Irving Finkel

He was a real person.

He was a king in Uruk, and he was one of those people who lived after their death in the world, like Alexander, for example.

So there were stories about Gilgamesh when he was alive.

There were stories about him afterwards.

Firstly, they were oral literature stories.

not written down at all.

And then around the 1800s, people started to write them down in Sumerian or Babylonian.

So there was a corpus, and eventually they were woven into this long 12 Homeric type thing about the adventures of Gilgamesh.

So it is certainly literature, and it's to do with humanity and immortality and death.

Man in the Hands of the Gods, and incorporates lots of interesting, exciting stories.

It's a very Hollywood-y kind of thing, and you can see within it, even in the sophisticated Nineveh version, its roots are in oral literature, because when somebody speaks

It says Gilgamesh opened his mouth to speak and addressed his friend Enkidu.

And then there's a speech.

And then Enkidu opened his mouth and addressed his friend Gilgamesh.

Well, when you're reading a story, you don't need that.

And that must be because when there was an enacting of an oral thing, a narrator would say, and it suddenly got frozen into the text.

So it's a very strange thing because if you're reading it, it's obvious that one person speaks and the other person speaks.

And they always have this complicated thing stuck in the text.

So it must be an echo of presumably you have your protagonists speaking.

enacting their timeless matter.