/lit/ - Literature

>>23157984
The voyage to the Underworld guided by a dark spirit to fulfil a sacred duty is literally, yes literally, the oldest trope there is.

you could have saved him, /lit/

Enter the void

Epic of Gilgamesh

This but unironically.

>>14518226
That's the point.
You read versed prose and normal prose literally the same way, one just happens to not use the whole page. That's why there's prose translations, it doesn't matter.

Eternal search for more.
Experience of awe.
Dasein.
Beauty.
Love, parents, family, children. Ancestors and descendants.
Brotherhood.
IMPERISHABLE FAME
All various shapes of immortality.

>>13295189
read Gilgamesh instead

>>11316791
Gilgamesh.

What does Enkidu represent? Could he be the mirror image of Gilgamesh? Is he the picture of human wild past, that is, living outside of cities and roaming the wild?

>>8459577
This was answered a long time ago.

>>7902055
Ignore this guy, he has no sense of it's historiological imporance.

It's short which means you have no excuse not to read a few different versions and decide which you like best yourself.

You're unlikely to find an expert in Sumerian cueniform here, so our guess as to the "best" translation will likely be only as good as yours.

The Epic of Gilgamesh exists inside a complex reconstructed mythological framework, of which the epic is simply the uppermost tip of the iceberg.

The set of gods in that myth persisted across several ancient Middle Eastern cultures in one form or another, and they have different variants and roles depending on the time and place.

The story's themes of civilisation versus nature and the struggle against mortality are basically universal, and represent the most ancient examples of their archetype.

>tfw Gilgamesh achieved his eternal life through his epic
Are there any other good epics that take place before Christ?

Was Gilgamesh a chad?