Tag: Study notes

Classic of Poetry

Classic of Poetry is the oldest poetry collection of East Asia. The poems reflect the breadth of early Chinese society. There are images of nature and distinctive, fresh simplicity. There is now centuries of commentary and interpretation and is an important element of the traditional curriculum.

 

The Anthology and its Significance

The anthology contains compact, evocative, lyric poetry. Because Chinese literature originated with the Classic of Poetry, short verse gained a degree of pedagogical, political, social importance in East Asia not enjoyed anywhere else in the world. The Classic of Poetry contains 305 poems and consists of three parts: the “Airs of the Domains”, the “Odes/Elegances” and the “Hymns”. The choice and arrangement of the poems were seen as an expression of Confucius’s philosophy. Moral virtue contributes to social order. Confucius’s high opinion of the Classic of Poetry led to its inclusion in the canon of “Confucian Classics.” The Confucian Classics became the curriculum of the state academy (124 B.C.). A “Great Preface,” written for the anthology, became the single most fundamental statement about the function and nature of poetry in East Asia. It claimed there were “six principles” of poetry: the three categories in which the poems were placed and the three rhetorical devices of “enumeration”, “comparison” and “evocative image”. Scholars have debated these issues ever since. They developed the idea that poetry and song can bridge the gulf between social classes, that they can serve as a tool for mutual “influence” and “criticism.” Poetry and songs give the people a voice, helping them keep bad rulers in check, and was central to the Confucian understanding of poetry and society. Poetry made room for social critique and created the institution of “remonstration”: the duty of officials in the bureaucracy to speak out against abuses of power.

 

The Poems

Almost all poems in the Classic of Poetry are anonymous and give voice to many different players in Zhou society. The constraints imposed by society, and the conflict between individual desire and social expectations, are important themes in the “Airs” section. The protagonists in the romantic plots that appear in the poems of the “Airs of the Domains” could be from any culture, past or present. The central stylistic device of the Classic of Poetry is repetition with variation. Enumeration is often used and is the telling of sequences of events in straightforward narrative fashion. Poems from the “Airs” section, by contrast, mostly employ “comparisons” and “evocative images.” Evocative images are much more elusive and do not easily translate into any rhetorical trope in the Western tradition. Xing, the term rendered as “evocative image,” literally means “stimulus” or “excitement.” Xing brings natural images into suggestive resonance with human situations, stimulating the imagination and pushing perception beyond a simple comparison of one thing to another. This collection was part of the education of political elites. They contain pristine simplicity and evocative power to voice fundamental human emotions and challenges.

 

Classic of Poetry

Fishhawk

About how women should act and a young man tormented by desire. The pretty girl is fit for a prince and she is forever desired. Went looking for her; she is always in my thoughts. Couldn’t sleep. We play music for the pretty girl. We play music to make her happy. Does this poem encourage women to not be jealous if their men take another lover?

 

Peach Tree Soft and Tender

The peach tree has cycles like a woman who will become a wife and mother. The bride is like a blossom. She will plump and ripen like the peach. She will mature into a bride.

 

Plums Are Falling

The fruits become fewer with each repetition until the woman decides whom she wants to marry. Seven men want me; I hope I end up with the fine one. Now there are three; I want a steady man. Although many men want me, I want only to be the bride of one.

 

[In the Airs section we can see how individual desire interacts with societal expectations.]

 

Dead Roe Deer

A girl who has just been seduced and now sits beside a dead deer. Death hovers ominously over deer, woman and maidenhood. The deer is wrapped in white rushes and the maiden is also white as marble. The maiden says to not touch her or make her cry out because the dog will bark.

 

Boat of Cypress

A heart that refuses to bend to society’s wishes. The wine does not calm my restlessness. My brothers do not help me with my grief. Neither you nor I can tell my heart what to do, but my behaviors have remained dignified. I contemplate little injustices. These troubles of the heart are like unwashed clothes and I cannot get away.

 

Gentle Girl

I pretty girl waits for me, but she is in shadow and I cannot see her. She gave me a scarlet pipe. I find delight in her beauty. She also brought me a reed, but what made it beautiful was the giver.

 

Quince

She gave me a quince and I gave her a garnet. Even though the exchange is unequal, our love will last. She gave me a peach; I have gave her an opal. She gave me a plum and I gave her a ruby. The gifts are not equal in monetary value, but we continually give to each other which will make our love last.

 

Zhongzi, Please

A suitor with very strong desires! The girl fears a scandal. Zhongzi, don’t cross my village wall and break the willows. My mom and dad already know you are trying to see me…and they don’t like it! Don’t cross my fence and crush the mulberries. My brothers will see that and there’ll be trouble. Don’t come into my garden and trample the sandalwood. The neighbors will talk.

 

Zhen and Wei

Festival scene along two rivers: the Zhen and the Wei. Erotic flirting. The man and maiden frolicked at the river’s edge. They throw flowers in the water.

 

Huge Rat

A voracious rodent compared to an exploitative lord. This huge rat has been eating my grain for three years, but I get nothing in return. I should leave and go to a happier place. I feed you, but you never thank me. In a happy realm I will find what I deserve. You do not reward my toil. I need to escape to a place where no one wails or cries.

 

She Bore the Folk  (from the Odes section)

Enumeration lends structure here. The miraculous birth of Lord Millet: ancestor of the Zhou and inventor of agriculture. A resourceful mother who steps into a god’s footprint. She gave birth to Millet with no pain. He was protected everywhere he roamed. He wailed when he was left alone. When he became hungry he began to plant. The art of agriculture. “He passed us down these wondrous grains…he spread the whole land with black millet.” The gathering and using of the harvest. Because of him we are able to live comfortably.

Early Chinese Literature and Thought

China is the oldest surviving civilization whose literary tradition stretches over more than three thousand years. Its earliest literature set patterns and posed questions for thousands of years to come and gave its civilization a sense of continuity and unity. China went through many changes and has hosted many languages. China was an idea tied to cultural values and the power of the written word. The people could resist change through cultural values, institutions, and writing and thus become “Chinese.” There is belief in cultural and political unity.

 

Beginnings: Early Sage Rulers

There was contact between sections, but they developed independently. In the second millennium B.C. a lineage of sage rulers laid the foundations for Chinese civilization. One can research an entire list of early rulers and what each contributed. Encapsulated in this lineage of legendary rulers are fundamental values of Chinese civilization: the importance of writing and divination; an economy based on intensive agriculture and silk production; a political philosophy of virtue that emphasizes fixed social roles; and practices of self-cultivation and herbal medicine.

 

Earliest Dynasties, China During the Bronze Age and the Beginning of Writing

China’s Bronze Age began around 2000 B.C. They used bronze for molding weapons, spoke-wheel chariots and bronze vessels used in ceremonies. The second dynasty was the Shang from 1500-1045 B.C. They had a complex state system, large settlements, and, most important, a common writing system. Writing was part of ritual practices that guided political decision-making and harmonized the relation between human beings and the world of unpredictable spiritual forces in the cosmos. The Chinese venerated their dead ancestors and various gods.

The Zhou Conquest and the “Mandate of Heaven”

Around 1045 B.C. the Zhou people overthrew the Shang. The Zhou claimed a higher moral ground. After the Zhou conquest, the claim to power in China depended on the claim to virtuous rule, which in large measure meant holding to the statutes and models of the earliest sage rulers and the virtuous early Zhou kings.

