Age (2020, pp. 200–201). We have already seen how since the discovery of Assyrian materials in the mid-nineteenth century ancient Greek writings became relatively no longer primary sources for art and literature. Gilgamesh was rediscovered by and for the Victorians unintentionally “by chance” and then intentionally “by design” (Schmidt, 2019, p. xiii). The Victorians turned to the ancient Mesopotamian culture in order to understand the origin of man and planet rather than relying on the Darwinian paradigm that dominated modern Western culture. A contemporary journalist, wrote that following Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, Gilgamesh felt to many Victorians “like another great crack in the edifice of… Christianity” (Adamson, 2015 “The Man who uncovered Assyria”). Thus, the discovery of Gilgamesh questioned the ori- ginality of the Bible and the Greeks. If the nineteenth century was the century of (cultural) history, then Gilgamesh was involved in the construction of that history. According to Labat et al., the rediscovery of the Gilgamesh Epic was not simply accidental, but also a product of the predominant secularism and discontent that characterized the era. The significance of Gilgamesh extends beyond its connection to the biblical flood account. The epic is characterized as the most exemplary manifestation of Mesopo- tamia’s Semitic extraordinary creativity (Labat et al., 1970). Gil- gamesh and the time of its rediscovery have a rich thematic overlap. Themes and motifs of mythology and immortality are practically prevalent across a variety of literary and cultural works from the nineteenth century (Cregan-Reid, 2013, p. 28). The return of Gilgamesh satisfied the “hunger for myth” epitomized in figures like Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche (Ziolkowski, 2011, pp. 9–26). Smith’s paper “The Chaldean Account of the Deluge” (1872), his project Assyrian Discoveries (1875), and other writings by him and Sir Henry Rawlinson were a cultural event and subject of interest to many, including those who were engaged in Oriental studies such as the scholars in “The Department of Oriental Antiquities at the British Museum.” According to Cregan-Reid, Smith’s intriguing foundation helped the Victorians value the distinction between natural and cultural history (2013, pp. 39–41). Known as the decipherer of the now world-famous “eleventh-tablet,” which included the Chaldean [Neo-Babylonian] story of the Flood, Smith had changed the intellectual life of the Victorians. Gilgamesh was viewed as a new “phenomenon:” “a late episode in the general Western fascination with the Near East” (Ziolkowski, 2011, p. 189). Despite the fact that the reception of Gilgamesh in the modern world has been considerably high, scholars emphasized that more research is needed now to fully take advantage of the rich heritage of the Mesopotamian epic (Damrosch, 2007). As shown by repre- sentative surveys conducted, the Gilgamesh Epic has been astonishingly received by the West in a variety of literature and the arts over the past century and a half. Commenting on the chronological list of works that he appended in his work Gilga- mesh among Us, Ziolkowski writes,

If we compare this phenomenon to the reception of other masterpieces of world literature, it is difficult, if not impossible, to find anything remotely analogous. While Homer’s Achilles and Odysseus, Virgil’s Aeneas, the figures of Minoan Crete, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and the biblical myths have all continued to leave their imprint on our time, nowhere have they had such a varied and pervasive cultural impact as has the Sumerian hero. (2011, p. 189).

Comparing Ziolkowski’s Gilgamesh among Us (2011) to his other works on Virgil, Minos, Ovid, and Jesus, we can suggest that the Mesopotamian hero has exceeded most other afore- mentioned classics in reception. This has been already realized by Ziolkowski himself. Ziolkowski planned to title his book as

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Gilgamesh and the Moderns, following the model of his earlier books Virgil and the Moderns (1993), Ovid and the Moderns (2005), and Minos and the Moderns (2008). But then he realized that there was something special about the return of the Sumerian hero. The reason behind changing the title of the book to Gil- gamesh among Us is “the astonishing popularity of Gilgamesh” (2011, pp. xii–xiii). This understanding of the high status of Gilgamesh in popular culture and literature has also been affirmed by Pryke (2019, p. 134). According to Ziolkowski, the only figure who approximates the Mesopotamian figure in invading popular culture is the Cretan Minotaur (2011, pp. xii–xiii, 220). This Ziolkowski’s suggestion also stems from the chronological list of works in the lengthy appendices and extensive bibliography of scholarly studies of Gilgamesh. From the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century, authors of all kinds turned to Gilga- mesh, reflecting the final part of successive waves of a long pro- cess of reception since the time of Herodotus. The tension, secularity, and anxiety that characterized the modern age made the public increasingly well prepared for the reception of Gilga- mesh in the late nineteenth century and its aftermath. As Ziolk- owski put it, “the epic burst upon the scene” at a time with “an urgent immediacy” (2011, p. 191). Gilgamesh encountered a public that was becoming more and more secularized and willing to find alternatives for their discourse in multiple contexts, and the Victorians resolved to re-evaluate their relationship, not only to the Bible, but also to the Greek and Roman classics.

In the mid-twentieth century, though the significant popular- ization of the Epic of Gilgamesh has been affirmed, it could be regretted that the epic was merely a “remote topic” that, unlike Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey, had not become part of the Western canon (Stamm, 1952, pp. 292–311). This is perhaps because Gilgamesh was not included in Robert Hutchins’ and Mortimer Adler’s 54 volumes of their Great Books of the Western World (1952) nor in the Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces (1987). Such a feeling of regret stems from the realization that the epic deserved more careful attention. Even if the epic was still remote, the story has later changed dramatically. The Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature (1998), the Prentice-Hall World of Literature (1999), the Norton Anthology of World Literature (2003) and the Bedford Anthology of World Literature (2004) open with Gilgamesh. The epic has been widely studied in uni- versity courses on literary heritage, world and comparative lit- erature, religious history and world mythologies. The epic has been heralded as the one of greatest epics from ancient non- Western civilizations (Moore, 2010), and there are more than fifteen recent great English translations and over eighty versions worldwide available. The epic is adapted to online videos, tele- vision series, illustrated versions, video games, comic books, and music.

