The Buried Foundation of the Gilgamesh Epic: The Akkadian Huwawa narrative.

• Author: Foster, Benjamin R.
• Position: Book review

The Buried Foundation of the Gilgamesh Epic: the Akkadian Huwawa narrative. By DANIEL E. FLEMING and SARA J. MILSYEIN. Cuneiform Monographs, vol. 39. Leiden: BRILL, 2007. Pp. xx + 222, plates. $ 132.

The Buried Foundation of the Gilgamesh Epic is a close study of the Old Babylonian Gilgamesh poems, intending to show that a lost Akkadian narrative about Gilgamesh, focused on the expedition of Gilgamesh and Enkidu against Huwawa, lies between the Old Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic, as known from the Penn and Yale tablets, and the Sumerian Gilgamesh and Huwawa poems. Fleming and Milstein propose that the outlines of this lost poem can be detected in the existing Sumerian and Akkadian sources and that the creative adaptation of this work explains certain inconsistencies they observe between the Penn and Yale Gilgamesh tablets, which, like most scholars, they consider a pair copied at the same time by the same person. They bring to their inquiry recently published Old Babylonian sources about Gilgamesh that suggest the confrontation with Huwawa was a separate story in Akkadian as well as Sumerian. They are forthright about the obvious problems with their hypothesis, such as that some or even all the independent Gilgamesh and Huwawa stories may well be later than the Penn and Yale tablets, but they are ready with carefully workedout answers. Throughout, the authors demonstrate enviable analytic skills, attention to detail, and exceptional acuteness of observation, the result being a rewarding and interesting study for anyone interested in the Akkadian Gilgamesh tradition.

The authors' point of departure is their conviction that, first, "where Yale appears to recall the events described in Penn, we find that the details do not match," and, second, "Given the single hand, we cannot help but expect continuity of voice, logic, and perspective across the two texts, even as the scenes change and the plot advances. We should find not only that Penn anticipates material in Yale but also that Yale shows awareness of the events that took place in Penn. At the outset, there is no reason to expect a disruption of the continuity" (p. 10). This reviewer much regretted that the authors did not defend this assumption in more detail, as they appear to insist that the Babylonian poem should be composed along the lines of a modern novel, in which inconsistencies, loose ends, or contradictions are deemed blemishes in the art form. Fleming and Milstein's assumption can be...