This object is massively cool. It’s another ancient clay tablet with writing from Iraq, this one a passage from the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh (which I finally got around to reading, motivated by seeing this tablet). Fiction had probably already been around, as well as history, for thousands of years in an oral tradition; but with writing now you have the opportunity to scribble your fictions down so all can enjoy, and future generations of freshmen will have books to buy at the co-op for World Lit 101. But of course the real fun thing about this particular “Flood Tablet” is the story it tells, which is the chapter about angry gods who smite the people of the mideast with a flood, and animals go two by two into an ark, and so forth. Sound familiar? When it was first deciphered, a decade or so after Darwin’s Origin of Species, they were baffled, because this document was clearly written long before the earliest known version of the Bible...and seemed to be telling an earlier version of that well-known Bible story. "But in church, they told us that God dictated the book of Genesis to Moses!" "Did He just tell stories that were popular at the time, instead?" "How could something they said in church be wrong?"
In any event, I’m sorry I had put off reading Gilgamesh all this time, because it really does kick butt. It’s funny, sad, brief, powerful, very human, and--at least, on a first reading--doesn’t offer any easy answers.
No comments:
Post a Comment