Gilgamesh and growing international reception Being part of a rich literary heritage, the Epic of Gilgamesh reappeared in a multitude of literary and artistic creations. Var- ious German and American poets and novelists were influenced by the epic. The first literary adaptations were Leonidas Le Cenci Hamilton’s Ishtar and Izdubar (1884), Rudolf Pannwitz’s Das namenlose Werk (1920), and Zabelle C. Boyajian’s Gilgamesh: A Dream of the Eternal Quest (1924). Following the First World War, several German artists, including Richard Janthur, Josef Hegenbarth, and Rolf Nesch, were inspired to depict characters and settings from the epic in their illustrations for Georg Burc- khardt’s instantly well-received translation Gilgamesch (1916). Since the late nineteenth century, the epic has continued to be retold in fictional and poetic works and the growing familiarity of the Gilgamesh themes has been increasing up until the present.

Soon the epic tempted American, Italian, German, and French writers to present the material, with different degrees of authenticity, to their nations. Artists depicted scenes from the epic in exhibitions as book illustrations in a range of modern styles. The epic attracted the attention of many other scholars and writers for its liturgical and dramatic elements.

In Germany, Friedrich Delitzsch published the cuneiform fragments of Tablet XI in his Assyrische Lesestücke (1876). Paul Haupt published the entire cuneiform text of Das Babylonische Nimrodepos (1884), establishing the groundwork for all sub- sequent interpretations of the epic. Gilgamesh was first made available to the general public when Alfred Jeremias released his translation of Izdubar-Nimrod (1891). This was the first complete translation of the epic which concludes with Jeremias’s empha- sized statement that “the renewal of the excavations in Nineveh is in the interest of international scholarship” (1891, p. 44). A noteworthy indication of the international fascination sur- rounding the subject is the in-depth review of Jeremias’ transla- tion that appeared in The New York Times on May 10, 1891. The review highlights that “the main interest of the work centres in the account of the flood” and suggests that “Hebrews and Babylonians were branches of the same great Semitic family” (S S M, 1891, p. 18). In Das Gilgamesch-Epos in der Weltliteratur (1906), Peter Jensen draws comparisons between Gilgamesh and a number of biblical characters, including David, Samson, Abraham, Isaac, and Jesus. The late nineteenth-century reception of the epic was summarized by Friedrich Delitzsch in his Babel und Bibel (1902): “a considerable Babylonian element adheres to our religious thought through the medium of the Bible” (1902, p. 44). The controversy caused by Delitzsch’s statements led him to write Die große Täuschung (1920–1921), proposing that the Old Testament should be completely excluded from the Christian canon and suspect the possibility that Christ was descended from Aryans.

Morris Jastrow provided the first incomplete prose translation of the epic into English in his book The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria (1898). He thinks that the biblical story of Samson was modelled after Gilgamesh. While the first complete translation into English was R. Campbell Thompson’s The Epic of Gilgamesh (1929). The American William Ellery Leonard offered his own poetic translation Gilgamesh: Epic of Old Babylonia (1934). According to Ziolkowski, the felicity of Leonard’s verse was hailed by critics in most of the major newspapers and journals, including Poetry, The Boston Transcript, The New Republic, The Saturday Review, and New York Times, who warmly welcomed Leonard’s work (2011, p. 45). Leonard’s translation also caused the Meso- potamian epic to be publically considered as the phenomenally successful story of civilization (Durant, 1954, pp. 50–54). Simultaneously, talented writers from different nations tried their hands at fictional or poetic retellings of the epic in their own languages. Such talents with the date of their retellings included: The Russian N. S. Gumilew (1919), the Polish Józef Wittlin (1922), the Hebrew S. Tchernichowsky (1924), the Dutch J. H. Eekhout (1925) and Franz M. T. Böhl (1941), the French Georges Contenau (1939), the Danish F. L. Østrup (1940), the Turkish Muzaffer Ramazanoglu (1942), the Finnish Armas Salonen (1943), the Italian G. B. Roggia (1944), and the Swedish Kn. Tallqvist (1945). Consequently, the ancient epic was received in a really international manner. Although there was no immediate literary reaction to these endeavours due to the Second World War, the adaptations quickly took shape in the years that followed.

In the early twentieth century, English and German intellec- tuals took part in literal or spiritual journeys, which Hermann Hesse and W. B. Yeats titled Journey to the East (1932) and “Sailing to Byzantium” (1927), respectively, in an attempt to find

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metaphors for a Western culture that they believed was collap- sing. German intellectuals brought the Epic of Gilgamesh to the attention of a wider audience as literature and philosophy. They identified in the epic universal human concerns: Gilgamesh and Enkidu are tentatively identified by Sigmund Freud as the indi- vidual and his appetite; Carl Gustav Jung sees Gilgamesh as the individual who breaks free from his reliance on the unconscious (the deities); Rainer Maria Rilke enthusiastically heralds the epic of fear of death; Hermann Hesse extols the hero who faces death; Elias Canetti sympathizes with Gilgamesh’s loss of Enkidu; and Rudolf Pannwitz recognizes an ancient Orient that possesses a wisdom that has been lost to subsequent Western civilizations (Ziolkowski, 2011, pp. 194–195; Lewis, 2021, p. 25). English and American cultural anthropologists also shared their ideas with Gilgamesh. Consider, for example, Ernet Becker’s neo-Freudian illumination of human nature in The Denial of Death (1973) (Gracia, 2005, pp. 541–544). Moreover, the philosophical world of Gilgamesh was shown relevant to modern audiences (Kluger, 1991).

