What Are You Reading 2014 - Page 58

It's basically documentary hypothesis applied to OB Gilgamesh. Inconsistences in the OB material must mean that there was an entirely separate Huwawa narrative, preserved by the Yale tablets + school extract tablets, preceding the OB epic.

Which is total bunk, to me. Maybe it's 'cause I've read too much bad fiction, but there are plenty of "inconsistent" stories, where things early on are not referenced later in the story (because it's not relevant or because the author has decided to shift the focus of the story). This still happens in the computer age, where it's actually easy to back-edit your stories. Now imagine you're writing on clay tablets. If you decide to change something later on, are you going to take the effort to write a whole new tablet just to change one word in the earlier tablets to make it all perfectly consistent? Fuck no; you'd have to rewrite it all by hand, then bake it. Not to mention, there are plenty of examples of inconsistent narration in the Mesopotamian tradition. You don't have to make up a new text to explain inconsistencies. You also can't prove it until we dig it outta the ground.

It is nice that the authors point the "inconsistencies" out; at least now they've been collected, though I'm still not sure "it mentioned lions (pl.) earlier, but later it only said 'a lion' (sg.)" is an example of inconsistent narration.

To be fair, they assume (and I think correctly) that the separate Akkadian Huwawa narrative (if it exists) would exist textually as a direct descendent of the Sumerian Huwawa text (which is a standalone and not a part of an epic). And once things are written in text, they're much less prone to variation. (I still think lion vs. lions is idiotic, though, which is why I mentioned it.)

They might be right. I don't think their inability to present a convincing argument is proof that they're wrong. A standalone Akkadian Huwawa narrative might exist, but they make the argument the wrong way, and they ultimately can't prove it unless we find it (but then we have the funny issue of "How can we tell it's not just a part of the OB epic?"). The most telling piece of evidence is actually the fact that the surrounding parts of the OB epic (before and after the Huwawa episode) are only attested in multi-column tablets, while all the bits to do with Huwawa are well-attested not only in the multi-column Yale tablet but also in the one-column extract tablets. Still doesn't prove anything, but it's actually solid evidence that for whatever reason, scribal schools found the Huwawa episode more important to copy.

Ultimately, it's all just speculation though (and thus, a waste of my time).

And now I think I am going to change my research direction from ancient literature to ancient accounting. It might actually get me a job, in addition to providing actual answers. Funny how that works.