 

The Decline of the Eastern Zhou and the Age of China’s Philosophical Masters

In 771 B.C. the king was killed. The Eastern Zhou Period was one of the most formative periods in Chinese history. There was interstate diplomacy, new military technology, and a new class of advisers and strategists. The Warring States Period (403-221 B.C.) was characterized by coercive drafts, raw power politics and strategic deception. The crossbow was invented. Confucius formulated visions of how to live and govern well in a corrupt world. “A hundred schools of thought bloomed.” Chinese call the texts written by masters or compiled by their disciples “Masters Literature.” Masters Literature flourished from the time of Confucius through the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.-220 C.E.) during which there was a broad spectrum of opinions on fundamental questions. The most prominent schools were the Confucians, the Mohists (named after their master, Mozi), the Daoists, the Logicians, the Legalists, and the Yin-Yang Masters, each advocating its own programs, adopting different styles of argument, and engaging the rival camps in polemical disputes. Confucianism and Daoism became the intellectual and religious backbone of traditional China, joined later by Buddhism. There are differences between the Confucians and the Daoists. Confucius, the first and most exemplary master whose sayings are preserved in The Analects, believed that a return to the values of the virtuous early Zhou kings, a respect for social hierarchies, self-cultivation through proper ritual behavior, and the study of ancient texts, could bring order. The most radical opponents of Confucius and his followers were thinkers who advocated passivity and following of the natural “way,” or dao. The Daoists had a deep mistrust of human-made things: conscious effort, artifice, and words. Laozi, a collection of poems and the foundational text of Daoism, proposed passivity as a means of ultimately prevailing over one’s opponents and gaining spiritual and political control. By contrast, many passages in Zhuangzi, the second most important Daoist text of Masters Literature, renounce any claim to societal influence and celebrate the joy of an unharmed life devoted to reflecting on the workings of the mind and on the relativity of perception and values.

 

Foundations of Imperial China: The Qin and the Han

The state of Qin, which had a reputation for ruthlessness and untrustworthiness, but whose armies were well disciplined and well supplied, destroyed the Zhou royal domain in 256 B.C. and conquered the last of the independent states in 221 B.C.: one of the most important dates in Chinese history. Conscious of the historical moment’s weight, the king of Qin conferred the title “First Emperor of Qin” upon himself to mark the novelty of his achievement. Although the Quin was a short-lived dynasty, many of its measures—designed to create a new type of state with a strong centralized bureaucracy—were adopted and adapted by the rulers of the subsequent Han Dynasty (206 B.C.-220 C.E.). With the Qin unification, China was finally an empire. Imperial China, with its upheavals, dynastic shifts, and momentous changes, would last another 2, 100 years—until the Republican Revolution of 1911. The kings of Qin reduced the power of the old nobility and based governance on a direct connection between ruler and bureaucrats controlled by the strict rule of written law codes and policies that were adopted by the new empire. The “Qin Burning of the Books,” of 213 B.C. was one of the most traumatic events in Chinese history. Liu Bang became the first emperor of the Han Dynasty; a Dynasty that lasted more than four hundred years. The Han was the crucial phase of imperial consolidation that set patterns for future Chinese dynasties. The most influential Han ruler was Emperor Wu. He was the first emperor to privilege Confucian scholars and teach the so-called Five Classics: the Classic of Changes, Classic of Documents, Classic of Poetry, Spring and Autumn Annals and the Record of Rites. During Emperor Wu’s reign, the first comprehensive history of China was written. These first 1,500 years of Chinese history, from the Shang Dynasty to the end of the Han Dynasty, saw the emergence of enduring political institutions and ideologies, of moral standards and social manners. The literature produced during this period encapsulates these values and formative patterns and is still the canonical foundation of Chinese civilization.

The Bhagavad-Gita

Introduction

Ca. fourth century B.C.E.-fourth century C.E.

The Bhagavad-gita asks the most difficult of questions. What is a just war, and when can the use of armed conflict to resolve a political stalemate be justified? Under what circumstances is it possible to engage in a violent conflict with family members, clansmen, teachers, and friends—the very people who have nurtured us since infancy—and claim a victory that is morally right? What is such a victory worth if, in the name of life, wealth, or truth, it destroys what we love? As a philosophical poem, the Bhagavad-gita does not provide simple answers, but offers explanations that are appropriately difficult because they involve dilemmas that cannot be resolved once and for all.

Context

The work is actually an integral part of the Mahabharata, and was originally composed as the sixty-third minor book of that epic. Since it is a poem within a poem, the Bhagavad-gita is best interpreted in relation to the epic’s larger narrative, setting, and background.

The Mahabharata is attributed to a single poet, or compiler, named Krsna Dvaipayana, but it was composed collaboratively by many generations of poets in Sanskrit between about 400 B.C. and 400 C.E. Its main story concerns a protracted conflict between two branches of a royal dynasty in northern India over the inheritance of a kingdom and the succession to its throne. The embattled groups are the Kauravas and the Pandavas. The Kauravas do not want to share the kingdom with the Pandavas side of the family. The Kauravas send their brothers into a 13 year exile and give them ultimatums which, if they meet expectations, will be given their share. After the exile, lead brother Duryodhana refuses to honor his promises.

Lord Krsna (as a human avatar of Visnu) comes to guide the Pandavas. The Kauravas refuse a compromise offered by Lord Krsna. The Pandavas find the only thing left to do is war with their family. They feel just in their decision because they have a legitimate claim based on succession and inheritance. They have tried everything else before this step.  Arjuna, of the Pandavas, arrives on the battlefield with Krsna at his side to guide him. He looks out over the battlefield and only sees people he knows. He throws down his weapons and refuses to fight, yet this places him in moral jeopardy. Dharma requires he be prepared to war when it is just. The Bhagavad-gita is the poetic record of that moment of crisis in Arjuna’s mind, and of the conversation he has with God on the brink of war.

Work

The Bhagavad-gita is divided into eighteen chapters (or cantos) composed in verse, and its total length runs to seven hundred couplets. Each canto is called a “chapter”; it contains Krsna’s instruction to Arjuna about what is involved in courage, death, duty, life, violence, war, and why it is essential to fight a just war, even if it means destroying precious lives. It is a nested tale with the author of the Mahabharata granting Sanjaya “celestial vision,” so that he can omnisciently observe everything in the past, present, and future, and everything that happens on the battlefield, in public and in private. Throughout the eighteen days of the war, Sanjaya tells the blind Dhrtarastra what happens in the war, and we, the readers, also witness the entire conflict through Sanjaya’s “visionary eye.” Chapter one: Arjuna explains why he puts down his arms. Chapter two: Krsna explains the imperishable soul. Chapter 3: Arjuna questions action as related to the self and evil and Krsna teaches the discipline of action. Chapter 6: Krsna explains what complete control of the self can accomplish. Chapter 11: Arjuna comes to a new understanding and Krsna reveals his blinding real self. In this version (Norton 3rd edition) we only get a small excerpt of the entire argument for war. Krsna emphatically does not offer a general justification for violence under all circumstances; the use of violence to settle a major dispute can be justified only when every possible option for a peaceful resolution has been explored within the full scope of the law, and all such options have failed. Moreover, in a just war, only the thoroughly trained and disciplined warrior can use violence, and even he can do so only when he is in complete control of himself, and selflessly pursues his duty as defined by dharma.

India’s Ancient Epics and Tales

The Indian subcontinent is also called South Asia and has not been politically united, although it is cohesive in its social and cultural practices. There is a distinct “cultural zone” within Asia, very different in art, language, population, religion, and ways of life.

