Ea's Duplicity in the Gilgamesh Flood Story.

• Author: Foster, Benjamin R.

Ea's Duplicity in the Gilgamesh Flood Story. By MARTIN WORTHINGTON. The Ancient Word. London: ROUTLEDGE, 2020. Pp. xxxii + 489. $140.

Frederick A. Pottle, long-time editor of the Boswell Papers, once wrote a monograph to demonstrate the infinite horizons of commentary, proceeding from the passing mention of a woman in a letter to a book-long narrative of her astonishing adventures and determination, worthy of a blockbuster film today (Boswell and the Girl from Botany Bay [New York: Viking, 1937]). So too, this remarkable study in well over 450 pages, proceeding from a ten-line passage of Babylonian, takes the reader far and wide through cuneiform. Classical, and modern literature, Mesopotamian civilization ranging from consumption of fish to urban self-government, and Assyriological scholarship from its heroic age until the present, in many of the languages of Europe (I missed only Turkish, M. Ramazanoglu's frequently reprinted Gilgamis destam [1942-2002], and Albanian, A. Berisha's several times reprinted Epi i Gilgameshit [1984-2008], neither of which 1 checked for this passage), probing highways and byways of the republic of philology with awe-inspiring learning conveyed in a lucid, modest style.

Worthington's point of departure is "bitextuality," meaning a passage in which the words can be fairly understood in two different ways. An example of this phenomenon, well known in the Arabic-speaking world, with slight variants among informants, goes, freely rendered:

[phrase omitted] taraqtu al-bab hatta kalla matin fa-lamma kalla matni... kallamatni fa-qalat li: ya Isma'il, sabr fa-qultu laha: ya Asmd. 'ila sabri I knocked on the door till my hand was wore, When my hand was wore, she spoke to me, Said she to me, "Hey, Ismail, patience!" Said I to her, "Hey Asma, my patience is o'er!" Worthington turns to the ancient audience, in preference to probing authorial intention, wondering, depending upon the time period and how the words were spoken, how far ambiguity can be pushed. Here such matters as juncture (green house versus greenhouse) and true ambiguity may come into play, as well as "ironclad" versus "potential" or "high potential" puns, to use his vivid terminology. In my own years of teaching literary ambiguity, I have never had a native speaker of English, however educated, recognize, unprompted, that "Danes eat more fish than Americans" can grammatically imply sporadic cannibalism in Scandinavia, so I found myself sometimes hesitating...