The Sumerian Gilgamesh Cycle: A Case-Study in Mesopotamian Sacred History

In the past few years, Assyrologists have pointed out that they are often asked to discuss, analyze or ponder on categories – history, epic and poetry just to name a few – which are Western conceptualizations. This is not to deny the ancient Mesopotamians lacked, for instance, a historical perspective, nor does it imply that their epic production was not poetic. It remains, however, difficult to study the Sumerian literary production or its historiographical tradition without any real knowledge or understanding of the emic classification. It may look to us like a poetic text and it may sound to us like a poetic text, but it does not mean it was a poetic text or that the ancients considered it as such. Sacred history offers an even more challenging problem, in particular because one cannot talk about a single “Mesopotamian Sacred History”, in the same manner as one cannot investigate one “Mesopotamian History of Religion”. Rather, when looking at the Ancient Near East, one finds a constellation of religious histories. Different religious experiences coexist synchronically and at times even within the same geo-political realities. This paper aims to investigate what the Sumerian Gilgamesh Cycle has to say about sacred history during the Ur III dynasty (2100-2000 BCE) and the Early Old Babylonian Period (2000-1750 BCE). The Sumerian Gilgamesh Cycle is a collection of five compositions written in the Sumerian language in southern Mesopotamia in or around 2000 BCE. In particular, I will discuss the ideological and religious reasons that inspired the codification of this cycle into written form. Furthermore, I will evaluate in what ways that the Sumerian Gilgamesh Cycle may be considered an early example of sacred history.