The Prehistoric Origins of Indian Literature

The kinds of stories ancient Indian literature tells, the forms they take, and the themes they explore are connected to the subcontinent’s past before the appearance of historical records. The Indus-Harrappan people had a writing system of their own. The Indo-Aryan people began to arrive on the Indian subcontinent as early as 2000 B.C. They were originally nomadic and pastoral. Different sub-groups continually moved into new areas. Indo-Aryans settled in Punjab, and by the second millennium B.C., they had organized agrarian villages. Small family farms with animals have endured for over 3,000 years. The “holy cow” is an image that the Indo-Aryans created in their earliest poems on the subcontinent. Their language eventually became Sanskrit, the medium of the largest body of Indian literature, and was produced continuously from 1200 B.C. to 1800 C.E. Sanskrit is related to Greek and Latin: they share grammar, sentence structures, and common roots in the vocabulary. All three languages, along with ancient Persian, may have evolved from a single source called proto-Indo-European, a language presumably used by the ancestors of the Greeks, Romans, Indo-Iranians, and Indo-Aryans a few thousand years earlier.

There are connections among these scattered peoples. They worship pantheons of gods, establish social hierarchies, practice rituals and customs, and adopt political models that resemble each other. Songs, tales, and cycles of myths are similar. By the first millennium B.C., Greek, Sanskrit, and Latin were highly differentiated, so their emerging literatures developed along independent trajectories. They still contained remarkable echoes of one another.

Orality and Writing in India

The first works on the subcontinent were hymns and ritual formulas in Sanskrit including commentary and theological material gathered into four large groups called the Vedas. This work grew into an entire philosophy called the Upanisads. Developed between 1200 and 700 B.C., much of this work is considered scripture and revealed knowledge. The structure includes mantras, poetry and verse, but are viewed as divine knowledge passed down to humans from the gods. Since divine revelation and knowledge need to be explained to human audiences, the Vedas and the Upanisads engendered many works of authoritative and specialized commentary, compendiums and rule books. This all evolved into Hinduism.

The Hindu canon was transmitted orally. Specialist priests and scholars belonging to the brahmana caste are trained from early childhood and taught orally for 12 years. The scholars come to know the text backwards and forwards. Unlike a bard, a Vedic reciter communicates divine revelation, and hence is not free to invent, embellish, or err. Brahmi migrated rapidly across South Asia after 250 B.C. spawning what would eventually become, over the next 1,500 years or so, the dozen distinct script systems in which most of the languages of the region are recorded. Brahmi also migrated out of India and helped spawn more literature and reading. For more than a millennium, the principal form of a Sanskrit book was a palm-leaf manuscript.

Society, Politics, and Religion

The first Vedic hymns were likely composed in Punjab. The society was based around agriculture and cattle. Their political form was a small republic centered around an urban capital ruled by a lineage of hereditary monarchs. A couple centuries later there were larger kingdoms and armies. The Maurya dynasty established the subcontinent’s first empire. This evolving world was shaped by the religion we now call Hinduism. The universe is fashioned in a vast process of self-generation. All primordial substance is godhead itself. Godhead is the “god beyond god” and is absolute and undifferentiated original matter of the universe. It divides itself into everything that exists. It is eternal and indestructible, and hence has no beginning or end. Godhead is unknowable, unimaginable, and indescribable. God is everywhere and in everything: pantheism. Godhead is also called Purusa (spirit), but in the Upanisads it is renamed Brahman. There is the belief that this world will end when the godhead re-gathers itself together. Any life-form’s ultimate goal is to be reunited with absolute godhead; for an individual soul or atman, such a union with the elemental stuff of the universe is possible only if it can achieve moksa, or “liberation,” for its differentiated existence. Since godhead can take on countless forms, there cannot be any one true representation of divinity, so…polytheism: the belief that there are many gods. This is a fundamentally pluralistic religion, tolerant of the worship of many different gods in many different ways, and of the pursuit of divergent ways of life, each of which has the potential to discover a path to maksa for an individual atman.

The Religious Contexts of Epic and Tale

Valmiki’s Ramayana is classified as the first poem in Sanskrit. It emphasizes imaginative and aesthetic excellence outside a religious context. In this framework, Visnu is the “supreme god” who manifests all aspects of godhead. Vedic rituals and a social hierarchy were important. There were four main caste groups: priests, warriors, traders, servants/cultivators. The hierarchy was divinely ordained and immutable meaning that an individual cannot migrate from one caste to another. Legitimate spouses must belong to the same caste-group. Ramayana also depicts a society of villages and small republics in which dynasties of kings do not yet pursue imperial ambitions. They preserve the divine order: humans, animals, plants, demons, celestial beings, and gods.

In the Mahabharata the village society was a more complex urban world with dynastic kingdoms on the verge of imperial formations. There was the addition of “untouchables” and foreigners with each caste-group being differentiated into numerous specific castes. The Mahabharata explores multiple marriages and reproductive relationships, overlaying polygamy with polyandry and complicating issues of legitimacy, illegitimacy, and legacy by birth. There were more complex and varying views on how action can accord with divine law. Many judgments regarding the rightness and wrongness of particular actions founder in uncertainty.

The Bhagavad-gita, which is part of the Mahabharata, tackles the dilemmas of karma in the most difficult of situations: when is war just, how can violence and killing ever be justified, and under what circumstances can human beings even conceive of taking up arms against family and loved ones? The philosophical and theological arguments about the human and the divine, and about social and political organization, launched by the Indo-Aryans toward the end of the second millennium B.C., thus reach a poetic culmination in the encyclopedic structure of the Mahabharata a thousand years later.

By the 6th century B.C. there began to appear responses to the Hindu theology of Brahman and atman; the writers were Mahavira and Siddhartha-Gautama Buddha (who went on to launch Buddhism). Buddhism was more severely skeptical and atheistic. There is no god beyond god and no substantial reality. That we possess an enduring self is an illusion. The only end of life can be a “snuffing out” or extinction of illusory identity (nirvana) which is the opposite of what Hindus call moksa, the liberation of a substantial atman from a material body for reunification with the ultimate, primordial substance: Brahman. Buddhism does accept the reality of karma and rebirth: our illusory self is reborn numerous times because it believes it has a persistent identity. This delusion ends when the self reaches Enlightenment and extinguishing itself. Such a rejection of Hinduism finds a narrative exposition in the Jataka tales: part of the canon of Theravada Buddhism in the Pali language. It contains a playful irreverence and philosophical dissidence and is a profound cultural alternative to the heroic Hindu worlds. For most of the ancient period the Indian subcontinent was not politically united. Down to modern times, South Asia has come to be divided into seven nations. In ancient times Jainism and Buddhism were dissenting from Hinduism. Later, other faiths, such as Zoroastrianism, Christianity and Sikhism also saw their times.

Antigone

by Sophocles

[Notes taken from outside source]

Antigone is the play’s tragic heroine. In the first moments of the play, Antigone is opposed to her radiant sister Ismene. Unlike her beautiful and docile sister, Antigone is scrawny, sallow, withdrawn, and recalcitrant brat. Like Anouilh’s Eurydice, the heroine of his play Eurydice, and Joan of Arc, Antigone has a boyish physique and curses her girlhood. She is the antithesis of the melodramatic heroine, the archetypal blond ingénue as embodied in Ismene. Antigone has always been difficult, terrorizing Ismene as a child, always insisting on the gratification of her desires, refusing to “understand” the limits placed on her. Her envy of Ismene is clear. Ismene is entirely of this world, the object of all men’s desires. Thus she will at one point rob Ismene of her feminine accoutrements to seduce her fiancé Haemon. She fails, however, as such human pleasures are not meant for her.

