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This chapter discusses the contemporization of the Gilgamesh epic from 1979 to 1999. It examines representative examples of several approaches that seized on Gilgamesh to illustrate their views ranging from the most abstractly theoretical through the historical and sociopolitical to the intensely personal, and the varied techniques used to achieve their ends. The period of contemporization began with the efforts of such theories as Orientalism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and ecology to expose sometimes far-fetched new aspects of the ancient epic of Gilgamesh. This period ended with a monument of brilliant Assyriological scholarship—a translation now widely regarded as definitive: The Epic of Gilgamesh (1999) by the British Assyriologist Andrew George, which also includes translations of the other Babylonian and Sumerian texts.

This chapter discusses how Gilgamesh remained alive and well in the first decade of the twenty-first century in art, music, and literature; in forms varying from translations and poetic re-visions to fictional postfigurations and thematic analogies; and in presentations for audiences ranging from awestruck children to jaded postmoderns. However, in the desecularized society of the new millennium, religion once again has taken center stage in many world civilizations, while the clash of these civilizations, notably Western and Muslim, has brought the political dimensions of the epic into the foreground to a degree unmatched in earlier adaptations. Not unsurprisingly, then, these developments show up in recent treatments of Gilgamesh.

This chapter considers the popular reception of the epic of Gilgamesh. The first serious cultural impact of the Gilgamesh epic in the early twentieth century took place in German-speaking countries, where public awareness was kindled by the controversy over Babel and Bible. It was in Germany, moreover, that the general public gained access to the earliest complete and reasonably accessible translations. The first complete translation into English was presented in 1928 by R. Campbell Thompson (1876–1941) in The Epic of Gilgamish, which was based on a new collation of the tablets in the British Museum. Six years after Thompson's translation, the American poet and translator William Ellery Leonard (1876–1944) offered in his Gilgamesh: Epic of Old Babylonia (1934) a wholly different version for the general reader: a rendition into free verse of Hermann Ranke's earlier German translation.

This chapter examines the popularization of the Gilgamesh epic and the broadening of its thematic use from 1959 to 1978. It discusses the many novels, stories, plays, poems, operas, drawings, readings, performances, and new interpretations of the Gilgamesh theme in countries extending from Italy to Poland, in both Europe and North America. These works demonstrate that 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. The story's appeal had moved beyond the initially more somber attraction of immediate postwar audiences because of its message of consolation after death and depression. During the 1960s, such social themes as homosexuality were coming to the fore along with the philosophical-psychological recognition of the archetypal significance of the epic's figures, the representation of the shift from matriarchy to patriarchy, the struggle between titanic action and humanistic contemplation, science fiction, and questions of religion.

Since the mid-twentieth century, the Gilgamesh story has been treated in a variety of aesthetic forms: fiction, poetry, drama, opera, film, painting, and beyond. These treatments, however varied they may be, use one of four basic modes of modernization. First, and most straightforward, is translation, ranging from highly literal to free. Second, are fictionalizing and dramatic revisions of the theme: that is, works that retell the story in its original period and setting while imposing upon it a viewpoint and values characteristic of the writer's own age. The third mode may be called postfigurative: that is, works set in the writer's own time but whose action clearly follows a pattern identified with a mythic model. Finally, there is a catch-all category that might be called broadly thematic or motivic analogues: that is, works sometimes known as “pseudonyms” or imitatio that seek to establish a loose thematic connection with the source work. This chapter examines works from all four categories or modes.

This introductory chapter briefly details the rise of Gilgamesh, a hero of a Mesopotamian epic from the third millennium bce, as a twenty-first-century cultural icon. It then traces the evolution, loss, and rediscovery of the Gilgamesh material, from the earliest Sumerian poems through the Old Babylonian version down to the Akkadian “Standard Form” and beyond to later copies. The last known cuneiform copies were made around 130 bce, and it was never translated into such dominant Western languages as Greek and Latin. The great epic was totally forgotten for over two thousand years until the cuneiform tablets were rediscovered in 1872 in the British Museum's collection of Mesopotamian artifacts. The remainder of the chapter discusses early translations of the Gilgamesh material.

Beginning with attention to the anxious exploration of human relations with other animals and wildness in The Epic of Gilgamesh and Euripides’s Bacchae, this chapter engages the question of the animal in Heidegger, Derrida, and present critical animal debates. It argues that Merleau-Ponty’s work on the animal question anticipated and moved considerably beyond the positions of most present theorists. By examining his attention to scientific animal studies in embryology, Uexküll’s umwelt theory, ethology, and human evolution in the Nature lectures, the chapter closes with a description of his acknowledgment of an evolutionary continuity between humans and other animals. It demonstrates his recognition of symbolic behavior, culture, and proto-linguistic activities among animals that manifest a “strange kinship” with humans.

This concluding chapter summarizes key themes and presents some final thoughts. It argues that the reception of the Gilgamesh epic during the past century and a half has revealed an astonishing number and variety of works from many Western countries and in manifold media and genres, that is unmatched by other masterpieces of world literature. While Homer's Achilles and Odysseus, Virgil's Aeneas, 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 Gilgamesh. The enthusiasm for the epic can be attributed to the ease with which it could be adapted to accommodate the various interests and issues that have rocked the world over the last century. This ability also constitutes a striking testimony to the eternal values embedded in the ancient monument.

This chapter considers the origins of the poem The Epic of Gilgamesh, which tells the story of the adventures of Gilgamesh, the king of Uruk, and his friendship with the wild man Enkidu. The version of Gilgamesh discovered by George Smith dates from the seventh century BC and was apparently written by a ‘master scribe and incantation priest’ called Sin-leqe-unnini. Smith conjectured that it was a retelling of a much older story, and some 90 years later he was proved right. The chapter also asks whether there is any evidence within Genesis that suggests a knowledge or awareness of Mesopotamian stories and religions.

This chapter looks at prehistory by analyzing impasses of language in the Epic of Gilgamesh and parts of the Hebrew Bible. As language comes to define the status of the human, the obstruction of language—for instance, at the revelation at Sinai—comes to figure the divine. The chapter also examines the distinctions the between the Old Testament prophet as a partly dys-/disarticulated purveyor of divine instruction and the fool as depicted in the wisdom literature. In the Hebrew Bible, divine ordinance and normative social order are not intrinsically in conflict. The prophet comes to return the divine and social to their proper relation; the fool is one who fails to comply both with divine mitzvoth and social conventionwhich are, essentially, the same. This is in contrast to the subsequent delineation of the sacred fool of Christian thought, wherein the divine and social contexts diverge.