Interestin Archeological Findings of The Epic of Gilgamesh
... until they found the palace and the library of Ashurbanipal. As Rassam would have said himself " It was an established rule that whenever one discovered a new palace, no one else could meddle with it, and thus, in my position as the agent of the British Museum, I had secured it to England" (Rassam 95). Although Rassam didn't know that what he had found at the site contained one of the earliest known hero stories, The Epic of Gilgamesh. And then other versions of this epic where found at different places and these showed that the roots of the Gilgamesh epic go back to much earlier times in Mesopotamia, at least to the second millennium BC The only thing that was found to have changed every time that the epic was rewritten were the themes that were modified to suit the needs of the changing times. It was George Smith, one of the handfuls of scholars that could read cuneiform at the time, who translated the tablets and deciphers the Epic of Gilgamesh. Smith was a self-educated scholar that in 1872 came across the tablets in the British Museum and discovered the Chaldean (Babylonian) account of the deluge. While working at this translation he found the flood story had a piece missing and so decided to go on the search for it to Nineveh. In 1873 Smith found, on an expedition funded by a London newspaper, the missing piece. Surprisingly it took Smith less than a week to find such piece. This piece was the part that was missing in the story he had already translated. Rassam claimed that the piece found by Smith was not the missing part of the story, since it was written in the third person , but this only proved later to be part of his jealousies. According to Jame B. Pritchard, the story of Gilgamesh is the first heroic epic known. In it, Gilgamesh seeks the secret of immortality from Utnapishtim, the counterpart to the biblical Noah. The hero of the flood tells how the gods lead him to build a ship in order to save his life. "Aboard the ship take thou the seed of all living things" (Gilgamesh Epic). Utnapishtim is the given an specific instruction on how to build the ship, including some kind of caulking he s supposed to use and an specific measurement. Even though there are some differences between the Genesis account , the similarities are so amazing that they cannot be due to any chances. For example, the number seven in both accounts , The landing on a mount, and the release of a bird. The Babylonian flood story is substantially older than the biblical account in terms of its ultimate roots. In fact it is believed that the Old Testament version is based on the earliest Babylonian account and was modified to suit the new monotheistic beliefs of that time. Then this raises the question of whether there was a real flood and if it is possible to be archeologically proved. In the site of Ur located not so far from the lower Euphrates valley, not so far from the Persian Gulf was where the excavations of Sir Leonard Woolley where. If we refer Ur to the Bible we can find that a list of Sumerian kings refer to "the flood" as a major event in the history of that area, that caused a break in the sequence of the rulers. In the list is found a passage that according to Max Mallowan, the Mesopotamian flood can be best dated to about 2900 BC in this list. Some evidence was first uncovered at Ur in 1929 by Woolley's work team, below the Royal Cemetery of Ur as they were trying to get to the bottom of the stratified mound. Woolley found a thick layer of clean sterile water that had other cultural materials underlying it; He was interested in what other people's reactions would be so he showed his wife the evidence and she said that it was evidence of the Flood. After he decided to expand his excavation in order to find more evidence. Wooley found that this had been caused by a flood from the Euphrates River that probably had covered an extensive area of about three hundred miles. If this flood did indeed happen then it caused a massive loss of life and provided the basis for the writings of the famous flood account. Although it is questioned that the dating and interpretations of the sediments at Ur where reliable and did not prove that such flood had occur. Because in order to prove that there had been a flood then many sediments of the sites all around the area would have to be dated and studied and such correlation does not exist for the period that concerns in Mesopotamia or the biblical world. But there is evidence of many local floods around the area which could have caused the story, although there is no archeological findings of such things as the ark loaded with living things. One of the most fascinating things is that the great flood stories are not only restricted to the Ancient Near East. But they can be found in Asia, in the Pacific islands, in other Native American groups, and in many other societies. Many explanations for this occurrence of the flood myth have been brought up for many years and they are very varied and imaginative. Everyone tries to find some archeological explanation of anything to s...