Generally audiences have received Anouilh’s Antigone as a figure for French Resistance, Antigone appearing as the young girl who rises up alone against state power. Anouilh’s adaptation strips Antigone’s act of its moral, political, religious, and filial trappings, allowing it to emerge in all its gratuitously. In the end, Antigone’s tragedy rests in her refusal to cede on her desire. Against all prohibitions and without any just cause, she will bury her brother to the point of her own death. As we learn in her confrontation with Creon, this insistence on her desire locates her in a line of tragic heroes, specifically that of Oedipus. Like Oedipus, her insistence on her desire beyond the limits of reason render her ugly, abject, tabooed. In refusing to cede it, she moves outside the human community. As with Oedipus, it is precisely her moment of abjection, when she has lost all hope, when her tragic beauty emerges. Her beauty exerts a chilling fascination. As Ismene notes, Antigone is not beautiful like the rest, but beautiful in a way that stops children in the street, beautiful in a way that unsettles, frightens, and awes.

Creon

Antigone’s uncle, the powerfully built King Creon is a weary, wrinkled man suffering the burdens of rule. Before the deaths of Oedipus and his sons, he dedicated himself to art patronage but has now surrendered himself entirely to the throne. A practical man, he firmly distances himself from the tragic aspirations of Oedipus and his line. As he tells Antigone, his only interest is in political and social order. Creon is bound to ideas of good sense, simplicity, and the banal happiness of everyday life. To Creon, life is but the happiness one makes, the happiness that inheres in a grasped tool, a garden bench, a child playing at one’s feet. Uninterested in playing the villain in his niece’s tragedy, Creon has no desire to sentence Antigone to death. Antigone is far more useful to Thebes as mother to its heir than as its martyr, and he orders her crime covered-up. Though fond of Antigone, Creon will have no choice but to but to execute her. As the recalcitrant Antigone makes clear, by saying “yes” to state power, Creon has committed himself to acts he finds loathsome if the order of the state demands it. Antigone’s insistence on her desire in face of state power brings ruin into Thebes and to Creon specifically. With the death of his family, Creon is left utterly alone in the palace. His throne even robs him of his mourning, the king and his pace sadly shuttling off to a cabinet meeting after the announcement of the family’s deaths.

 

Themes

The Nature of Tragedy

Halfway through the play, the Chorus appears on the scene to announce that the tragedy is on. His speech offers a meta-theatrical commentary on the nature of tragedy. Here, in apparently a reference to Jean Cocteau, tragedy appears as a machine in perfect order, a machine that proceeds automatically and has been ready since the beginning of time. Tension of the tragic plot is the tension of a spring: the most haphazard event sets it on its inexorable march: in some sense, it has been lying in wait for its catalyst. Tragedy belongs to an order outside human time and action. It will realize itself in spite of its players and all their attempts at intervention. Anouilh himself commented on the paradoxical nature of this suspense: “What was beautiful and is still beautiful about the time of the Greeks is knowing the end in advance. That is “real” suspense…” As the Chorus notes, in tragedy everything has “already happened.” Anouilh’s spectator has surrendered, masochistically, to a succession of events it can hardly bear to watch. “Suspense” here is the time before those events’ realization.

Having compared tragedy to other media, the Chorus then sets it off generically, specifically from the genre of melodrama. Tragedy is “restful” and “flawless,” free of melodramatic stock characters, dialogues, and plot complications. All is inevitable. This inevitability lends, in spite of tragedy’s tension, the genre “tranquility.” Moreover, it gives its players innocence as they are only there to play their parts. Though Creon will later accuse Antigone of casting him as the “villain” in her little melodrama, the players are embroiled in a far more inexorable mechanism. Again, note the incommensurabilities between Anouilh’s theory of the tragic and political allegory. The latter is necessarily engaged in the generally pedagogical passing of ethico-politico judgment, the arbitration of innocence, guilt, and complicity. Though tragic players face judgment, they do so on rather different terms.

The Sisters’ Rivalry

As with Sophocles’ sistes, Ismene and Antigone appear as foils and rivals. Ismene is “reasonable,” timid, and obedient, full-figured and beautiful in being a good girl. In contrast, Antigone is recalcitrant, impulsive, and moody, sallow, thin, and decidedly resistant to being a girl like the rest. Though the Chorus emphasizes the play’s distance from conventional melodrama, it is interesting to note how, in revision the opposition in Sophocles’ version, it perhaps imports the good girl/bad girl structure typical of this genre, not to mention a number of rather “sentimental” scenes. Ismene advises moderation, understanding, and capitulation. They must take Creon’s obligations into account.

Anouilh develops another form of rivalry between the sisters with regards to femininity. Whereas Ismene is the appropriate, beautiful girl, Antigone curses her girlhood. Antigone in particular manifests her hatred for the ideal of femininity Ismene incarnates in their childhood, brutally binding her sister to a tree to stage her mutilation. Anouilh attributes Antigone’s hate and envy in Ismene’s capacity to figure as an object of desire, as the woman men want. Thus, in attempting to seduce Haemon and become “his woman,” Antigone steals Ismene’s goods—lipstick, rouge, perfume, powder, and frock—in another act of sisterly dismemberment. Through Ismene, Antigone would be a woman; as we will see, however, such “human” pleasures are not meant for her.

Motifs

The Chorus

In Greek tragedy, the Chorus consisted of a group of approximately ten people, playing the role of death messenger, dancing, singing, and commenting throughout from the margins of the action. Anouilh reduces the Chorus to a single figure who retains his collective function nevertheless. The Chorus represents an indeterminate group, be it the inhabitants of Thebes or the moved spectators. It also appears as narrator, framing frames the tragedy with a prologue and epilogue. In the prologue, it directly addresses the audience and is self- conscious with regards to the spectacle: “we” are here tonight to take part in the story of Antigone. Like its ancient predecessor, Anouilh’s Chorus prepares a ritual, instructing the audience on proper spectatorship. The Chorus then reappears throughout the play, marking its another turning points and futilely interceding into the action on “our”—that is, the spectators’ and Theban people’s—behalfs.

Tragic Beauty

As noted above, Antigone’s insistence on her desire makes her monstrous, abject. At the same time, her abjection is her tragic beauty. Antigone announces this beauty throughout her encounter with Creon. Specifically Oedipus emerges as its model. Oedipus’ moment of beauty comes at his moment of total abjection, the moment when he knew all and had lost all servile hope and passed beyond the human community in his transgression of its founding taboo. Like Oedipus, Antigone will become “beautiful” at the moment of his total ruin. As Ismene notes, Antigone’s beauty is somehow not of this world, the kind of beauty that turns the heads of small children—be it in fear, awe, and otherwise.

