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Einsamer Schütze  · CC BY-SA 3.0

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A king, a poem and three clocks

Gilgamesh is a name in a list of kings, the hero of one of the oldest poems that survives, and the son of a goddess. Three kinds of date, kept apart.

  • 7 steps
  • Figures, Texts, Places, Deities
  • A note at each step
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Not yet reviewed · written . The notes follow the records; no editor has signed them.

  1. Unknown artist · Public domain

    Step 1 of 7: Figure

    Gilgamesh

    Sumerian ruler and protagonist of the Epic of Gilgamesh

    Gilgamesh as the records hold him: a person, a ruler of Uruk and the hero of an epic, all on one record. The parents on his page — the king Lugalbanda and the goddess Ninsun — come from the poems, not from any document of a reign. A parent who is a goddess is kinship inside an account, whatever kind of record the child is filed as.

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  1. Sumerian King List Text
  2. Epic of Gilgamesh Text
  3. Uruk On the timeline
  4. Eanna On the atlas
  5. Inanna Family tree
  6. Ninsun Deity

  1. Step 2 of 7: Text

    Sumerian King List

    Mesopotamian literary composition

    The Sumerian King List names him among the kings of Uruk and gives the kings around him reigns of improbable length. It is a source with a date and a purpose of its own — a composition that presented kingship as passing from one city to the next — and its numbers are the list’s, not a chronology anyone can put on the historical clock.

    Open the profile Continue to Epic of Gilgamesh
  2. Public domain

    Step 3 of 7: Text

    Epic of Gilgamesh

    Epic poem from Mesopotamia, is amongst the earliest surviving works of literature

    The epic. The date on its page is on the source clock: when the earliest poems about him were written down. That is a date for a text. It is not his date, and it is not a date for anything the poem describes.

    Open the profile Continue to Uruk
  3. SAC Andy Holmes (RAF) · OGL v1.0

    Step 4 of 7: Place · On the timeline

    Uruk

    Ancient city of Sumer and Babylonia

    Uruk on the timeline, dated on the historical clock by the city’s own archaeology. Archaeology dates a city; it does not date Gilgamesh. Whether a king of that name reigned there is argued from the king list and later inscriptions, and the timeline places the city, not the man.

    See it on the timeline Continue to Eanna
  4. Einsamer Schütze · CC BY-SA 3.0

    Step 5 of 7: Place · On the atlas

    Eanna

    Ancient Sumerian temple in Uruk

    The Eanna, the temple precinct of Inanna at the heart of Uruk, which the epic praises alongside the city’s walls. Here the three clocks touch without merging: a building the record places but does not date, a poem dated by its tablets, and a story whose own time this site never converts into years.

    See it on the atlas Continue to Inanna
  5. Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP(Glasg) · CC BY-SA 4.0

    Step 6 of 7: Deity · Family tree

    Inanna

    Sumerian goddess

    Inanna, the goddess of the Eanna, and her family as the accounts tell it. The canvas draws three recorded parents and a consort who is also listed as a parent, because Sumerian and Akkadian texts disagree and the records keep every version. Nothing is resolved into a single tree, and that is the point.

    Open the family tree Continue to Ninsun
  6. Rama · CC BY-SA 3.0 fr

    Step 7 of 7: Deity

    Ninsun

    Sumerian goddess

    Ninsun, Gilgamesh’s mother in the poems: a goddess on one end of a relationship whose other end is a record filed as a person. A relationship keeps the mode of the account it comes from. A king’s divine mother is kinship in an account, and never evidence of a documented family.

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