h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

First of all, great choice of topic.

On the SKL (Sumerian King List) Gilgamesh's antecedant is Lugalbanda, not Lugulbanda. This is a key difference, since Lu means man and Gal means great, and Lugal was a title sort of like "king". Lugulbanda while phonetically similar, is just wrong.

You list the Sumerians, Assyrians, and Semites as the sources for the Gilgamesh Epic (or Cycle). You failed to mention the Hittites, who have a copy of Gilgamesh in their language. Also, the Assyrians are infact Semites. If you wanted to distinguish between semitic peoples, you ought to have mentioned the Babylonians, since infact, it is from the Babylonians in the kassite period that the earliest "Epic" of gilgamesh comes, in which the sumerian tales are strung together in a single narrative. Also known as the OBV or Old Babylonian Version (for the Dialect of Akkadian in which it was written)

The God Ea is actually the god Enki, whereas Enki (Lord Earth) is a sumerian name, the Akkadians who adopted the Sumerian religion (basically, with some notable changes in whom they chose to worship most and in what way, and obvsiously over the ages that changed as well (a good parallel might be the adoption of greek divinities in rome. Ares was an "evil" deity to the greeks, whereas Mars was much celebrated"))called Enki Ea.


You state that Gilgamesh writings represent the first non-financial texts, which is not true. There are MANY "hymns" and other short works of historical-legendary-fiction dating from the period just before Gilgamesh first appears in the earliest sumerian forms. There are poems about Lugalbanda, for instance!

And of course, the late EDIII "law codes" neither financial or literary in form or function.


Gilgamesh travels with Enkidu to the Cedar Mountain because Humbaba (or Huwawa) has created problems, and not to show superiority. Cedar was one of the chief building materials, and indeed the great gates of Uruk were made of Cedar.



As for the flood, the south of iraq flooded every year to some extent, which is the geographical locus of the Gilgamesh tales. Unlike the Nile, which flooded essentially the same amount each year, the Tigris and the Euphrates were fueled by far more random weather patterns in the Zagros mountains. It seems likliest that since the flood story appears nearly 1000 years eariler in south iraq than anywhere else, that it originated there and merely included an exagerated version of usual meteorological events.


Other than that, good treatment. Don't like to nitpick, but this is meant to be very accurate.

I did study Ancient Near Eastern Civilizations though, and studied Akkadian language, so I thought I'd add a couple details that you might have gotten from a penguin classics edition of the poem...