Gilgamesh
by Stephen Mitchell, Mitchell, Stephen · first published 2004
100% recommend
"Gilgamesh dates from as early as 1700 BCE - a thousand years before the Iliad. Lost for almost two millennia, the eleven clay tablets on which the epic was inscribed were discovered in 1853 in the ruins of Nineveh, and the text was not deciphered and fully translated until the end of the century." "The epic is the story of literature's first hero - the king of Uruk in what is present-day Iraq - and his journey of self-discovery. Along the way, Gilgamesh discovers that friendship can bring peace to a whole city, that a preemptive attack on a monster can have dire consequences, and that wisdom
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Sorry for the delay, busy few days. 1) The three volumes of Lichtheim's Ancient Egyptian Literature 2) Stephen Mitchell's Gilgamesh 3) Black et al, The Literature of Ancient Sumer 4) Foster's From Distant Days (Akkadian) After that there should be some major works from India, but I haven't gotten around to that yet, so it's, uh,…
on “How Should Secular People Approach Sacred Art?” ↗…of which I've read or attempted (haven't made it to the Indian philosophy sourcebook yet, some of which is quite old) and of them the only one I'd recommend to the general reader is Stephen Mitchell's Gilgamesh, which was entirely excellent and so wildly better than any of the other Mesopotamian work from that time that I suspect Mitchell embellished heavily (IIRC reviews indicate he didn't, but still) or the…
on “What Do Our Oldest Books Say About Us?” ↗The Gita-- Eknath Easwaran's translation is the best Gilgamesh--Stephen Mitchell's translation Dear Author, you need to quit by Becca Syme-- a book for fiction writers, it opened my eyes to the fact that I dont need to follow the advice of "experts", thats its okay…
on “Ask HN: What book changed your life?” ↗