Apart from the aforementioned literary adaptations by Boya- jian, Pannwitz, and Hamilton, the primary reception was mostly a tendency of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. In order to comprehend the rationale behind the distribution in terms of both geography and temporality, one needs to examine beyond the formal aspects of the reception to its conceptual aspects. Since the 1940s and 1950s, the Gilgamesh story has been intended for postmodern popular audiences. Consider Theodor H. Gaster’s The Oldest Stories in the World (1952), for example, which was intended for a general audience. The ancient story has been also portrayed in a multitude of artistic mediums, including literature, poetry, drama, opera, film, painting, and more. These portrayals took different modes of modernization: translation, fictional and dramatic revisions of the Gilgamesh theme, post- figurative mode, and thematic or motivic analogues (Ziolkowski, 2011, pp. 47–78). One of the best studies that helped resuming religious debates was Alexander Heidel’s Gilgamesh Epic and Old Testament Parallels (1949). In America, Samuel Noah Kramer and Ephraim Avigdon Speiser included their translations in James B. Pritchard’s Ancient Near Eastern Texts (1950). Many of the American adaptations that followed were based on their translations. However, the most important and highly considered translations of the Epic of Gilgamesh are that of Nancy Sandars (1960) and Andrew George (2003).

Four important English and American poets postmodernized the ancient epic: Frank Laurence Lucas, Douglas Geoffrey Brid- son, Charles Olson, and Gregory Corso. Lucas’s Gilgamesh: King of Erech (1948) is a free retelling and de-Sumerianization of the ancient epic. Bridson’s The Quest of Gilgamesh (1972) makes its narrator a postmodern voice and draws cultural analogies between prehistory and postmodern age and character analogies (Gilgamesh and Enkidu are compared to David and Jonathan, Achilles and Patroclus). Thus, these works were not meant as translations but rather as retellings and rethinking of the Gilga- mesh story. They focused on themes like man and his environ- ment, gold gained from experience, and the search for the secret of immortality, thus synthesizing the ancient epic for the post- modern public. The American Olson and Corso transposed the Sumerian materials and went back to the original sources beyond the Greek and Roman rationalism to a primordial coherence. Corso was known for his lectures on Gilgamesh at “Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics” (1977) and Olson, as found in the introduction, considered himself Gilgamesh and an Ur world in his mind.

The presence of Gilgamesh in post-war musical world can be felt in Ture Rangström’s opera Gilgamesj (1943–1944), Alfred Uhl’s oratorio Gilgamesch (1965), and Per Nørgård’s Gilgamesch:

Opera in Six Days and Seven Nights (1973). While the presence of the epic in Children literature can be felt in Anita Feagles’s He Who Saw Everything (1966), Bernarda Bryson’s Gilgamesh: Man’s First Story (1967), Elizabeth Jamison Hodges’s Song for Gilgamesh (1971), Edgar B. Pusch’s Der kleine Gilgamesch (1978), Victoria Brockhoff’s and Hermann Lauboeck’s Als die Götter noch mit den Menschen sprachen (1981), and Tilo Prückner and Roland Teubner’s theatrical adaptation for children, Gilgamesch und Enkidu (1981). These works are either complete or partial retellings of Gilgamesh episodes intended for youthful readers. For Historical novels and other fictional retellings of the epic composed between the years 1959 and 1970, consider Gian Franco Gianfilippi’s Gilgamesh: Romanzo (1959), Hope Glenn Athearn’s Gilgamesh: A Novel (1970) and Herbert Gianfilippi’s Gilgamesh: A Verse Narrative (1970). Gilgamesh also appears in all kinds of speculative fiction, a genre that involves supernatural elements, including science fiction novels and videogames. Exemplary products are Wilson Tucker’s science fiction novels Time Bomb (1955) and The Time Masters (1953) and Hironobu Sakagushi’s fantasy anthology media franchise Final Fantacy (1987-present). To sum up this growing widespread reception of the epic, consider Ziolkowski’s conclusion: “by the late 1970s Gilgamesh had emerged from what had been primarily a German and English cultural context to become an increasingly familiar name and story in the world at large” (2011, p. 108). Such widespread use of Gilgamesh indicates that even the common readers must have become somewhat familiar with the figure in the mid-twentieth century.

For a variety of reasons, the literalization of the Epic of Gil- gamesh resumed in post-war Germany. These included the ori- ginality of the biblical stories, the debate about the rediscovery, and the recognition of a deep sense of loss through death in the epic after the Second World War. This post-war mood is found in England as well. The epic was reviewed, adapted, and transposed even before the mid-century, however, as a result of the 1960s social unrest, the story of the reception changed significantly, and numerous authors started highlighting the epic’s socio-political relevance for their contemporary world. American poets like Charles Olson and Louis Zukofsky, “saw the epic in less personal- social and more general cultural-historical terms.” For them, “the epic exemplifies the primal and archetypal human nature to which men and women in a decentered modern society need to return” (Ziolkowski, 2011, p. 195). New movements of homo- sexuality and gay rights participated in the adaptation of the epic, resulting in making the epic at the top of the list included in The Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature (1998).

Books on the Ancient Near East cultural memories enthu- siastically celebrated “the ways in which popular culture [and beyond] has consumed aspects of the Ancient Near East to construct new realities,” reflecting on how the Ancient Near East scholarship “have been remembered, constructed, reimagined, mythologized, or indeed forgotten within our shared cultural memories.” Rather than being collections of pieces about the distant past, the books are about the narratives “we tell ourselves about ourselves” (Collins, 2020, p. vii). The Sumerian artefacts began to be described as postmodern works of art (Azara and Marín, 2020). The most likely heralds of Gilgamesh in American popular culture were the voraciously knowledgeable Black Mountain and Beat Generation writers who, for very various reasons, had grown disillusioned with the Socratic-rationalist tradition and had turned to older sources (Ziolkowski, 2011, p. 54). They situated themselves outside the Western Box, instead choosing to dwell in the Urukean world. The unusual use of Gilgamesh as a leitmotif or super(hero) popular culture has been discussed extensively (see Ziolkowski, 2000; Turri, 2020). Exten- sive books on the modern reception of Gilgamesh open with the

