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Sep. 16th, 2013 08:38 amDavid Damrosch's The Buried Book was a loan from ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
genarti -- it's an exploration of the epic of Gilgamesh, working backwards from its translation in 1872 to the creation of the original poem.
Damrosch makes a deliberate effort to focus on figures who were coming from a context in some way on the margins of the upper-class world of educational and political privilege that was the general purview of nineteenth-century archaeological studies. George Smith, the translator who published the first version of the epic, came from a lower-class background and taught himself Akkadian by sneaking off to the British Museum on his lunch break, which is kind of mind-boggling. Like, I would not even be able to teach myself French on my lunch break. LET ALONE CUNEIFORM.
(As a sidenote: wow, I am never not going to be flabbergasted by fact that we have a contemporary understanding of cuneiform at all. The Rosetta Stone equivalent for cuneiform featured Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian, none of which was understood at the time. Old Persian just happened to be an alphabetic language rather than a logophonetic language, which made it SLIGHTLY EASIER to decipher. But still -- three incomprehensible languages! No clues, except that a bunch of king's names are in there somewhere! Where do you even START?)
Anyway, interesting as George Smith was, the archaeologist who grabbed the tables to begin with was even more fascinating -- Hormuzd Rassam was Assyrian Turkish, went to Oxford, and became the only actual Middle Eastern dude leading expeditions in the context of British archaeology. He also worked as a politician and a diplomat before -- surprise! -- racism ended up damaging his reputation, and most of his discoveries were eventually downplayed or credited to others.
I could have read a whole book about Rassam, honestly. Not that I didn't enjoy it when Damrosch went back in time to the reign of Ashurbanipal, Mediocre Poet King, and then gave us a chapter-long summary of the epic itself. And not that Damrosch clearly didn't enjoy having the excuse to then use the theme of "Gilgamesh in contemporary literature" to talk about Saddam Hussein's Epic Romance Novel, Zabibah and the King, because, oh, he SO DID. But I still think the first section is the highlight of the book -- mostly because it's doing the most work of writing against the established versions of history, and that's always the most compelling for me.
genarti -- it's an exploration of the epic of Gilgamesh, working backwards from its translation in 1872 to the creation of the original poem. Damrosch makes a deliberate effort to focus on figures who were coming from a context in some way on the margins of the upper-class world of educational and political privilege that was the general purview of nineteenth-century archaeological studies. George Smith, the translator who published the first version of the epic, came from a lower-class background and taught himself Akkadian by sneaking off to the British Museum on his lunch break, which is kind of mind-boggling. Like, I would not even be able to teach myself French on my lunch break. LET ALONE CUNEIFORM.
(As a sidenote: wow, I am never not going to be flabbergasted by fact that we have a contemporary understanding of cuneiform at all. The Rosetta Stone equivalent for cuneiform featured Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian, none of which was understood at the time. Old Persian just happened to be an alphabetic language rather than a logophonetic language, which made it SLIGHTLY EASIER to decipher. But still -- three incomprehensible languages! No clues, except that a bunch of king's names are in there somewhere! Where do you even START?)
Anyway, interesting as George Smith was, the archaeologist who grabbed the tables to begin with was even more fascinating -- Hormuzd Rassam was Assyrian Turkish, went to Oxford, and became the only actual Middle Eastern dude leading expeditions in the context of British archaeology. He also worked as a politician and a diplomat before -- surprise! -- racism ended up damaging his reputation, and most of his discoveries were eventually downplayed or credited to others.
I could have read a whole book about Rassam, honestly. Not that I didn't enjoy it when Damrosch went back in time to the reign of Ashurbanipal, Mediocre Poet King, and then gave us a chapter-long summary of the epic itself. And not that Damrosch clearly didn't enjoy having the excuse to then use the theme of "Gilgamesh in contemporary literature" to talk about Saddam Hussein's Epic Romance Novel, Zabibah and the King, because, oh, he SO DID. But I still think the first section is the highlight of the book -- mostly because it's doing the most work of writing against the established versions of history, and that's always the most compelling for me.
