Read the following passage and answer the questions that follow.
Gilgamesh
The oldest story in the world is the epic of Gilgamesh, written on stone tablets in Sumeria almost 5,000 years ago. The twelve original tablets were found in Nineveh, a city in ancient Mesopotamia, and they date to around 2700 BCE. How old the epic was when it was written down, nobody knows. The story must have been around for quite some time, though. There actually was a Gilgamesh. He was a king of ancient Iraq hundreds of years before the epic was carved in stone.
When these Sumerian texts were translated in the nineteenth century by the British scholar George Adam Smith, they created a lot of controversy. There in the tablets, written several thousand years before the writing of the Bible, was an account of the Great Flood nearly identical to the one in the Book of Genesis.
Apparently, the story was well-known throughout the ancient Middle East. A version of the epic was translated into the Hittite language. There are versions from the Babylonian Empire during the reign of Hammurabi. Ancient versions have also been found in southern Turkey and Palestine. It is certainly possible that early authors of the Hebrew Bible were familiar with the story. Whether this makes the biblical account of the flood seem more or less like the truth is a matter of personal opinion. Did the Gilgamesh epic influence the authors of the Bible, or is this a case of diverse cultures responding separately to an actual event in their shared memory? We may never know.
Gilgamesh himself was well-known and much revered in the ancient world. The ancients loved to tell tales about the great king who defeated monsters, built cities, and, according to legend, traveled to the underworld. The epic we see in the twelve stone tablets incorporates all of these legends and ties them to the story of Gilgamesh's friendship with the wild man, Enkidu. What had once been a series of unrelated hero-stories now becomes a heartbreaking saga of friendship and loss. "Open up the special box that's hidden in the wall," says the anonymous author of the epic, "and read aloud the story of Gilgamesh's life. Learn what sorrow taught the heavy-hearted king."
At the beginning of the epic, Gilgamesh has grown bitter and angry, and has turned on his people. To save them, the gods create a friend and sidekick for him-Enkidu, the wild man. Gilgamesh and Enkidu have many adventures together. After defeating the Bull of Heaven, Enkidu angers the gods, who punish him by taking his life. Gilgamesh is distraught and sets off to find the secret of eternal life and rescue his best friend.
Gilgamesh travels far and wide in search of answers. His far-flung journeys and strange encounters remind us of the Greek hero Odysseus, whose adventures, occurring several millennia after Gilgamesh's, are regarded as foundation texts of Western civilization. Did
Gilgamesh's story influence the Greek storytellers? Did they know this story? Unless
some new artifact links the two texts, we will have no way of knowing.
At his wit's end, Gilgamesh travels to the underworld to seek advice from Enkidu. But Enkidu has no advice for him. He tells Gilgamesh that the afterlife is a dark and terrible place. Even good, wise, strong men live in misery and receive little comfort. But worst off is the man who has left no one behind who loves him or cares about him. This man's fate-to be forgotten-is the worst thing that can happen. He has no pillow for his head, Enkidu tells his friend, and his only food is dust. We can sense, in Enkidu's warning, that Gilgamesh himself is tempting this fate by turning his back on his people and thinking only of his own pain.
We do not know what happens to Gilgamesh after this.We assume that he returns home-a little older, a little sadder perhaps, but also a little wiser. One thing we do know is that he has not been forgotten.
- Gilgamesh is described as, "the heavyhearted king." A word that conveys the same feeling would be
- intense
- mirthful
- cheerless
- irate
- What happens immediately after Gilgamesh sets off in search of answers?
- He reminds us of Odysseus.
- His story influences Greek storytellers.
- He travels to the underworld.
- He defeats the bull of heaven.
- Enkidu says of the forgotten man, "his only food is dust." The feeling this conveys is that
- there is no solace for those who are forgotten
- people who are forgotten eat dust
- there is no food in the underworld
- one should not tempt fate
- What conclusion can be reasonably drawn from the passage?
- People knew about Gilgamesh before the writing of the epic.
- People first learned about Gilgamesh from the epic.