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realization that the topic of Gilgamesh “deserved more extensive scrutiny” (Ziolkowski, 2011, p. ix). Many scholars who specialized in the Ancient Near East delivered lectures in their field and corresponded with post-war famous talents like Black Mountain and Beat Generation writers. Such scholars were Robert Braid- wood, Samuel Noah Kramer, Hans Güterbock, and Cyrus Gor- don. They participated in seminars on pre-Homeric literary and cultural heritage, offered by the rector of Black Mountain College, Charles Olson. In 1959, a symposium was held, resulted in “Mythologies of the Ancient World” (1961). The idea of the Seminars continued and resulted in Charles Olson’s Causal Mythology (1965). Among the texts made available are James Pritchard’s (ed) Ancient Near Eastern Texts (1950, 1955, 1969); some of Samuel Noah Kramer’s works, including History Begins at Sumer (1956), From the Tablets of Sumer (1965), Sumerian Mythology (1961), and Mythologies of the Ancient World (1961); and some of L. A. Waddell’s works, such as The Aryan Origin of the Alphabet (1927) and The Indo-Sumerian Seals Deciphered (1925). The postmodern writers’ ultimate task was to extend their studies of American civilization back to the ancient Sumerians as they explained, for example, in Alcherigna, an ethnopoetics magazine edited by Dennis Tedlock and Jerome Rothenberg between the years 1970 and 1980. Various postmodern intellec- tuals collected sources on the Ancient Near East, including works of archaeology, history, myth, and literature and managed to publish Ancient Near Eastern scholarship: typology, diagrams, visions, narratives, histories, et cetera. The intention of Alcher- inga, as the editors write in the introduction to the first issue (1970), is not a scholarly “journal of ethnopoetics,” but a platform where our best-talented authors bring back the archaic and pri- mitive cultures to the Americans’ minds so that they can find their real identity. Interestingly, the editors conclude their state- ment of intention by writing that the Western version of a crisis is to be found in ancient non-Western culture and literature as epitomized in “the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh” (Rothenberg and Tedlock, 1970, pp. 1–77). Twentieth-century writers had great access to Ancient Near Eastern material, possessed the ability to read and assimilate materials on the archaic, and were enthu- siastic readers of Ancient Near Eastern scholarship, including the Sumerian.

The situation in the twenty-first century changed dramatically. Late twentieth-century theories that were once applied for understanding biblical narratives, now become to be applied to enquire into the sources of the text of the Epic of Gilgamesh and its discourse. Consider, for example, Meir Sternberg’s “source- oriented theory” in The Poetics of Biblical narrative (1985), which is used for the purpose of understanding the importance of Gil- gamesh and its world for capturing the postmodern imagination. The attempt is felt more fruitful and conclusive: “the story of one man… may be the story of anybody, anywhere, any place, any time. His story is… anybody’s story… the epic remains relevant in post-modem society” (De Villiers and Prinsloo, 2005, p. 165). According to Helle, Gilgamesh used the greatest trick of litera- ture: “to tell the story of one person and make it feel like the story of everyone. It is a trick that Gilgamesh pulls off to perfection” (2021, p. vii). The novelist Ali Smith could be intrigued enough by this trick to consider the epic as “Gold from the Old” and dub it “the original epic of human self-knowledge” (2006). Thus, Gilgamesh is undergoing a rebirth because the broken narrative of the ancient epic is the broken narrative of postmodern life.

The late twentieth and early twenty-first century saw a dra- matic expansion of adaptations and translations of the epic, its inclusion in significant anthologies of best world literature, and readable introductions. The initial babel/Bible controversy was revived but with more sophisticated mood, taking into account the role of religion in the ancient civilizations. Excellent new

translations appeared by Benjamin R. Foster (2001), Andrew George (1999, 2003) and Stephan M. Maul (2005); retellings in verse and prose, consider Stephen Mitchell’s Gilgamesh: A New English Translation (2000), Derrek Hines’s Gilgamesh (2002) and Gilgamesh: The Play (2007), and Gerhard Begrich’s Gilga- mesch. König und Vagant (2003); fictional revisions or historical novels such as Stephan Grundy’s Gilgamesh (2000) also invaded the scene; works flavoured with dramaturgical and conceptual efforts consider Chad Gracia’s and Yusuf Komunyakaa’s Gil- gamesh: A Verse Play (2006); extended reflections on the epic such as Michael Schmidt’s Gilgamesh: The Life of a Poem (2019) which explored the opportunities and challenges the epic offers (post)modern readers; and creative translation like Jenny Lewis’s Translating Epic from an Unfamiliar Language: Gilga- mesh Retold (2021) and Sophus Helle’s Gilgamesh: A New Translation of the Ancient Epic (2021); and Chinese translations and retellings that offer a better understanding of Gilgamesh the hero and king and a better representation of the friendship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu like Save the Story: Gilgamesgh (2016) by Kang Kai (translator), Marco Lorenzetti (illustrator), and Li Yiyun (teller), and The Epic of Gilgamesh (2021) by Gong Yushu.

TV documentaries, drawings and paintings, and poetic dra- matizations of the epic become of special interest. Take, for example, Peter Moers’s and Frank Papenbroock’s “Das Phantom von Uruk: Fahndung nach König Gilgamesch” (2007). It’s one of the interesting documentaries that suited the public’s taste. Jenny Lewis’s About Gilgamesh (2009) is one of the dramatizations that reminds the audiences of the Greek chorus. Analogies of figures and cultural sites are a common German tendency in the early twenty-first century exhibitions of drawings and paintings through transparencies and oratorios: The Urukean Walls as an analogy to the Berlin Wall and Gilgamesh as an analogy to Jesus (Ziolkowski, 2011, p. 155, 169). The modern age also saw minor attempts to consider Gilgamesh as a sacred drama and trace the epic to ritual sources due to its hero’s quest for mortal or eternal life. Within this box, consider, for example, Jane Harrison’s Ancient Art and Ritual (1913), Theodor H. Gaster’s Thespis: Ritual, Myth and Drama in the Ancient Near East (1950), Ger- trude R. Levy’s The Sword from the Rock (1953), and Patrice Cambronne’s Gilgamesh, or Glory between Power and Destiny (2000).

