'Gilgames, Enkidu and the Netherworld' and the Sumerian Gilgames cycle

This dissertation examines the Old Babylonian Sumerian literary text "Gilgames, Enkidu and the Netherworld" (GEN) within the larger landscape of Sumerian literary texts about Gilgames and Enkidu. It offers a new critical edition of GEN, and represents the starting point of a discussion about the Sumerian Gilgames stories and their inherent relations to each other and to Sumerian literature as a whole.; In Chapter I, I present a summary of GEN, a history of its previous scholarly treatments, and the research strategies used in this investigation.; In Chapter II, I offer an overview of the debate about literary theory in Assyriology, and illustrate the place of GEN within the culture that produced it. I argue that the label "cycle," borrowed from Classical studies, is applicable to the Sumerian stories about Gilgames.; In Chapter III, I discuss the prologue of GEN. I argue that this prologue serves a specific narratological function vis-a-vis the rest of the text.; In Chapter IV, I review the attestations of the term halub/ huluppu in both Sumerian and Akkadian documents. I propose a feasible candidate for the identification of this tree.; In Chapter V, I argue that when Enkidu returns from the Netherworld to relate the destinies of the ghosts to Gilgames, he is alive, and not dead as scholars have so far believed. I propose that GEN was the first, and not the last of the stories narrating Gilgames and Enkidu's adventures. These adventures were narrated in a coherent cycle, discussed in Chapter VI.; In Chapters VII and VIII, I offer an analysis of the narrative and poetic structure of the text, and present a detailed survey of manuscript tradition and textual variants of GEN.; In Chapter IX, I provide the composite text and translation of the composition, followed by the textual matrices (Appendix 1) and commentary (Appendix 2). Appendix 3 contains my reconstruction of manuscript XI, as well as a table illustrating the order in which the destinies of the ghosts are arranged in each manuscript. Appendix 4 is a concordance of the manuscript sigla used by A. Shaffer, myself, and A. George, respectively.