This publication is the long-awaited new edition of the Sumerian composition known as “Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the Netherworld” (GEN) by Alhena Gadotti, based on her doctoral dissertation submitted to the Department of Near Eastern Studies, The Johns Hopkins University, in 2005. Gadotti intends to replace the pioneering first editions of this text by the late S.N. Kramer (1938) and A. Shaffer (1963), taking into account the new primary sources and extensive secondary literature which have appeared over the past half century.
Eight substantial introductory chapters lead to a new text edition (transliterations, translations, commentary and reconstruction of problematic manuscripts), followed by a bibliography, some very useful indices and plates with mostly excellent photographs of the relevant cuneiform texts, and reproductions of older, unfortunately often unreliable, handcopies from previous publications.
After a general “overview” outlining the history of research on GEN and her own intended approach to dealing with this text, the author embarks on a detailed discussion of the various narrative units, in particular the possible functions of the prologue and the meaning of the episode surrounding the Ḫalub-tree. A study of this famous tree in different text genres is included, and there is an attempt to establish a proper botanical identification. Following a discussion of the famous “ballgame” the author tackles the dicey question of the “state” or “capacity” in which Enkidu “returned” from the Netherworld. According to her new study he returned alive, not in the form of a shade as was assumed in the past.
This is one of her most interesting results and has wider implications for the position of GEN within her hypothetical but nevertheless well-supported assumption of a “Sumerian Gilgamesh Cycle”. Here this episode would represent the “trigger” and starting point for the adventures of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, contrary to the later Standard Babylonian version of the Gilgamesh epic in which Enkidu's journey to the Netherworld appears to have led to his death and is therefore separated from the beginning of the composition and placed at the end. The Akkadian epic as it is known today seems to have reinterpreted this episode and developed a tradition divergent from the Sumerian texts.
In conclusion to this section Gadotti deals with the famous description of various types of ghosts encountered by Enkidu in the Netherworld, and their fate.
The following chapter is dedicated to the 74 cuneiform sources used for reconstructing the text. These were excavated at Nippur, Ur, Meturan, Sippar, Isin and Uruk. One source is unprovenanced. The archaeological context and dating of the individual manuscripts according to provenience are discussed, also tablet types, and – albeit briefly – a variety of textual variants, including local idiosyncrasies, based on the work of P. Delnero (2006).
The new text edition represents the main part of Gadotti's study: a great deal of consideration and effort have combined to make this complex and difficult text accessible to the modern reader. A very readable and imaginative translation is followed by an “Eclectic text” and a “Textual matrix” which also includes from line 172 onwards the parallel lines of the Standard Babylonian Version of the Akkadian Gilgamesh Epos following the edition of A. George (2003).
The commentary offers plenty of in-depth analyses of lexical and grammatical problems, some well-informed and convincing, others less so. There are also evaluations of textual variants, all of which would require critical examination and comment beyond the scope of this review. Previous work of other colleagues on text-related problems is acknowledged and discussed, but in a sometimes surprisingly curt and unappreciative fashion.
At this point some considerable drawbacks of this in general very appealing new publication become visible, and these concern the treatment of the primary sources, the cuneiform tablets.
Apart from the tablets housed in the University Museum, Philadelphia, Gadotti worked only with older copies and photographs, incorporating some (but not all!) of the collations of the original tablets provided by colleagues past and present. She did not publish copies of her own. Aside from the tablets excavated at Nippur the tablets from Ur housed in the British Museum in London represent the largest group, and it is very regrettable that the author did not find the time during all the years she spent preparing her new edition to work on these tablets herself.
The photos published give an excellent first impression, but are by no means sufficient to prepare a reliable edition of these abraded and damaged texts which are products of the scribal school and notoriously difficult to read. There always remains the possibility of reconstructing a broken line by checking hypothetical readings on the original tablet, a chance the author sadly missed.
The tablets from Ur preserve (among other unique features) two parts of GEN thus far unknown from other sources, and it is both irritating and somehow telling to find that the relevant text fragments are transliterated differently on pp. 168 and 242 respectively. A seemingly casual and careless attitude to the laborious but essential process of reading original cuneiform tablets and, as a consequence, a failure to evaluate collations properly and to understand the pitfalls of older copies is unfortunately a more general problem and not restricted to the texts from Ur; see most recently P. Attinger (Zeitschrift für Assyriologie 105, 2015, 235–65) to which I provided further collations of the Ur-tablets.
Gadotti's publication nevertheless represents an important milestone in our understanding of the Gilgamesh Epic as it adds much new information and highlights in particular differences in the development of the Sumerian and Akkadian versions, and divergent interpretations of shared narrative units.
The philological basis of her work is not as sound as one would have hoped for, but will provide an invaluable source for further studies.
