The Buried Book

Description

"He who saw the deep." is the dramatic start of a translation of the oldest extant version of the epic tale of Gilgamesh, which is the focus of **The Buried Book**. Gilgamesh was evidently a real king of the Sumerian city of Uruk, and ruled c.2650 BCE. But by the time of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal in the mid-600s BCE, Gilgamesh was already legendary, and was in fact honored as one of the judges of souls in the underworld. His epic adventures were written in Akkadian cuneiform on hardened clay tablets, and a copy of these tablets was in Ashurbanipal's library at Nineveh (near modern Mosul, Iraq). The library collapsed in the fall of the city in 612 BCE, and its contents were buried for two millennia. "The Buried Book" recounts the story of the rediscovery of the tablets, their journey to the British Museum in London, and their eventual translation into English. The book is written in reverse. It begins with George Smith's electrifying translation and publicizing of a passage on a tablet fragment which he translated during one of his lunch-hour visits to the museum. The fragment refers to a Great Flood. The public was energized by this possible independent verification of the Biblical Noah story, and George Smith was sent to Nineveh to try to find a complete copy of the flood tale. **The Buried Book** is wonderfully told, and is full of interesting information. Highly recommended.

Description

Composed by a poet and priest in Middle Babylonia around 1200 BCE, the Epic of Gilgamesh foreshadowed later stories that would become as fundamental as any in human history, the Odyssey and the Bible. But in 600 BCE, the clay tablets that bore the story were lost--buried beneath ashes and ruins when the library of King Ashurbanipal was sacked in a raid. This book begins with the rediscovery of the epic and its decipherment in 1872 by George Smith, a brilliant self-taught linguist, who created a sensation when he discovered Gilgamesh among thousands of undistinguished tablets in the British Museum. From there the story goes backward in time, all the way to Gilgamesh himself.--From publisher description.

Subjects

Other Editions

• The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of GilgameshHardcoverHenry Holt and Co.2007-03-06
• The Buried BookAudio CDBlackstone Audio Inc.2007-12-26
• The Buried BookPaperbackHolt Paperbacks2007-12-26
• The Buried BookAudio CDBlackstone Audio Inc.2007-12-26
• The Buried BookAudio CDBlackstone Audio Inc.2007-12-26
• The Buried BookAudio CassetteBlackstone Audio Inc.2007-12-26