Max thanks some of my poems have also been hanging around that long P
-----Original Message-----
From: Poetryetc: poetry and poetics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of Max Richards
Sent: 27 February 2014 23:25
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: cuneiform [for Patrick mainly]
The Epic of Gilgamesh was deciphered from cuneiform tablets in the British
Museum which had been excavated in the Library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh.
Thousands of chunky manuscripts, chipped, friable and defaced, more like
knapped flints than books, were dug out of the alluvial strata by Henry
Layard and Homuzd Rassan in the 1850s and laid out on trays in the museum.
George Smith was an engraver of banknotes for Bradbury's, the printers,
which specialised in playing cards and had the commission from the Mint to
issue banknotes. The workshop was near the museum and the story goes that
George took to haunting the Assyrian collections in his lunch hour, until he
caught the eye of the keeper, who asked him what he was doing, coming so
regularly. 'I am reading,' he replied. So this startling decoder was set to
work on the jumble of stone bits and pieces until one day he cried out in
ecstasy and ran round the room tearing off his clothes. George Smith had
found Tablet XI of the Epic of Gilgamesh, which told the story of the Flood,
and his joy was occasioned above all by the independent corroboration the
poem offered to the historicity of the Bible. He was a fervent Christian and
longed, as many did, for archaeology to prove the scriptures' reliability.
Later that year, 1872, he delivered a paper to the Society for Biblical
Archaeology, and read out the account of the flood from the epic. This was
the first time the Epic of Gilgamesh had been heard and understood after an
interval of two thousand years: the longest sleeper ever among the world's
great poems. Four years later, Smith died in Aleppo at the age of 36.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n05/marina-warner/short-cuts=
|