The author writes fascinatingly about how the ‘inadvertently colonial’ spirit of the 1960 Penguin Classics translation by N.K. So far, so good, but you could learn this just as well by reading one of many English versions of the poem that are free online. Enkidu falls sick and dies, and the grief-stricken Gilgamesh wanders the world in search of immortality.
They become best mates and battle monsters together. The latter is seduced and tamed by the holy prostitute, Shamhat. The godlike King Gilgamesh habitually rapes brides on their wedding night, so the gods create a rival to stop him: the hairy wild man, Enkidu. What do you learn? Oddly, a large part of this short book merely summarizes the plot of the ‘Gilgamesh’ poem. Nor of how he died of dysentery in Aleppo, aged 36, leaving behind a wife and six children. You don’t learn how Smith, a former engraver’s apprentice with no archaeological experience, was sent to Nineveh by the Daily Telegraph to track down missing fragments of the Flood tablets - and did. You won’t find much of this in Michael Schmidt’s new book about the poem usually known as the ‘Epic of Gilgamesh’, despite the fact that it is the one Smith had identified, and despite the fact that Schmidt claims to be writing about its ‘life’ - how it began to be created a millennium before the Iliad (making it the oldest long-form literary work in history), how it was lost, and later re-found, and what impact it has had on world culture. Soon the working-class autodidact was presenting his spectacular conclusions to a meeting of grandees, attended by none other than the prime minister, William Gladstone. The tablets were part of a long narrative poem, which, though predating the Old Testament by centuries, included a version of the story of the Flood. He set to it, decoding the cuneiform script to make a series of breakthroughs, culminating in one that excited him so much that, when he recognized it, he had to take his clothes off.
It was at that moment that something clicked in Smith’s head. Then, one day, a museum attendant remarked that it was a shame no one had bothered to decipher ‘them bird tracks’ - by which he meant the weird-looking scratches in clay tablets from the newly rediscovered ancient city of Nineveh. His name was George Smith, and this was his secret passion. In the mid-19th century, around lunchtime, a pale young man with an enormous beard could be seen in the British Museum reading room poring over piles of books about Mesopotamia.
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