Were gilgamesh and enkidu gay
Fridae
Gilgamesh was a historical king who reigned in the Mesopotamian city of Uruk in about 2750 BCE.
He is the basis for the hero of the Epic of Gilgamesh, considered the oldest story in the world, a 1,000 years older than Homer’s Iliad or the Bible.
The first fragments were initiate in 1853, written in cuneiform on clay tablets found in the ruins of Nineveh, the ancient capital of Assyria. Cuneiform was not deciphered until 1857. In 1872, George Smith, a curator at the British Museum, realised that one of the fragments told the story of a Babylonian Noah. This stirred up a great deal of interest – the Victorians saw it as proof that the Great Flood had actually taken place.
The Monumental is set out on 11 clay tablets, only 3 of which are even close to accomplish. So early translations are full of gaps and speculations. Over the next 120 years or so, more fragments were start and the language excel understood, providing more finalize and more fluent translations.
The Epic tells of an arrogant king (Gilgamesh) whom the gods decide to tame by providing him with an equal (Enkidu). Some scholars describe him as his servant and others as his ‘beloved friend&
Gilgamesh paper anon. I establish this quote during my research. This is 100% verbatim: “So are there homosexuals in Mesopotamian literature? This is ultimately something that can only be decided by the society using the category of homosexuality. If love between people of the matching sex, sexual coercion, random homoerotic encounters, and gender neutral sexual roles are not considered expressions of homosexuality, as I think they are not, then the answer is inevitably “no”. “ I don’t get it.
Okay, there’s a lot to unpack here. Let’s start with a clarification: the axe pun is Akkadian, not Sumerian, and found in the Old Babylonian version of the epic (early 2nd millennium BC). This version also contains what I assume you call the “heterosexual parts”, i.e. Enkidu’s sexual encounter with Šamkat and Gilgamesh’s right to acquire intercourse with newly married women. As far as I can tell (though I admit I re-read the texts cursively), the Sumerian texts don’t hold anything on the sexuality front that the Vintage Babylonian texts don’t. It’s also worth mentioning that the Sumerian copies we ha
David & Jonathan
and the Epic of Gilgamesh, Part 2
HOMOSEXUALITY AND THE BIBLE, Supplement
By Bruce L. Gerig
Homoerotic elements in the Epic – The excellent Assyriologist Thorkild Jacobsen, in the overdue 1920s, was the first scholar to argue that the relationship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu should be understood as sexual in nature; and he based this view on two early scenes in the Gilgamesh epic, one explaining the unhappy articulate in Uruk and the other detailing two dreams of Gilgamesh.1 In the second (axe) envision, in the Pennsylvania tablet (OBV), Gilgamesh tells his mother, “I loved it and cohabited / with it, as if it were a woman…” Earlier, in the first (meteor) dream, Gilgamesh’s mother tells him that this symbolism means that someone like him will come and “you will rejoice”and “embrace him…” (both translations by Jacobsen).2 Jacobsen concluded that this dream symbolism “cannot mean anything but that homosexual intercourse is going to take place between Gilgames[h] and the newcomer.” In proof, the new companion created for Gilgamesh has such “enormous sexual vigor” that after m
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Anonymous asked:
So I just did a document on Gilgamesh and Enkidu being in a relationship and I found that most papers trying to disprove it kept referring to laws and traditions in Babylonia, Assyria, and even Hittite or other later cultures. But looking at the Sumerian version there's a ton of sexual puns (like the axe) and the heterosexual parts all seem post Sumerian. What do you think of people trying to relate much later cultures to an originally Sumerian text? I think it's misleading at best.
Gilgamesh manuscript anon. I establish this quote during my research. This is 100% verbatim: “So are there homosexuals in Mesopotamian literature? This is ultimately something that can only be decided by the community using the category of homosexuality. If love between people of the same sex, sexual coercion, random homoerotic encounters, and gender neutral sexual roles are not considered expressions of homosexuality, as I trust they are not, then the retort is inevitably “no”. “ I don’t get it.
Okay, there’s a lot to unpack here. Let’s start with a clarification: the axe pun is Akkadian, not Sumerian, and found in the Old Babylonian version of the titanic (early 2nd
Thoughts on Gilgamesh and Enkidu by Chris Park
Gilgamesh was a historical king who reigned in the Mesopotamian city of Uruk in about 2750 BCE. He is the basis for the hero of the Epic of Gilgamesh, considered the oldest story in the world, a 1,000 years older than Homer’s Iliad or the Bible.
The first fragments were found in 1853, written in cuneiform on clay tablets found in the ruins of Nineveh, the ancient capital of Assyria. Cuneiform was not deciphered until 1857. In 1872, George Smith, a curator at the British Museum, realised that one of the fragments told the story of a Babylonian Noah. This stirred up a great deal of interest; the Victorians saw it as proof that the Great Flood had actually taken place.
The Epic is set out on 11 clay tablets, only 3 of which are even close to complete. So early translations are full of gaps and speculations. Over the next 120 years or so, more fragments were found and the language better understood, providing more complete and more fluent translations.
The Epic tells of an arrogant king (Gilgamesh) whom the gods decide to tame by providing him with an equal (Enkidu). Some scholars describe him as his servant and