During this growing international reception, the age also saw the emergence of theories regarding the Near East. One theory worth mentioning is Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978): A focus on Western deformation of Near Eastern mindedness and scho- larship. Another major view regarding the Near East considers Samuel Huntington’s theory of “The Clash of civilizations” (1993) or The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996): The interaction between the West and non-Western civilizations is accompanied with a postmodern cultural conflict. Furthermore, as noted by Emmerich, the Orientalists’ journeys to the Near East have been compared to Gilgamesh’s journey to the Cedar Forest and the home of Utnapishtim (Noah). While Gil- gamesh returned a better king with a high level of knowledge, the European Orientalists returned with wide knowledge about their past and future (2016, p. 252; 2003, pp. 39–77). The international reception of Mesopotamian literary and cultural heritage started since the second part of the nineteenth century. For instance, Espesito, in his dissertation The Artistic Discovery of Assyria (2011), devoted almost three chapters to the discussion of Assyrian discoveries in France from 1850 to 1950. Nevertheless, Espesito makes no mention of Gilgamesh or George Smith’s contribution. Built on this extensive review, each nation’s reception of the Epic of Gilgamesh calls for a separate detailed study.

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Gilgamesh as ancient and modern literary and cultural phenomenon After almost two millennia of oblivion, Gilgamesh’s return in the second part of the nineteenth century gave rise to his revival of popularity, and—as it had been in the times of the Ancient Near East—he once again immediately entered the collective con- sciousness. Recently, there began a tendency of offering exhibi- tions to examine the close connection between the interesting story of Gilgamesh’s rediscovery and the developments made in all aspects of life in the present. The exhibitions covered various areas of scholarship. These included myth and journey, the creation of the world, Sumerian historical kings, space and architecture, Sumerian legacy, and Sumer and contemporary art. The first major exhibition devoted to the ancient Mesopotamian world that was discovered in the nineteenth century and its importance to the present is Before the Flood. Mesopotamia, 3500–2100 BC (30 November 2012–24 February 2013). The exhibition offered a chance to travel through time and space to Mesopotamia in the fourth and third millennia BCE, learning about the most recent research conducted on the Sumerian heritage and seeing the profound impact that this heritage had on modern society. The exhibition examined the worldview that the people of ancient Mesopotamia had a view that has largely been transmitted to the modern West through Greek mythology and the Bible. The conclusion summed up all the findings: all cultural and literal forms have their roots in Sumer. Compared to Greece, Sumer was much earlier. It was the most fundamental and pure type of culture. The most interesting part of the conclusion considers various modern and postmodern authors’ reputations, their projects of creating postmodern Gilgamesh and restoring the original human nature, and their immense influence on the public audience and later poetics and aesthetics. Finally, the exhibition concluded that the social and political disorders, including those of the 1950s and 1960s, have their roots in these postmodern writers who situated themselves outside the Western thought tradition, instead drawing upon Mesopotamian culture to inform their postmodern posture (Azara, 2012–13).

Another more recent exhibition, Sumer and the Modern Paradigm (28 October 2017–21 January 2018) was perhaps the first exhibition of its kind, examining the relationship between the archaeological excavations in modern-day Iraq during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the resulting development of modern aesthetics. The Epic of Gilgamesh and its influence on pre-and-post War art was a major concern. One of the conclusions that the exhibition came up with was that Gil- gamesh was no longer an oppressive human facing both the outside world and himself; instead, he was a human being con- scious of his situation and extremely proud of his accomplish- ment—direct experiences that led to coherence and unity of Uruk. Violence does not exist in Gilgamesh, instead it is con- tained in the way we read the epic. The most interesting part of the conclusion considers the mid-twentieth-century reception of the Epic of Gilgamesh, some postmodern writers’ fame, their projects of creating postmodern Gilgamesh and restoring the original human nature, and their influence on later poetics and aesthetics (Azara, 2017–18).

The crisis of the European civilization is analysed, concluding that “there is no longer any way out of the crisis of European culture on any hitherto tested path” except “merging of our European half-cultures… with the great classic Oriental cultures” (Pannwitz, 1947, p. 180). The third millennium BCE Babylonia is seen as having “a classic spirit,” while our contemporary notions represent the “complete barbaric condition of the spirit.” The perverse professionalism and false Eurocentricism deepened the public’s soul and spirit and increased their absorption of ancient oriental cultures, especially that of Sumer (Pannwitz, 1947, pp.

150–188). In fact, the return of Gilgamesh caused a constant tension, calling for a re-assessment of Westernism and resulting in the emergence of Oriental theories and Oriental aspects of Gilgamesh. “One of the intellectual beneficiaries of that public turmoil was Edward Said and his book Orientalism” (Ziolkowski, 2011, p. 109), an attempt to “expose sometimes far-fetched new aspects of the ancient epic of Gilgamesh thus ended with a monument of brilliant Assyriological scholarship that laid the groundwork for the reception in the twenty-first century” (Ziolkowski, 2011, p. 153). Not only Orientalists benefited from the contemporization of Gilgamesh and showed its relevance to the present, but also psychoanalysts, constructivists, and ecolo- gists, to mention but a few. Otherness was consumed during a period of political and social upheaval when archaeology was a popular practice and had a strong cultural connotation (McBRYAN, 2011). Through the lenses of constructivists, the inspiring tale of Gilgamesh was narrated, showing us how knowledge from the ancient epic may help us overcome the difficulties of present times. From a constructivist perspective, demonizing the Other and acting self-righteously may be self- serving, but exhibiting humility by being receptive to the Other and accepting their legitimacy is the real kind of role model that Western societies require to promote psychological recovery (Zhu and Zheng, 2021, pp. 245–246). Thus, the epic contains profound wisdom that is timeless and transcendental, and it is set in the ancient world that granted shape to the modern West.

