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Originally Posted by NoSanninWa
I read that for "fun" and learned that the Sumerians were awful writers. The basic plots, characters and themes are great, but they just wrote it sooo badly that I couldn't enjoy it. I suppose I can't blame them too much since it is basically the first book ever written and they didn't really know what they were doing yet.
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Gilgamesh has been favorite pre-Hellenistic work for years now, and I absolutely love the complexities of many of its themes despite the fact that it's the first "book" ever written. Enuma Elish, on the other hand, seems to have been written for the sole purpose of forcing unwitting students to drudge through unpreserved texts in which the only noticable theme is "just because they're noisy, you shouldn't try to kill your grandchildren".
A professor of mine, when I was in community college a couple years ago, introduced Gilgamesh to me during a lecture on cuneiform and Sumerian mythology. I read it shortly after that lecture (although at the time my local library only held an abridged version translated by John Gardner, who wrote a side-story book called Grendel), and I read it again last week for an assignment. If you enjoyed Gilgamesh, NoSanninWa, then I would have to recommend the Atrahasis. It details the story of a young man who gets caught up in the middle of a dispute between the gods and ends up building an ark in order to escape to escape the gods' wrath, which is manifested as a catastrophic flood. If you read it, and you get something out of it, then I would recommend re-reading Gilgamesh just to see the fate of Atrahasis after stepping off the ark as the only immortal human left on the face of the earth.
I still laugh every time I read how Enkidu becomes civilized by the denizens of Ur: they simply send him a priestess from the temple of fertility.
You know, I try to convince my friends that this field of study really isn't so bad, but some of them earlier this year caught glimpses of me with my earlier assignments, which consisted of me reading the Iliad and Odyssey in their original ancient greek, and most of them dropped any classes even remotely related to the classics.
Oh, and you should try to find a copy of Grendel at some point. If you enjoyed Beowulf, then you would absolutely love it. It tells the story from the perspective of Grendel, and focuses on how he is merely gentle and misunderstood, while Beowulf is a heartless savage who ruthlessly hunts him down.