The Tomb/Bridal Bed

A number of commentators have cast Antigone as a figure “between two deaths,” what we will refer to here as her death as a social or even human being and her death as her demise. The space between two deaths is most certainly materialized her tomb, the cave in which she, as a tabooed and abject body, is to be immured to keep her from polluting the polis. Her death sentence makes her more wretched than animals; such is her “Oedipal” beauty, a beauty in her inhuman abjection. As she appears to sense, however, she will not die alone. Her “tomb” will also serve as her “bridal bed,” Antigone ultimately bringing Haemon with her to the grave. Strangely, another of the tragedy’s victim—Queen Eurydice—meets her demise in another tomb that doubles as bridal chamber. Eurydice dies in her bedroom—bedecked by familiar, comforting feminine accoutrements, appearing as a maiden queen of sorts, having scarcely changed since her first night with Creon. The wound in her neck appears all the more horrible in marring her virgin neck. Her death would appear all the more tragic because she dies in all her “feminine” purity.

Symbols

The Gray World

Upon sneaking in from her brother’s burial, Antigone tells the Nurse that she has come from a “gray world.” Like many of Anouilh’s heroines, Antigone wanders in this gray “nowhere,” a world beyond the “post card” universe of the waking. This world is breathless with anticipation: it doubles the stage, set apart from the human world, upon which Antigone’s tragedy will ensue. At the same time, the world of the living does not lie in wait for Antigone: she is meant to pass onto another.

Creon’s attack

Anouilh symbolizes Antigone’s transcendence of state power with Creon’s assault on her person during their confrontation. Enraged by her proud defiance and his inability to sway her, Creon seizes Antigone and twists her to his side. The immediate pain passes, however: Creon squeezes to tightly, and Antigone feels nothing. Thus Antigone passes beyond the reach of state power and the realm of men.

Eurydice’s Knitting

As the Chorus remarks, Queen Eurydice’s function in the tragedy is to knit in her room until she dies. She is Creon’s final lesson, her death leaving him utterly alone. In the report of her suicide, Eurydice will stop her knitting and the stab herself with her needle. The end of her knitting is the end of her life, evoking the familiar Greek myth of the life-thread spun, measured, and cut by the Fates.

 

Sophocles

Sophocles

496-406 B.C.

 

The seven  remaining plays of Sophocles are considered the height of ancient Athens’ achievements with themes of army, city, family, the human race and independence within and without family. Acceptance of place or rejection? What does it mean to be an outsider? What should we do when forced to choose?

 

Life and Times

Sophocles had a long, successful, productive and happy life. He was fairly wealthy and well educated. He lived in Athens during the golden or classical age. Pericles, an important political figure, was a personal friend of Sophocles. After age 60, the city of Athens began to experience turmoil. He worked in Athenian theater all his life and introduced scene painting, increasing the chorus members from twelve to fifteen, and bringing in a third actor (a “tritagonist”) which allowed three-way dialogue and deeper relationship explorations. Sophocles’s plays seem more modern because he de-centered the chorus to focus more on the characters. He created realistic characters who explored issues such as when is it appropriate to compromise? Should I be a hero or take the course of moderation? He won first prize at the Great Dionysia while still younger than thirty. He composed over one hundred and twenty plays. He had so much charm of character that he was loved everywhere, by everyone. Sophocles’s participation in public life suggests that he was seen as a trustworthy and wise member of the community. He was married and had five sons, one of whom became involved in the theater. He lived past the age of ninety.

 

The Epic of Gilgamesh (ca. 1900-250 B.C.E.)

[These notes were pilfered from another source. Not my work.]

Plot Overview
The epic’s prelude offers a general introduction to Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, who was two-thirds god and one-third man. He built magnificent ziggurats, or temple towers, surrounded his city with high walls, and laid out its orchards and fields. He was physically beautiful, immensely strong, and very wise. Although Gilgamesh was godlike in body and mind, he began his kingship as a cruel despot. He lorded over his subjects, raping any woman who struck his fancy, whether she was the wife of one of his warriors or the daughter of a nobleman. He accomplished his building projects with forced labor, and his exhausted subjects groaned under his oppression. The gods heard his subjects’ pleas and decided to keep Gilgamesh in check by creating a wild man named Enkidu, who was as magnificent as Gilgamesh. Enkidu became Gilgamesh’s great friend, and Gilgamesh’s heart was shattered when Enkidu died of an illness inflicted by the gods. Gilgamesh then traveled to the edge of the world and learned about the days before the deluge and other secrets of the gods, and he recorded them on stone tablets.
The epic begins with Enkidu. He lives with the animals, suckling at their breasts, grazing in the meadows, and drinking at their watering places. A hunter discovers him and sends a temple prostitute into the wilderness to tame him. In that time, people considered women and sex calming forces that could domesticate wild men like Enkidu and bring them into the civilized world. When Enkidu sleeps with the woman, the animals reject him since he is no longer one of them. Now, he is part of the human world. Then the harlot teaches him everything he needs to know to be a man. Enkidu is outraged by what he hears about Gilgamesh’s excesses, so he travels to Uruk to challenge him. When he arrives, Gilgamesh is about to force his way into a bride’s wedding chamber. Enkidu steps into the doorway and blocks his passage. The two men wrestle fiercely for a long time, and Gilgamesh finally prevails. After that, they become friends and set about looking for an adventure to share.
Gilgamesh and Enkidu decide to steal trees from a distant cedar forest forbidden to mortals. A terrifying demon named Humbaba, the devoted servant of Enlil, the god of earth, wind, and air, guards it. The two heroes make the perilous journey to the forest, and, standing side by side, fight with the monster. With assistance from Shamash the sun god, they kill him. Then they cut down the forbidden trees, fashion the tallest into an enormous gate, make the rest into a raft, and float on it back to Uruk. Upon their return, Ishtar, the goddess of love, is overcome with lust for Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh spurns her. Enraged, the goddess asks her father, Anu, the god of the sky, to send the Bull of Heaven to punish him. The bull comes down from the sky, bringing with him seven years of famine. Gilgamesh and Enkidu wrestle with the bull and kill it. The gods meet in council and agree that one of the two friends must be punished for their transgression, and they decide Enkidu is going to die. He takes ill, suffers immensely, and shares his visions of the underworld with Gilgamesh. When he finally dies, Gilgamesh is heartbroken.
Gilgamesh can’t stop grieving for Enkidu, and he can’t stop brooding about the prospect of his own death. Exchanging his kingly garments for animal skins as a way of mourning Enkidu, he sets off into the wilderness, determined to find Utnapishtim, the Mesopotamian Noah. After the flood, the gods had granted Utnapishtim eternal life, and Gilgamesh hopes that Utnapishtim can tell him how he might avoid death too. Gilgamesh’s journey takes him to the twin-peaked mountain called Mashu, where the sun sets into one side of the mountain at night and rises out of the other side in the morning. Utnapishtim lives beyond the mountain, but the two scorpion monsters that guard its entrance refuse to allow Gilgamesh into the tunnel that passes through it. Gilgamesh pleads with them, and they relent.
After a harrowing passage through total darkness, Gilgamesh emerges into a beautiful garden by the sea. There he meets Siduri, a veiled tavern keeper, and tells her about his quest. She warns him that seeking immortality is futile and that he should be satisfied with the pleasures of this world. However, when she can’t turn him away from his purpose, she directs him to Urshanabi, the ferryman. Urshanabi takes Gilgamesh on the boat journey across the sea and through the Waters of Death to Utnapishtim. Utnapishtim tells Gilgamesh the story of the flood—how the gods met in council and decided to destroy humankind. Ea, the god of wisdom, warned Utnapishtim about the gods’ plans and told him how to fashion a gigantic boat in which his family and the seed of every living creature might escape. When the waters finally receded, the gods regretted what they’d done and agreed that they would never try to destroy humankind again. Utnapishtim was rewarded with eternal life. Men would die, but humankind would continue.
When Gilgamesh insists that he be allowed to live forever, Utnapishtim gives him a test. If you think you can stay alive for eternity, he says, surely you can stay awake for a week. Gilgamesh tries and immediately fails. So Utnapishtim orders him to clean himself up, put on his royal garments again, and return to Uruk where he belongs. Just as Gilgamesh is departing, however, Utnapishtim’s wife convinces him to tell Gilgamesh about a miraculous plant that restores youth. Gilgamesh finds the plant and takes it with him, planning to share it with the elders of Uruk. But a snake steals the plant one night while they are camping. As the serpent slithers away, it sheds its skin and becomes young again.
When Gilgamesh returns to Uruk, he is empty-handed but reconciled at last to his mortality. He knows that he can’t live forever but that humankind will. Now he sees that the city he had repudiated in his grief and terror is a magnificent, enduring achievement—the closest thing to immortality to which a mortal can aspire.