The return of the Epic of Gilgamesh created an irony that was expanded by cultural Orientalism itself. The archaeological pro- jects in the nineteenth century were funded by the European governments during a period of intense imperialism. Layard’s, Rassam’s, and Smith’s contributions to the rediscovery of Assyrian remains in Nineveh and their foundations were sent to the British Museum. Kendall notes that “[t]he role of colonialism and the colonialist project of cultural institutions like the British Museum in obtaining and promoting Gilgamesh only enriches the irony of this story” (2012, p. xxxi). This irony, in addition to the West’s recognition of an ancient different methodology of experience, caused psychological disorder as it denies their dis- course of the universe. This fact has been recognized and emphasized by those scholars who translated and introduced the text to contemporary readers, for whom, Gilgamesh offers diffi- cult, demanding, and even dangerous experiences on a psycho- logical level. While there are aspects of the epic that we can identify with our own thinking and sacred tales, the contexts in which the ancients formulated their thoughts were frequently very different from our own. The realization that there are dif- ferent, unique, and irreconcilable ways to experience the world puts us in danger (Kendall, 2012, p. xxxv). Those who have spent a lot of energy on formulating their fundamental assumptions may find it difficult to consider this idea of diversity. The epic is part of an extraordinary literary and cultural heritage that caused disorder concerning how we can encounter it.

A deeper and more comprehensive understanding of the notion of the world is made possible by studying Orientalism in the postmodern context. The widespread reception of Gilgamesh caused postmodern tension and resulted in a call for changing the West’s perspective toward the Orient in order to better promote Eastern and Western cultural interchange, thus increasing the value and significance of studying Orientalism (Yuanchun, 2020). Since the Epic of Gilgamesh has received widespread public and academic interest, academics are no longer encouraged to use Orientalism to create biased ideas or cognitive frameworks about Eastern culture due to the Eastern richness and Mesopotamian mindedness. The long-running, self-centred, ontological, and philosophical Western cultural paradigm has been profoundly influenced by the work of Edward Said, which served as a catalyst

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for the postmodern and contemporary wave of Orientalist thought research. Yuanchun differentiates between two types of Orientalism: traditional and postmodern. The former “focuses on the study of society, culture, literature, history, and other dis- ciplines in the Orient with a Western-centred perspective,” while the latter changes perspectives from “other” to “us.” Yuanchun relates this change to the fact that the scholars “no longer treat the study of Orientalism as a way to form a prejudiced thinking or cognitive system about Eastern culture, as such research is meaningless” because “the differences between Eastern and Western culture are becoming less apparent” (2020, p. 101). Yuanchun can be easily considered right in his perspective if one thinks about the impact of the return of the Sumero-Akkadian Scholarship and the great progress made by China. Thus, the traditional West-centred view of understanding the Orient becomes inadequate due to the Orient’s mindedness and rich heritage. The story changed significantly: The Occident is becoming more and more integrated with the Orient, and the Orient is greatly influencing the Occident. To sum up, Western conceptions of Eastern history were rife with prejudices and employed as a tool of imperialism; these imperialists frequently exploited these conceptions to repress or skew Eastern historical awareness in order to maintain their permanent dominance. Following that, an argument pertaining to this was raised in Said’s Orientalism. Traditional Orientalism is essentially a critical stance toward Eastern scholarship from the perspective of Westerners. However, in the postmodern context, Orientalist research is combined with an interpretation of the Orient based on the actual values of Easterners. As a result, Orientalism and Eastern culture can be better evaluated and studied in a more detailed way and the conflict between Eastern and Western cultures has progres- sively transformed into a new form of dialogue.

Much has been said about the Oriental Influences on the tension, anguish and conflicting demands of the modern age, but, surprisingly enough, no detailed account was given on the posi- tion of the rediscovery of the Epic of Gilgamesh in these previous studies, despite the fact that the scope of the Orientalist studies do cover the Gilgamesh Epic. As Said put it, “Orientalist studies… cover everything from the editing and translation of texts to numismatic, anthropological, archaeological, sociological, eco- nomic, historical, literary, and cultural studies in every known Asiatic… ancient and modern” (1978, p. 52). Unfortunately, it did not happen to Said to refer to the reception and translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh. However, it happened to him to mention the translations of the Quran and The Thousand and One Nights. He also considered the reception of the Oriental historical accounts of the Creation, the Deluge, and the Bible in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (1978, pp. 63–64).

The nineteenth century was, as Edward Said has demonstrated, the golden age of Orientalism, a collection of discursive techni- ques that justified the political supremacy over the Easterners/ Orients by depicting them as different, exoticized people. It is misleading to view the colonial endeavour as merely an imperial power display. Rather, according to Said, modes of knowledge about the East developed by and for persons and organizations in the West supported and even enabled this violent takeover. The Near East was a source of materials that were “reconverted, restructured from the bundle of fragments brought back piece- meal by explorers, expeditions, commissions, armies, and mer- chants into lexicographical, bibliographical, departmentalized, and textualized Orientalist sense” for Western consumption. This textual process, Said says, included the creation of “dictionaries, grammars, commentaries, editions, translations, all of which together formed a simulacrum of the Orient and reproduced it materially in the West, for the West” (1978, pp. 165–166). Moreover, “scientific and archaeological expeditions were always

going East,” especially in the nineteenth century (1978, p. 204). Layard’s Nineveh and Its Remains (1849), for example, was the first textual fragment of the Gilgamesh story, which was the job of European Orientalists. As Emmerich writes, “Layard is himself a prime example of how the discursive construction of the Middle East as a place containing secrets about the history of Western civilization was imbricated in the project of colonial conquest: not just an adventurer in search of the ruins of biblical cities, Layard was also a spy during a time of expanding British political ambitions in the region” (2016, p. 254). Moreover, the efforts of Layard, his partner Hormuz Rassam, and George Smith were also long-effaced and undervalued (see Damrosch, 2007, pp. 21–100; 2003, pp. 39–77). The nineteenth century was an age of Assyr- omania, Orientalism, and intense debate over the origin of the world and human history caused by the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), and the discovery of the Epic of Gilgamesh (1872).

