Gilgamesh
"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 can be found only when the quest for it is abandoned."--BOOK JACKET.
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What Hacker News says
- 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 to write what I love and keep my writing a fun hobby. I only recently read this, and it allowed me to restart writing after a 2-3 year gap.
- You got any suggestions for the Sumerian works? I've read The Literature of Ancient Sumer, and made it through, but didn't enjoy it at all and nothing stuck. Attempted From Distant Days (Akkadian literature) but just couldn't do it. Book was poorly put together and it was pretty much the same stuff as the Sumerian book I'd just finished, which wasn't a huge surprise but man that book is bad.
I read all three volumes of Lichtheim's Ancient Egyptian Literature first, though, so that may have spoiled me. It's dry as hell but way better than either of those other volumes. Was good enough that I remember quite a few details and individual works from it years later, unlike those.
I've got about seven volumes of ultra-early literature (the last 1.5 or so of Lichtheim aren't that early), six 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 modern version of the work was much improved by the time any of the copies or large fragments we have were written/chiseled. It's crazy good. A couple later Egyptian tales were of similar (though definitely lesser) quality but absolutely nothing else Sumerian or Akkadian's even got a hint of anything like that, from what I've seen.
I'm not sure I'd recommend the Sumerian or Akkadian collections to anyone, really, unless that's their specialty in which case they don't need me to recommend things to them. It's possible I just chose poor collections, though. Certainly the Akkadian one was no good, though I'm not sure there's any better in English.
- 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, (counts) 14 volumes of Greek lit, philosophy, and math instead. A few Chinese authors ought to be represented along with the Greeks, but again, haven't gotten to it.
I usual prefer accuracy over readability in translations if I have to choose between the two, but I make an exception for some epic verse. Mitchell's Gilgamesh is one of those cases. It's not an abridgment or a retelling, but it errs on the side of readability. Great read, I'd definitely recommend it.
Lichtheim's introductions leave me wanting more, but those books are still very good, and they make the Sumerian and Akkadian volumes seem really bad in comparison. AFAIK there's not much out there better than those two, so those literatures may be in need of a good, well-edited anthology. The Literature of Ancient Sumer is serviceable, but I wasn't even able to finish From Distant Days and I'm considering getting rid of it. Part of that's the literature itself (seems like a big step down from Sumer, IMO) but part of it's the poor work of the editor, annotator, and translator, Foster.
Only the first few works in Vol. 1 of Lichtheim predate the Sumerian and Akkadian literature, and most of the stuff in Vol. 3 is all the way up in the first millennium BCE, but I keep the trilogy together anyway.
(1) http://www.amazon.com/Ancient-Egyptian-Literature-Middle-Kin...
(2) http://www.amazon.com/Gilgamesh-English-Version-Stephen-Mitc...
(3) http://www.amazon.com/Literature-Ancient-Sumer-Jeremy-Black/...
(4) http://www.amazon.com/Distant-Days-Poetry-Ancient-Mesopotami...
[EDIT] formatting [EDIT 2] If you're only going to buy/read one volume of Lichtheim I'd recommend Vol. 2 (not the one I linked)