Character List
People
Gilgamesh –  King of Uruk, the strongest of men, and the personification of all human virtues. A brave warrior, fair judge, and ambitious builder, Gilgamesh surrounds the city of Uruk with magnificent walls and erects its glorious ziggurats, or temple towers. Two-thirds god and one-third mortal, Gilgamesh is undone by grief when his beloved companion Enkidu dies, and by despair at the prospect of his own extinction. He travels to the ends of the Earth in search of answers to the mysteries of life and death.

Enkidu –  Companion and friend of Gilgamesh. Hairy-bodied and brawny, Enkidu was raised by animals. Even after he joins the civilized world, he retains many of his undomesticated characteristics. Enkidu looks much like Gilgamesh and is almost his physical equal. He aspires to be Gilgamesh’s rival but instead becomes his soul mate. The gods punish Gilgamesh and Enkidu by giving Enkidu a slow, painful, inglorious death for killing the demon Humbaba and the Bull of Heaven.

Shamhat –  The temple prostitute who tames Enkidu by seducing him away from his natural state. Though Shamhat’s power comes from her sexuality, it is associated with civilization rather than nature. She represents the sensuous refinements of culture—the sophisticated pleasures of lovemaking, food, alcohol, music, clothing, architecture, agriculture, herding, and ritual.

Utnapishtim –  A king and priest of Shurrupak, whose name translates as “He Who Saw Life.” By the god Ea’s connivance, Utnapishtim survived the great deluge that almost destroyed all life on Earth by building a great boat that carried him, his family, and one of every living creature to safety. The gods granted eternal life to him and his wife.

Utnapishtim’s Wife –  An unnamed woman who plays an important role in the story. Utnapishtim’s wife softens her husband toward Gilgamesh, persuading him to disclose the secret of the magic plant called How-the-Old-Man-Once-Again-Becomes-a-Young-Man.

Urshanabi –  The guardian of the mysterious “stone things.” Urshanabi pilots a small ferryboat across the Waters of Death to the Far Away place where Utnapishtim lives. He loses this privilege when he accepts Gilgamesh as a passenger, so he returns with him to Uruk.

The Hunter –  Also called the Stalker. The hunter discovers Enkidu at a watering place in the wilderness and plots to tame him.
Partial List of Important Deities and Demons
Anu –  The father of the gods and the god of the firmament.

Aruru –  A goddess of creation who fashioned Enkidu from clay and her spittle.

Ea –  The god of fresh water, crafts, and wisdom, a patron of humankind. Ea lives in Apsu, the primal waters below the Earth.

Humbaba –  The fearsome demon who guards the Cedar Forest forbidden to mortals. Humbaba’s seven garments produce an aura that paralyzes with fear anyone who would withstand him. He is the personification of awesome natural power and menace. His mouth is fire, he roars like a flood, and he breathes death, much like an erupting volcano. In his very last moments he acquires personality and pathos, when he pleads cunningly for his life.

Scorpion-Man –  Guardian, with his wife, of the twin-peaked mountain called Mashu, which Shamash the sun god travels through every night. The upper parts of the monsters’ bodies are human, and the lower parts end in a scorpion tail. They are familiar figures in Mesopotamian myth.

Siduri –  The goddess of wine-making and brewing. Siduri is the veiled tavern keeper who comforts Gilgamesh and who, though she knows his quest is futile, helps him on his way to Utnapishtim.

Tammuz –  The god of vegetation and fertility, also called the Shepherd. Born a mortal, Tammuz is the husband of Ishtar.

Enlil –  God of earth, wind, and air. A superior deity, Enlil is not very fond of humankind.

Ereshkigal –  Terrifying queen of the underworld.

Ishtar –  The goddess of love and fertility, as well as the goddess of war. Ishtar is frequently called the Queen of Heaven. Capricious and mercurial, sometimes she is a nurturing mother figure, and other times she is spiteful and cruel. She is the patroness of Uruk, where she has a temple.

Lugulbanda –  Third king of Uruk after the deluge (Gilgamesh is the fifth). Lugulbanda is the hero of a cycle of Sumerian poems and a minor god. He is a protector and is sometimes called the father of Gilgamesh.

Ninsun –  The mother of Gilgamesh, also called the Lady Wildcow Ninsun. She is a minor goddess, noted for her wisdom. Her husband is Lugulbanda.

Shamash –  The sun god, brother of Ishtar, patron of Gilgamesh. Shamash is a wise judge and lawgiver.

Analysis of Major Characters
Gilgamesh
An unstable compound of two parts god and one part man, Gilgamesh suffers most from immoderation. He is the greatest of all men, and both his virtues and his flaws are outsized. He is the fiercest of warriors and the most ambitious of builders. Yet until Enkidu, his near equal, arrives to serve as a counterweight to Gilgamesh’s restless energies, he exhausts his subjects with ceaseless battle, forced labor, and arbitrary exercises of power. Beautiful to behold, Gilgamesh selfishly indulges his appetites, raping whatever woman he desires, whether she is the wife of a warrior or the daughter of a noble—or a bride on her wedding night. Enkidu’s friendship calms and focuses him. When Enkidu dies, Gilgamesh grieves deeply and is horrified by the prospect of his own death. Abruptly abandoning glory, wealth, and power, all of which are worldly aspirations that he as king had once epitomized, he begins a quest to learn the secret of eternal life. What he finds instead is the wisdom to strike harmony with his divine and mortal attributes. Reconciled at last to his mortality, Gilgamesh resumes his proper place in the world and becomes a better king.

Enkidu
Hairy-chested and brawny, Enkidu begins his literary life as Gilgamesh’s faithful sidekick. In the most ancient of the stories that compose The Epic of Gilgamesh, he is a helper to Gilgamesh. As those legends evolved into chapters of a great epic poem, Enkidu’s role changed profoundly. Much more than a sidekick or a servant, he is Gilgamesh’s soul mate, brother, and equal, even his conscience. In the later stories the gods bring Enkidu into the world to provide a counterpoint to Gilgamesh. Unlike Gilgamesh, who is two-thirds god, Enkidu is fashioned entirely from clay. He begins his life as a wild man, raised by animals, and, crude and unrefined, he remains to a certain extent a sojourner in the civilized world. For example, when Gilgamesh spurns Ishtar, the goddess of love, with flowery, allusive insults, Enkidu merely hurls a piece of meat in her face. However, Enkidu is also instinctively chivalrous. He takes up arms to protect the shepherds who first give him food, and he travels to Uruk to champion its oppressed people and protect its virgin brides from their uncontrollable king. Ironically, that king is Gilgamesh. Enkidu overcomes him with friendship rather than force and transforms him into the perfect leader. Perhaps Enkidu feels Uruk’s injustices so keenly because he is such a latecomer to civilization. Though Enkidu is bolder than most men, he is also less pious than he should be. He pays dearly for the disrespect he shows to Enlil, the god of earth, wind, and air, when he urges Gilgamesh to slay Enlil’s servant Humbaba, and he incurs the wrath of Ishtar. Like all men, Enkidu bitterly regrets having to die, and he clings fiercely to life.

