This is my favorite piece of music right now. I love that this exists. But the title is quite misleading. What is amazingly presented is not the Epic of Gilgamesh but rather, "... a few of the opening lines of part of the epic poem". It is a great 3 minutes and 55 seconds, but don't fire up this URL thinking you are going to hear the entire epic.
adrian_b|3 years ago
There has never existed an "Epic of Gilgamesh" in Sumerian.
The Sumerians have created a series of separate short stories about various adventures of Gilgamesh ("Gilgamesh" is used in Akkadian, it was "Bilgamesh" in Sumerian).
A few hundreds of years later, maybe around the time of the King Hammurabi, the Sumerian stories about Gilgamesh have been translated into the Old Babylonian language. Then they were slightly altered and various new texts have been written and intercalated between the old stories in order to integrate them into a single complete "Epic of Gilgamesh", telling the story of the entire life of Gilgamesh.
So the first version of the "Epic of Gilgamesh" was written in Old Babylonian, being derived from the older Sumerian stories.
During the next millennium, the Epic of Gilgamesh has been rewritten in later dialects of the Babylonian language and it was also translated into other languages spoken in the region. Various minor changes have been made to the story, but none so important as the great changes that exist between the Sumerian cycle of stories and the Old Babylonian first version of the Epic of Gilgamesh.
The Sumerian stories about Gilgamesh are interesting, but I believe that the Old Babylonian version is a text with a much higher artistic value.
Among the Old Babylonian completely new additions to the Sumerian stories are some segments that I consider beautiful in their Old Babylonian version, but which, a millennium later, have been horribly deformed into the stories about Eve and about the snake, who became villains in the "Genesis" part of the Old Testament.