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A Postscript to the “Letter of Gilgamesh”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 December 2013

Benjamin R. Foster
Affiliation:
Yale University

Extract

The celebrated “Letter of Gilgamesh,” treated by Gurney, AnSt VII (1957), 127 ff. and by Kraus, AnSt XXX (1980), 109 ff., has so far remained without parallel in Akkadian literature. Kraus pondered the significance and interpretation of this enigmatic text, and found it an “Erstling” (p. 120). He looked ahead to Ovid for a parallel. With diffidence one may also look backward to some obscure school-boy efforts from Sargonic Girsu. In the archives of the ensi of Girsu appeared various learner's texts which I have suggested elsewhere were the efforts of bureaucrats learning their profession “on the job.” Among these are two fanciful products that raise some of the same problems that the Gilgamesh letter does.

The first is a “letter” (L. 1073), that, daydream though it be, offers a tantalizing glimpse of another scholar apparently thinking along the same lines as the amanuensis of Gilgamesh.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The British Institute at Ankara 1982

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References

1 “Education of a Sargonic Bureaucrat,” AOr. in press.

2 I am grateful to Veysel Donbaz, Fatma Yıldız, and the antiquities authorities of the Republic of Turkey for permission to collate this tablet.

3 For example: L. 2903, 3116; ITT I 1170Google Scholar.

4 3600 gur7 = 12,960,000 gur.

5 CT 50, 52, 11 ff.: 2 gišgigir, [ ] [BAR]. , 1 gud Lu-[lu-búm] … nindaba lugal.