Utnapishtim
Utnapishtim’s name means “He Who Saw Life,” though “He Who Saw Death” would be just as appropriate, since he witnessed the destruction of the entire world. The former king and priest of Shurrupak, Utnapishtim was the fortunate recipient of the god Ea’s favor. His disdain for Gilgamesh’s desperate quest for eternal life might seem ungenerous, since he himself is immortal, but Utnapishtim must carry a heavy load of survivor’s guilt. He doesn’t know why, of all the people in the world, Ea chose him to live, but he does know that he tricked hundreds of his doomed neighbors into laboring day and night to build the boat that would carry him and his family to safety while he abandoned them to their fates. What Utnapishtim gained by his trickery was a great boon for humankind, however. He received a promise from the gods that henceforth only individuals would be subject to death and that humankind as a whole would endure. When Utnapishtim tested Gilgamesh by asking him to stay awake for a week, he knew that he would fail, just as he knew that Gilgamesh wouldn’t profit from the magical plant that had the power to make him young again. Gilgamesh is one-third man, which is enough to seal his fate—all men are mortal and all mortals die. Yet since Utnapishtim “sees life,” he knows that life extends beyond the individual—that families, cities, and cultures endure.

Themes
Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.

Love As a Motivating Force
Love, both erotic and platonic, motivates change in Gilgamesh. Enkidu changes from a wild man into a noble one because of Gilgamesh, and their friendship changes Gilgamesh from a bully and a tyrant into an exemplary king and hero. Because they are evenly matched, Enkidu puts a check on Gilgamesh’s restless, powerful energies, and Gilgamesh pulls Enkidu out of his self-centeredness. Gilgamesh’s connection to Enkidu makes it possible for Gilgamesh to identify with his people’s interests. The love the friends have for each other makes Gilgamesh a better man in the first half of the epic, and when Enkidu dies, Gilgamesh’s grief and terror impel him onto a futile quest for immortality. The epic may lack a female love interest, but erotic love still plays an important role. Enkidu’s education as a man begins with his sexual initiation by the temple harlot, and the two heroes’ troubles begin with their repudiation of Ishtar, the goddess of love. Humanity renews itself through the female life force, which includes sex, fertility, domesticity, and nurturance, not through an arbitrary gift of the gods. When Gilgamesh finally sees that his place is here on Earth and returns to Uruk to resume his kingship, Ishtar returns to her place of honor.

The Inevitability of Death
Death is an inevitable and inescapable fact of human life, which is the greatest lesson Gilgamesh learns. Gilgamesh is bitter that only the gods can live forever and says as much when Enkidu warns him away from their fight with Humbaba. Life is short, the two warriors tell each other on their way to the deadly confrontation in the Cedar Forest, and the only thing that lasts is fame. But when Enkidu is cursed with an inglorious, painful death, their bravado rings hollow. Shamash, the sun god, consoles Enkidu by reminding him how rich his life has been, but though Enkidu finally resigns himself to his fate, Gilgamesh is terrified by the thought of his own. Mesopotamian theology offers a vision of an afterlife, but it gives scant comfort—the dead spend their time being dead. If Gilgamesh’s quest to the Cedar Forest was in spite of death, his second quest, to Utnapishtim, is for a way to escape it. Utnapishtim’s account of the flood reveals how ludicrous such a goal is, since death is inextricably woven into the fabric of creation. But life is woven in as well, and even though humans die, humanity continues to live. The lesson that Gilgamesh brings back from his quest isn’t ultimately about death—it’s about life.

The Gods Are Dangerous
Gilgamesh and Enkidu learn all too well that the gods are dangerous for mortals. Gods live by their own laws and frequently behave as emotionally and irrationally as children. Piety is important to the gods, and they expect obedience and flattery whenever possible. They can often be helpful, but angering them is sheer madness—and a character’s reverence for the gods is no guarantee of safety. Thus, the world of The Epic of Gilgameshdiffers markedly from that of the Judeo-Christian tradition, in which God is both a partner in a covenant and a stern but loving parent to his people. The covenant promises that people will receive an earthly or heavenly inheritance if they behave well. The Judeo-Christian God represents not just what is most powerful but what is morally best—humans should aspire to imitate him. These differences are noteworthy becauseGilgamesh also shares certain common elements with the Judeo-Christian Bible. Both Gilgamesh and parts of the Bible are written in similar languages: Hebrew is related to Akkadian, the Babylonian language that the author used in composing the late versions of Gilgamesh. The Bible comes from the same region as Gilgamesh and shares some of its motifs and stories, such as the serpent as the enemy who deprives humans of eternal life and, most important, the flood. In both the Bible and Gilgamesh, disobedience to a god or gods brings dire consequences. Although we never learn exactly why the gods unleashed the great flood inGilgamesh, we know why Ea rescues Utnapishtim and through him all the creatures and people of the world. As the god of wisdom and crafts, Ea is responsible for human attributes including cleverness, inventiveness, and creativity, which enable people to survive independently. Ishtar, too, while a fickle friend, presides over sexual desire, fertility, nurturance, agriculture, and domesticity, which ensure humankind’s future. For the Mesopotamians, piety and respect for the gods are not true moral obligations. Rather, piety and respect suggest a practical acknowledgment of nature’s power and serve to remind humans of their place in the larger scheme of things.

Motifs
Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.

Seductions
There are two important seductions in Gilgamesh, one successful and one a failure. When the temple prostitute seduces Enkidu, he loses his animal attributes but gains his self-consciousness and his humanity. In contemporary western society, people often view human sexuality as base and lewd and may be more accustomed to a reversal of roles—with Enkidu seducing a woman, instead of a woman seducing him. Furthermore, Christianity encourages its followers to transcend their bodies and to store up treasures in heaven. Sex played a much different role in the Mesopotamian worldview. The notion of sublimation was entirely foreign to the ancient Mesopotamians, who believed that this world is the only one and that the act of sex mystically and physically connects people to the life force, the goddess. Sacred prostitutes did not embody moral frailty—they were avatars and conduits of divinity. When Gilgamesh spurns Ishtar as she attempts to seduce him, he brings disaster upon himself and Enkidu. When he asks Ishtar what he could offer her in return since she lacks nothing, he misses the point of her seduction. When Gilgamesh—who has no afterlife to look forward to and no moral ideal to aspire to—spurns the goddess, he spurns life itself.

Doubling and Twinship
Gilgamesh is full of characters and events that mirror or resemble one another. For example, Gilgamesh and Enkidu look almost identical. After Enkidu dies, Gilgamesh grows his hair and dons animal skins, as if trying to become his lost friend. Two scorpion monsters guard the twin-peaked mountain, Mashu, which Shamash travels through nightly. The gods Ea and Shamash champion the human heroes. The heroes undertake two successful quests, one against Humbaba the demon and one against the Bull of Heaven. Gilgamesh’s solitary quest to find Utnapishtim mirrors his journey with Enkidu to the Cedar Forest. These repetitions sometimes serve to reinforce or emphasize important features of the story, such as Gilgamesh’s and Enkidu’s power and heroism. At other times they create contrasts, calling attention to the differences between two similar events. Alternately, the story may be structured in terms of twins and doubles primarily for aesthetic reasons—in other words, because the repetitions lend the story a symmetry or cyclicality that is beautiful or poetic in itself.

