The Story Behind the Epic

David Damrosch's The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh is a fascinating book that is distinctive in its form.  Damrosch is a respected professor and literary scholar in Comparative Literature at Columbia University.  He has previously written books on Biblical topics, so choosing to write about the Epic of Gilgamesh is not an outlandish choice.  However, The Buried Book is not your typical work of literary analysis.  It is part literary biography, part detective story, part history, part literary analysis, part cultural studies analysis, and it also has an overall meta-analysis too of the process through which literature connects to us and helps define who we are as a civilization.  For the most part, the book works in both its individual parts and as an integrated whole.
The story unfolds with a trip back to 19th century Iraq where a young amateur archaeologist Austen Henry Layard along with an Iraqi colleague named Hormuzd Rassam had uncovered the ancient city of Nineveh and the library of Ashurbanipal, the famed Assyrian ruler.  At the time, neither Layard or Rassam fully understood the monumental importance of the find as they could not read the tablets they had uncovered.  This task was accomplished by a young British Museum curator named George Smith.  One would think that these men would have received equal credit for their discoveries, but history and academia are rarely so fair when it comes to these matters.
As Damrosch digs further into the controversy revolving around Hormuzd Rassam, he finds himself thrust into an analogous role to Layard and Rassam, as he digs further into the historical and cultural layers of this story.  As he writes about his discovery of a long forgotten lawsuit initiated by Rassam: "Turning the musty pages of this volume, I experienced the archaeologist's sense of discovery as a long-lost drama unfolded, day by day, in the summer of 1893." (7)
Layard and Rassam had shipped thousands of fragments of these stone tablets back to the British Museum where they lay undisturbed for a quarter century until George Smith began to examine them.  Smith was a self-educated man whose formal education ended when he was 14.  Smith had never been to college, but he became an acknowledged expert in ancient languages like Akkadian and translated numerous works of Babylonian literature.  However, as someone without the formal credentials, it is not surprising that despite uncovering the Assyrian account of a major flood that clearly preceded the Noah story in the Hebrew Scriptures.  A rising star in the British engraving industry, Smith began his work in the emerging field of Assyriology by chance.  Smith would take his lunch breaks in the museum where he could examine these ancient tablets.
Damrosch presents a vivid recreation of what life was like at the British Museum at the time.  Despite its often stringent class distinctions that corresponded to the prevailing Victorian ethos of the time, the British Museum was surprisingly accessible and egalitarian when it came to allowing access to these tablets.  Once some of the permanent staff realized Smith's ability to read these tablets, they brought him to meet the leading Near East scholar, Sir Henry Rawlinson, who hired Smith to help him with his own academic work.  Smith continues his rise into the profession and after his famous discovery, Smith himself becomes famous.  His desire to do fieldwork is denied, as he is deemed too valuable back at the Museum.  He then puts all his efforts into the painstaking work of reconstructing and deciphering these tablets.
Damrosch is sensitive to the many personalities involved in this tale.  He should be credited with helping to establish the overlooked role of Hormuzd Rassam and the subtle, but undeniable racism at play in determining who deserved credit for these discoveries.  Even George Smith's tale didn't necessarily have a happy ending, as he died suddenly and before his time.
After recounting the tangled and messy process of the rediscovery of the Epic of Gilgamesh, Damrosch spends the second half of the story putting the epic in its historical, literary, and cultural context. At the very end of the text he attempts to recover the "historical Gilgamesh", but doesn't have too much luck with this.  As someone whose doctoral work focuses on looking for the "historical" or "authentic" Malinche, I know how difficult this type of recovery project can be.  Moreover, after hundreds or in the case of Gilgamesh, thousands of years, I don't know if there is any real value in such a quest.
There is however considerable value in Damrosch's work.  I think this work can appeal to those of you who like a bit of historical detective work and who appreciate a first-rate historical and cultural critic who tackles a text like Gilgamesh.  It is a well-told and tremendously well-researched account and it reads like fiction.  Highly recommended.

Czar