The exploration of cultural memories has shown how they shape the values, bodies and life of societies throughout history (Connerton, 1989, pp. 2–37; Collins, 2020, p. vii; Halbwachs, 1992, pp. 51–81). Scholarly explorations of modern culture and beyond have shown a significant deal of interest in certain ancient scholarships that are more widely known than those of the Ancient Near East and Mesopotamia (De Groot, 2016, pp. 3–48). Such ancient scholarships are Roman and Greek (order, aes- thetics, and politics) (Laird, 2007, pp. 222–236; Collins, 2020, p. vii), and Egyptian (hieroglyphs, pyramids, mummies, etc.) (Collins, 2020, p. vii). However, more recent studies went further to discover how much of an influence the Ancient Near East has had on modern culture (Collins, 2020, p. vii). The Ancient Near East was once considered as a very foreign, mysterious, and threatening Orient world. However, this same world “charms because it is little known” (Lowenthal, 2015, p. 13). Ideas about Mesopotamian civilization were already touched upon in classical and biblical texts, then in texts on geographical and archae- ological explorations. Mesopotamia came to be understood as the earliest cradle of civilization or the origin of human culture in the Old World. Since the earliest colonial adventures and explora- tions in the Near East, Mesopotamia has been Orientalized for Occidental consumption (Bahrani et al., 2011, pp. 56–62). However, gaining access to this distant history was extremely challenging and was only made possible by the valiant deci- pherment of the long-lost cuneiform writing. Although much scholarly construction of Mesopotamia’s prehistory in the nine- teenth century and early twentieth century was remote, implica- tions drawn from them caused a dramatic change in reception in the second half of the twentieth century and they still reverberate in the West’s cultural memories. As Collins put it, “[t]hroughout the first half of the twentieth century, the academic reconstruc- tion of Mesopotamia remained essentially a story of racial conflict with the Sumerians viewed as the founders of civilization, ulti- mately crushed by Semitic conquerors” (2020, p. viii). It was only by the 1950s, due to more translations and conflations of Sumerian literature, myth and history, the Sumerians became to be seen as the precursors of the modern world, having originated the cuneiform scripts, the polis, the wheel, democracy, and coherence. The return of the Sumero-Akkadian heritage not only took a role in increasing the Victorian tension or the Gilgamesh controversy surrounding its rediscovery is a symptom and evi- dence of that tension, but also shows the postmodern tension regarding the fact of the Sumerians. For example, as Cooper shows, in popular imagination, the mythology surrounding the origins of Sumerian civilization has proven remarkably solid, problematizing the conventions that the Sumerians were essen- tially an invention of modern Assyriology (1993, p. 331). Fur- thermore, ancient Sumer becomes accessible to teachers to delve

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into the accomplishments of the world’s primordial cultures in the UK national history curriculum for school students (“National curriculum in England”).

During the nineteenth century, the museum exhibitions, with their ethnographic portrayals, helped disseminate views about the colonial non-Western world—both its past and present. The origins of Western history can be found in the Ancient Near East. Mesopotamian cultures dominated the scene, partly because it was possible to explore places like Ur, Nineveh, and Babylon for artefacts to fill the galleries with amazing findings, but partly because many of these same regions and their inhabitants were already deeply rooted in cultural memory. Exhibits in museums depicted a new alternative image of the Orient (Collins, 2020, pp. ix–x). For Azara and Marín, “[i]t seems clear that the emergence and sustenance of the paradigm of early Mesopotamian art… was forged through the interaction of not only a few artists and art historians, but also gallerists, art collectors, curators, critics, edi- tors, and even some archaeologists, throughout the twentieth century” (2020, p. 29). In fact, the galleries and collections of the European and American Museums acted as the transmission of knowledge, enlargement of the Western imagination and re- shaping their understanding of history, science, culture, and art. Furthermore, the Mesopotamian literary production is heavily utilized as a model in the production of contemporary artworks.

Gilgamesh’s mythos have been incredibly received and crea- tively reused in popular cultures as part of a literary heritage, generating new meanings for modern popular society (Miller, 2020, pp. 141–142). The reason behind the turn to Gilgamesh is that they recognized aspects of themselves in the ancient Meso- potamian hero. Mesopotamian cultural and literary legacies offer a wholly different set of non-Greek problems that have been brought to the West’s attention by distinguished scholars of the Ancient Near Eastern scholarship, catching the imagination not only of all kinds of writers but also of the general public. More- over, Sumerian Heritage is idealized as an archetypal paradigm for the life of eternal ideals (Ziolkowski, 2011). Postmodern writers were looking for a “foreign policy,” and their “‘refusal to accept the limits of knowledge’ was a virtue of their literary and cultural production, where ‘the limits of knowledge’ are under- stood as restrictions cultures impose on human enquiry.” Moreover, the general public’s interest dramatically shifted to thinking of the importance of these writers’ art and their “explicit interest in other regions of the world, especially the ancient region of Sumer” (Herd, 2010, pp. 378–381). Their journey to Akkad and Sumer, “was fundamental, crucial to… poetic re-mapping… re-thinking of… what was once said in Sumer is of importance to an American readership” (Herd, 2010, pp. 389–390). Postmodern writers’ intellect suspected and refuted the Western intellect and scholarship. Instead, they drew upon the ancient Mesopotamian scholarship. As Herd writes, “Nothing is more characteristic” of postmodern writers than their “rejection of the Western tradition in favour of Hittite, Akkadian, and especially Sumerian literature” (2010, pp. 227–228).

