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Sep. 16th, 2013 08:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsDavid Damrosch's The Buried Book was a loan from 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.
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Date: 2013-09-16 01:30 pm (UTC)YES. I want a movie about this guy, because he was FASCINATING.
I mean, like you, I enjoyed the rest of the book too, but he was the most interesting part of a really interesting story.
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Date: 2013-09-16 01:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-09-16 09:43 pm (UTC)This sounds fantastic; I will track it down. Thank you.
But still -- three incomprehensible languages! No clues, except that a bunch of king's names are in there somewhere! Where do you even START?
For starters, it took like a dozen people over the course of several decades! There had been work done on inscriptions from Persepolis prior to the Behistun Inscription and Sir Henry Rawlinson was in no way working alone. Also, getting a giant archive out of Nineveh didn't hurt.
(I can read cuneiform, although only Akkadian. My knowledge of Sumerian is confined to common logograms, and I wouldn't even try to work without a sign-list anyway. I don't think I've done any active translation from the original signs rather than transliteration in about six years.)
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Date: 2013-09-16 10:11 pm (UTC)In a way I think it's even more impressive that it was such a collaborative long-term enterprise. If it were me, I know I would be really tempted to just throw it all away and go "ALL THE REST OF YOU GUYS WERE JUST MAKING THIS SHIT UP, WEREN'T YOU?" every time I ran up against a wall where something didn't make sense. Like when your code doesn't work and you can't figure out how, except a MILLION TIMES more subjective and no way to tell you've actually gotten something right.
. . . which is to say, I in no way have the patience to be any kind of linguist!
(As far as I am concerned being able to read any kind of cuneiform is also MAD IMPRESSIVE. That's really cool!)
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Date: 2013-09-16 11:08 pm (UTC)To be fair, that is a very popular reaction when trying to read anything written in cuneiform. Especially Akkadian: BECAUSE OBVIOUSLY A PARTIALLY LOGOGRAPHIC SYLLABARY WAS THE OPTIMAL WRITING SYSTEM FOR A SEMITIC LANGUAGE YES INDEED. I mean, it is cool that for once we get a Semitic language with the vowels built in, that's very helpful. BUT THE REDUPLICATION AND THE GLOTTAL STOPS AND THE TREATMENT OF VOWEL LENGTH BASICALLY EVERYTHING ELSE NO.
(Hittite is worse. Hittite is an Indo-European language encoded in cuneiform. That is not very helpful either.)
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Date: 2013-09-17 01:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-09-17 01:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-09-17 02:14 am (UTC)I understand it works very well for Sumerian, which is an agglutinative language.* That's a completely reasonable context for a logosyllabic script; the combination works fine for Japanese. The difference in that case is just that Japanese separates out its logographic values from its phonetics by using different scripts for each (kanji vs. hiragana and katakana), whereas cuneiform is polyvalent—any given sign can be read one of four ways, logographically, phonetically, as a determinative (classifying the noun it precedes), or as a phonetic complement (adding a grammatical element to a logogram). Context allows the reader to sort out which is which. Which is a total rebus to an outsider at first, but in terms of absolute complexity it's not actually worse than several systems in operation today. That said, given that Sumerian is a language isolate and there isn't as much of it attested in print as anyone would like, I have the impression there's a lot more ongoing argument about the morphology than there is with other dead languages, and there are ways in which cuneiform doesn't help; it may not have been built to distinguish all the features of a language scholars millennia later would like to know.
* i.e., it sticks words together out of morphemes, each of which has a single grammatical or semantic value, but aggregate into quite complex concepts; past this definition I have to recommend you to the internet, because I don't actually speak any languages of this kind. All of mine, Semitic and Indo-European, are inflecting languages. It would probably have been useful for me to learn Sumerian just for a change.
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Date: 2013-09-17 02:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-09-17 08:42 pm (UTC)Sorting out a polyvalent writing system as an outsider is difficult enough if it's a living system that people can explain to you, or at least a well-understood dead one; I can't imagine deciphering one from scratch. But I find it beautiful in the abstract. I took a semester of hieroglyphic (Middle Egyptian) in college, and I'll always remember the first day, when the teacher explained how hieroglyphic was logoconsonantal, and that a given symbol could mean the word its image depicted, or a different morpheme with the same consonants, or a determinative modifying the previous symbol(s) to clarify the meaning. (Not that any given symbol is necessarily used for all three of these, but in potentia.) It was like a bright shining light which also happens to be an oncoming academic train: ooooooh this is fascinating, look at this thing humans have made that I can learn! and oh god this is going to be SO CONFUSING FOREVER, both at once.
(I always kind of wish I'd stuck with it, but I was only in Egypt for the one semester and would have had to work much harder to keep studying hieroglyphic after, and I don't actually want to be an Egyptologist. Much. But man, it was fascinating.)
As interesting and heartbreaking as I found Rassam's story -- and I really, really did -- what I think I loved most was the way Damrosch peeled back the layers from modernity on back. First, the explosion of Victorian interest in Gilgamesh and tales of ancient floods; then, the deciphering of the script; then, the discovery of the tablets that bore it; then, the context of Ashurbanipal and his father Esarahaddon and what literacy and kingly epics might have meant to them, and why this work in these languages was in this library; then, only at the end, the story of Gilgamesh itself. (And then the epilogue about Saddam Hussein's romance novel. Okay, Damrosch! It's not that it's totally unrelated, and it was definitely interesting, but I'm pretty sure he mostly just wanted an excuse to go OH MAN YOU GUYS LOOK AT THIS THING THAT EXISTS to everyone.) I think the part about Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal was the most compelling to me, because it was treated with the same interest and thoughtful respect as the more recent sections, and I really appreciate it when ancient history is explored that way. It's the history of people being people, after all, as shaped by their context as the Victorians or as US Americans in 2013.
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Date: 2013-10-19 07:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-10-19 08:42 pm (UTC)