Overview

The Epic of Gilgamesh: A Verse Retelling with Commentary The oldest great poem in the world is also one of the most modern. Written and rewritten across a thousand years of Mesopotamian civilization, from the Sumerian court poems of the late third millennium to Sîn-lēqi-unninni's Standard Babylonian masterpiece, the Epic of Gilgamesh confronts the questions that have never stopped being urgent: What does it mean to know you will die? What is the value of a life lived in that knowledge? What do we build, and for whom, and does it last? This volume presents a complete verse retelling in rhyming alexandrine couplets, accompanied by a full critical commentary that reads the poem not as an artefact of the ancient Near East but as a living work of philosophy and literature. The commentary traces the poem's deepest structures, the divine anesthesia of the gods, the feminine principle that governs every threshold of transformation, the nature of love and friendship, the paradox of a hero who already possesses the immortality he will cross the world to find, and sets them in dialogue with the traditions they shaped them: Genesis, the Arda Viraf Nameh, the mythology of Jamshid, Plato, Dante, and the theological revolution that carried the world from polytheism to monotheism under the universal order of the Achaemenid kings. Three voices speak through the poem, the Sumerian, practical and humanistic; the Old Babylonian, psychological and tender; the Standard Babylonian, existential and unresolved, and this retelling attempts to bring all three together in a single utterance. The result is a Gilgamesh for readers who want not only to hear the poem but to understand what it is doing, why it still matters, and what it knows about being human that we have not yet surpassed.

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