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George, A. R. : The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic: Introduction, Critical Edition and Cuneiform Texts 1-2. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. xxxiv + 986 p. + 147 plates.
Gilgamesh is often called a Sumerian epic, though it is in fact a product of the Babylonians. The Sumerians did have short poems about Gilgamesh, but they never developed these poems into a long epic. It was in the hands of the Babylonian scribes that the epic took the form we know today as the Gilgamesh epic. Given the importance of this epic it might be thought that a good edition of it is available, but the last full edition of the epic is long out of date, superseded, as works of ancient literature often are, by later finds and interpretations, and the only recent edition is really a student edition. As an edition and translation of the available source texts alone, then, George's work fills an important lacuna.
Although The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic is an edition of all of the Babylonian Gilgamesh texts, it is not constructed in a way that limits its use to Assyriologists. The first four chapters of the work are a general introduction to the epic that does not require knowledge of Akkadian, and can thus be used with profit by scholars outside Assyriology. The first of these chapters treats the literary history of the epic, ranging from the early Gilgamesh texts in Sumerian to the survival of the epic after cuneiform writing disappeared. Though the Babylonian versions of the stories are in part derived from the Sumerian poems, they are, George suggests, largely new works drawing on Akkadian oral and literary traditions that expand considerably the length and profoundness of the story (pp. 4-22). Many of the episodes and motifs of the later Babylonian epic are original to the Babylonian versions, and have no parallels in the Sumerian texts. George also takes up the question of the survival of the Gilgamesh epic in later traditions (54-70). George convincingly demonstrates that, while some vague knowledge of Gilgamesh as a name, and perhaps some of the episodes of the epic, survived, no real knowledge of the epic itself did: "ancient Greek and medieval Jewish and Arabic literature undoubtedly bore at great remove some imprint...