The Epic of Gilgamesh (Penguin Classics S.) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140447210 ISBN 13: 9780140447217

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 2000

Synopsis

THE EPIC OF GILGAMESH is the tale of one man's struggle against death. Not content with the immortal renown won by reckless deeds, the hero of the epic seeks immortality itself and journeys to the ends of the earth and beyond. The epic was originally the work of an anonymous Babylonian poet who lived more than 3,700 years ago. He composed the epic in Akkadian language, but the literary traditions of Gilgamesh go back even further to five poems in Sumerian. These texts are today being reconstructed from the many thousands of clay tablets recovered from the mounds that bury the cities of ancient Mesopotamia.

About this title

Review:

"Andrew George has skillfully bridged the chasm between a scholarly re-edition and a popular work"
--London Review of Books

"Humankind's first literary achievement...Gilgamesh should compel us as the well-spring of which we are inheritors...Andrew George provides an excellent critical and historical introduction."
--Paul Binding, Independent on Sunday

"This volume will endure as one of the milestones markers...[George] expertly and easily conducts his readers on a delightful and moving epic journey."
--Samuel A. Meier, Times Literary Supplement

"Appealingly presented and very readably translated...it still comes as an exhilarating surprise to find the actions and emotions of the Sumerian superhero coming to us with absolute immediacy over 30-odd centuries.
--Scotsman

"Andrew George has formed an English text from the best of the tablets, differentiating his complex sources but allowing the general reader a clear run at one of the first enduring stories ever told."
--Peter Stothard, The Times

"An exemplary combination of scholarship and lucidity...very impressive...invaluable as a convenient guide to all the different strands which came together to produce the work we now call Gilgamesh."
--Alan Wall, Literary Review

About the Author:

Andrew George is Reader in Assyriology at SOAS (the School of Oriential and African Studies) in London, and is also an Honorary Lecturer at the University's Institute of Archaeology.
His research has taken him many times to Iraq to visit Babylon and other ancient sites, and to museums in Baghdad, Europe and North America to read the original clay tablets on which the scribes of ancient Iraq wrote.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0140447210
• ISBN 13: 9780140447217
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 304