Part of the intension now should turn to study the turn to the Epic of Gilgamesh that took place alongside the rise of modern theories of Orientalism and the clash or integration of cultures, and how this provided a context for Mesopotamian engagements. Said’s “Orientalism,” for example, considers not only the Western patronizing representation of the East, but also how the West realized the faults of the European Suzerainty over the last two millennia and the importance of the East to its imagination in the present. This included the Western recognition of aspects of itself in the Middle East and how, since the Second World War, Arab Muslims have become important figures in parts of American culture. Not only is the Orient geographically close to Europe, but it is also the location of the continent’s largest, wealthiest, and

most ancient colonies, the cradle of its languages and civilizations, a rival to its cultural fabric, and one of its most persistent and profound stereotypes of the Other (Said, 1978, p. 1). In spite of Gilgamesh controversy, some sensed that Mesopotamian cultural and literary heritage is still in danger, believing that growing awareness of Sumero-Babylonian scholarship, including the Gil- gamesh Epic, “has the benefit of creating greater awareness of the high value of Ancient Near Eastern cultural capital, and the necessity of preserving Mesopotamia’s legacy for future genera- tions” (Pryke, 2019, p. 7). There is, therefore, a scholarship turn: de-Eurocentring the Western image and returning the Ancient Near Eastern scholarship.

The Gilgamesh Epic is considered as central to the literary heritage of the Ancient Near East and compared to the Hebrew Bible, Classical literature, and world mythology. It has become a cultural icon symbolizing the ancient great Mesopotamian culture and scholarship, giving “a hopeful perspective on future efforts to preserve the cultural heritage of Mesopotamia” (Pryke, 2019, pp. 25–33). For the interest in the Ancient Near East, this is an important turning point. While contemporary instability and warfare have adversely affected Sumero-Akkadian cultural heri- tage, literary evidence for Sumer and Akkad is expanding and becoming increasingly accessible to contemporary audiences. Preserving the cultural legacy of ancient Mesopotamia to future generations necessitates showcasing their distinct historical record for a wider contemporary public, perhaps resulting in bridging the cultural divide or achieving cultural integration. This extraordinary story of Gilgamesh’s rediscovery and reception demonstrates a strong popular interest in prehistorical memories and the various ways that contemporary popular culture con- sumes Ancient Near Eastern legacy and culture. The tendency to expand the Gilgamesh epic as literary and cultural evidence for Mesopotamia to the modern public is diverse, gaining promi- nence as time passes. Only time will tell the degree of success in diversifying the actual ancient Mesopotamia’s story and legacy. Combined, such translations, adaptations, retellings, and exhibi- tions make enduring appraisals of the surge of inventiveness and creativity that Mesopotamia fostered.

Conclusion This paper situated the return of the Gilgamesh Epic inside the box of origin of the multifaceted tension in the Victorian Age and its aftermath. Although the discovery was a relatively late stage in the process of the reception of Mesopotamian antiquities, it has been the fascinating discovery of the age. The rediscovery of the Mesopotamian epic complicated centuries-old and on-going debates about time and history: The major archaeologists of the period utilized it to return the field to its earliest arguments and better understand what time and history meant at the end of the nineteenth century, the Historians, Hebraists, and Biblicists began to question the originality of the Bible and verify its reliability, and figures specialized in literature and/or the arts got access to the primary sources of prehistory to update existing literature or create new fictional arts. Likewise, Gilgamesh’s themes appealed to modern and postmodern audiences. The epic is a moral nar- rative with (post)modern analogies that warns us not to neglect the present and future. It is a work in progress/motion even now, and living with us. Its translation, adaptation, retelling, and integration are on-going.

The Epic of Gilgamesh is one of the earliest and greatest works of literary heritage that has survived. It fell into oblivion for two millennia and was dug up again in the Victorian Age. The story started with the discoveries of Layard, his partner Hormudz Rassam, and George Smith, supported by the fascination of the press, causing the agitation against old assumptions growing

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rapidly. The nineteenth century was an age of intense debate over the origin of the world and human history caused by the pub- lication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), and the discovery of Gilgamesh increased the Victorian tension and became a cultural phenomenon in the modern age. Gilgamesh became a great part of ancient literary and cultural legacies that defined Ancient Near Eastern civilizations, especially the Sumero- Akkadian. But it also becomes a work of world and comparative literature in the modern world.

The value of the Epic of Gilgamesh goes much beyond just being one of the greatest achievements in the humanities and its impor- tance is much more than its theme of fear of death. The epic pro- vides numerous insightful perspectives on existence and universal truths as well as the human predicament in the Ancient Near East that touched us all. Gilgamesh is seen to have a significant direct or indirect influence on ancient Greek literature as well as the later Near Eastern literary world, an intriguing theory that is supported by the occurrence of analogous characters, ideas, and events in the Mesopotamian epic and Homeric epics. However, addressing the reception of the Gilgamesh epic in ancient times is still a developing field of study. Moreover, the extensive review of the reception of the Gilgamesh Epic in modern times has revealed an outstanding volume and variety of writings from various Western nations, across all categories of narrative diversification, including genres and media. Many postmodern writers formed their ideas outside the Western Box, instead taking inspiration from the Mesopotamian Gilgamesh, as in the case of Charles Olson, who criticized Western imperial methodology and looked for Eastern methodology as an alternative to value and describe ancient Mesopotamia. Additionally, the contemporary popular era saw renewed interest in com- memorating the significant impact of both Gilgamesh and the Ancient Near Eastern Heritage, as a whole. There is an increasing contemporary cultural awareness of the Gilgamesh Epic and Mesopotamia, the cradle of civilizations. This, in turn, raises con- sciousness of the diverse aspects of the Ancient Near East and the critical importance of conserving ancient Mesopotamian heritage for posterity.

Received: 25 December 2023; Accepted: 10 June 2024;

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Author contributions Abdullah Qasim Safi Al Hadi: Drafting, data collection, research, revision, editing; Gao Xiaoling: Supervision, revision, editing.

Competing interests The authors declare no competing interests.

Ethical approval Ethical approval was not required as the study did not involve human participants.

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Informed consent Informed consent was not required as the study did not involve human participants.

Additional information Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to Abdullah Qasim Safi Al-Hadi.

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