Gilgamesh's clay tablets speak to us about the tragedy of our greedy, extractive society

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II you want some real news, some real food for thought about what is happening on planet earth, not what pollsters and pundits tell you is happening, I urge you to read A Fireball from the Sands by Robert Macfarlane in the October20 New York Review of Books. This video is described in Macfarlane’s review of Galgamesh: A New Translation of the Ancient Epic.

Gilgamesh predates The Iliad and the Odyssey, which are often called the foundational poems—or novels, if you will—of Western literature. It is far more subtle and philosphic than either of those works, but because it’s from Sumer in the Mesopotamian valley it has not qualified as European literature, an historic sin that reflects the worst aspects of ethnocentrism.

There is a section in Gilgamesh called Cedar Wood that constitutes an epic within an epic. The song presented in the foregoing video addresses that epic. There is probably no better description of extractive society and its destructive impulses than Cedar Wood. It predicts the kind of society that now drives us inexorably towards extinction, a greedy, mindless society in which the rich get richer and party harder while everyone else suffers, a society that hornswoggles itself about trickledown Reaganonics and Thatcherism and Brexit, all forms of mass suicide to appease the Musks, Zuckerbergs, Trumps and other exploiters.

We know what ancient Greek looked like, but we’re unsure what it sounded like. In other words, we don’t really know how the Iliad and Odyssey sounded. But we have a pretty good idea of how they were rendered in a written language. We don’t even know if Homer existed. But we know a lot about how Greek influenced European languages. We know this, by the way, in great part because of the heroic efforts of Muslim scholars and translators in the medieval period, a debt that West is habitually reluctant to acknowledge.

Gilgamesh, on the other hand, comes to us from styli impressed on wet clay—cuneiform, and fragments of its tablets have been lost. So we know less about it than we do the Greek classics. Macfarlane is reviewing a book that tells a great deal more about Gilgamesh than we have ever known. I intend to read the book by Sophus Helle, a Danish scholar. Meanwhile, I strongly commend his review to you, because it makes the case for Gilgamesh’s importance to our moment in history.