- People first learned about Gilgamesh from the Bible.
- People first learned about Gilgamesh in the 19th century.
- You might find this article in
- A an encyclopedia
- B a newspaper
- C a literature anthology
- D a fifth-grade textbook
The First Alphabet
One of the great puzzles of human history is the development of the first written alphabet. It is difficult for us to know how people lived in very ancient times, before there was any written language to record and document daily life. For thousands of years, humans got along just fine without needing to commit their thoughts to paper or papyrus. Why did that change? How did it change? This is something that linguists and archaeologists have been wrestling with for years.
The ancient Egyptians were often considered the inventors of written language, but what they developed was not what we think of as an alphabet. They developed a system of hieroglyphics, or picture-language, which used small pictures and symbols to represent things (pictograms) and ideas (ideograms). This was a very complicated system, requiring knowledge of over a thousand symbols and a deep understanding of the ideas and objects represented by those symbols.
Herodotus, a Greek historian living in the fifth century BCE, believed that the Phoenicians had been the first to invent an alphabet. What he meant by an alphabet was something different from the pictograms or ideograms of the Egyptians. He meant a set of symbols that represented the sounds of spoken consonants and vowels-a set of symbols that would duplicate on paper the sounds heard in speech. In 1929, 2,040 years after Herodotus, a French archaeologist confirmed what the ancient Greek had believed: The Phoenicians had indeed invented the first alphabet some time during the second millennium BCE.
The Phoenicians lived in what is now Lebanon, and they were a seafaring people. They traveled widely throughout the Mediterranean, from Babylonia to Spain, and may have been the first sailors to circle the continent of Africa. They traded with many different cultures, buying and selling spices, perfumes, grains, wines, fabrics, woods, metals, weapons, animals, and slaves. The center of Phoenician commerce was the city of Ugarit, which was a prosperous, multicultural community. Because of their wide-ranging commerce and multinational city-life, the Phoenicians needed a way to simplify the language of trade and business. They needed a method of recording their business transactions in a way that both buyer and seller could understand.
Why was an alphabet simpler than any of the systems of hieroglyphics the ancient cultures were using? The symbols of an alphabet represent spoken sounds of which there are usually no more than thirty, depending on the language. The symbols of a picture language, on the other hand, represent objects and ideas of which there can be thousands. At some point, a Phoenician scribe must have realized this fact and begun the process of simplifying the pictograms into something connected to spoken sounds. We do not know who this scribe was or when he began the process of turning pictograms into an alphabet, but we do understand the process itself.
To take one example: The Phoenician symbol representing a bull was separated from the idea of "bull" and was made to represent a sound instead. Over time, the symbol came to look less and less like the animal it had represented, and it began to take on a more abstract shape. Not only that; it turned completely upside down. What had once been a realistic picture of a bull's head eventually became the Roman letter "A." Turn a capital "A" upside down and you can just make out how this symbol was once a picture of an animal's face and horns.
By around 1400 BCE, the Phoenicians were using a full, written alphabet. We know this because in 1929, a French archeologist discovered a series of Phoenician tablets dating from that time, inscribed with cuneiform (or "wedgeshaped") writing. Twenty-eight distinct symbols were eventually identified, twenty-six of which were consonants. Although the Phoenicians did not invent cuneiform writing (made by impressing a wedge into wet clay in a variety of different positions), they seem to have been the first to use it as an alphabet instead of a system of pictograms. This simplified alphabet allowed more people access to reading and writing. Myths and histories could be written for later generations to read.
Because of the Phoenicians' widespread trade throughout the area, their invention influenced many other cultures and languages, from Hebrew to Greek and eventually to Latin, from which we get our own alphabet. By 400 AD, hieroglyphic writing had completely died out in the Mediterranean world. The period of pre-history- the time before written language-was over.
What advantages did the invention of the alphabet give the Phoenicians? Use details from the article to support your answer.
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Why does the existence of written language make it easier for us to understand how people once lived? Use details from the article to illustrate your answer.
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