Journeys
Almost all of the action in Gilgamesh begins with a journey. Enkidu journeys from the wilderness to Uruk and Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh and Enkidu journey to the Cedar Forest. Enkidu journeys to the underworld. Gilgamesh journeys to and then through the twin-peaked mountain Mashu. He journeys to Urshanabi to find Utnapishtim, then travels with Urshanabi across the sea and through the sea of death, only to return to Uruk. Gilgamesh’s many journeys mirror his internal journey to become a selfless and devoted king.

Baptism
Baptism imagery appears throughout Gilgamesh, signaling a continual renewal and rebirth of the characters. Enkidu washes and anoints himself after he tastes cooked food and beer at the shepherd camp. Ninsun washes herself before she communes with Shamash. Gilgamesh washes himself after his return from the Cedar Forest. Gilgamesh and Enkidu wash themselves in the Euphrates after they subdue the Bull of Heaven. Gilgamesh undergoes a reverse baptism after Enkidu’s death, when he dons skins and lets his hair grow. Siduri urges Gilgamesh to wash himself, but he refuses. Utnapishtim orders his boatman to baptize Gilgamesh before they journey home. Gilgamesh is in a pool of pure water when the snake steals the magic plant. Though Gilgamesh regrets losing the plant, the baptism imagery suggests he doesn’t need it anymore. He has finally come to terms with his morality and is ready to resume his place in the world.

Symbols
Symbols are objects, characters, figures, or colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.

Religious Symbols
Gilgamesh is rich in religious symbolism. Religious rituals in Mesopotamia involved sacrifices, festivals, sex, dream interpretation, and shamanic magic, all of which appear in the story. Enkidu’s hirsuteness symbolizes the natural, uncivilized state. The walls of Uruk symbolize the great accomplishments of which mortals are capable. In the context of the ancient king who built them, they represent the immortality he achieved through his acts. Bulls represent explosive, destructive natural power, and the ability to wrestle a bull suggests humanity’s ability to harness nature’s power. This symbolism accounts for Enkidu’s interpretation of Gilgamesh’s dream about the bull in the Cedar Forest. Enkidu says the bull is Humbaba, and that the act of wrestling the bull is Shamash’s blessing. Later in the poem, Enkidu and Gilgamesh do subdue a bull together, perhaps suggesting that humankind has the power to conquer famine.

Doorways
Images of doorways, portals, and gateways constantly recur in Gilgamesh. Enkidu blocks the doorway of the bride’s chamber and wrestles with Gilgamesh. Enkidu and Gilgamesh stand awestruck and terrified before the gates to the Cedar Forest. After their triumph there, they fashion the tallest tree into a gate for Uruk. The Scorpions guard the gates of Mashu. Siduri the barmaid locks the door to her tavern. The hatchway of Utnapishtim’s boat is caulked shut. In most cases, doorways mark a transition from one level of consciousness to another. They also represent choices, since characters can either shut themselves behind doorways to seek safety or boldly venture through them.

 

Ancient Egyptian Literature

Ancient Egypt has one of the world’s oldest literary traditions. Texts that emerged from ancient Egypt display a remarkable range of genres, styles and themes. It was not until the nineteenth century that European scholars deciphered the forgotten language and gradually recovered Egypt’s written heritage. It did not help that they used fragile papyrus for their writings.

The Oral and Written in Egyptian Literary Culture

Egyptian texts were mostly written in ancient Egyptian language, a member of the Afroasiatic language related to ancient Semitic languages. The classical form of the language is Middle Egyptian. Egyptian was written in two main scripts: hieroglyphic script and “hieratic” or “priestly writing.” Literacy was restricted to elites in ancient Egypt. Literature was not a medium for broad consumption by reading but was enjoyed through verbal storytelling. Skillful speech was highly valued. Egyptians saw written compositions as part of a culture of oral performance, taking delight in alliteration, repetition and wordplay. The earliest longer texts from the Old Kingdom (3rd millennium B.C.) are carved in tombs. They have metrical form and are the largest category of continuous composition. There are also Pyramid Texts carved in the burial apartments of kings and queens.

The Classical Periods of Egyptian Literature

Kings of the Middle Kingdom (1940-1650 B.C.) expanded writing and scribal schools. Thus came the production of complaints, dialogues, tales, and wisdom texts  with complex imaginary settings, narrative frames and story cycles. This fiction set the standard for later times. The New Kingdom (1500-1000 B.C.) combined motifs from the Near East revealing their cosmopolitan life and relations with other countries. Some poems during this period began to critique old rituals.

The Late Period (C.A. 1000-30 B.C.)

Egypt lost its imperial power through foreign invasions. It became a province of the Roman Empire. This led some of its literature to explore more somber tones. The new form of writing was called Demotic (650 B.C. to 300 C.E.). Demotic developed new themes and longer tales.

 

Cannibal Spell for King Unis 2325 B.C.

This work is one of the earliest long Egyptian texts and was found inside a king’s sealed death pyramid. The text tells of the king taking on the role of creator god in a never-ending cycle. This text may have been recited during the burial ceremony along with an animal sacrifice.

[Summary in my own words except for the quotes]

All the world pauses for the death of King Unis. He is powerful, even more powerful than his creators. Unis wears his headdress and is still vital and powerful. He grows in power by eating other gods. He is effective. Unis has gone up into the sky. The sky gods are now working his case. Unis can devour all and has many helpers in his quest. Unis eats the magic of the gods and those in the sky serve him. Both skies serve him and both shores serve him. “Unis is the most controlling power, who controls the controlling powers; Unis is the sacred image who is most sacred of sacred images…” He is now in his proper place in front of all privileged ones. He is the most senior of the senior gods. He is the crowned lord of all controlling powers. He has acquired the hearts of the gods. Their magic is now in his belly. “…he has swallowed the Perception of every god [and] eternity is his limit…” Unis is now set and apparent. “Those who do (evil) deeds will not be able to hack up the place of Unis’s heart among the living in this world forever continually.”

Creation and the Cosmos

Cosmogonies are stories about how the world began. To compose a “cosmogony” is to describe how the world came to be a beautiful and well-ordered place. Early cosmogonies provide mythical stories and divine personifications instead of scientific theories. The continuity of mythical elements across the Babylonian, Greek, and Roman cultures (i.e. divine creation/floods) seems to indicate a common heritage among the ancient Mediterranean world. Ancient cosmogonies do not usually begin with creation ex nihilo (from nothing), but present some primeval matter from which the world took shape. These works also trace the ways human life has changed since it began. Ideas of decline and progress are essential to the way humans imagine themselves and their place in the world.
A whole world is a relatively new idea. Early people always pictured themselves at the center of the world and tried to imagine what was above and below. These text often feature stories of primeval struggle between different generations of the gods: a “theomachy” (battle of the gods). This kind of story can display triumph of male power over an earlier time (matriarchal); as a prototype for how successful human rulers can replace warring factions or oligarchies; or as a mirror of the usual struggles in human families where the younger generation takes control. Creation stories may also help establish the centrality of a particular place or culture within the whole world.
Cosmogonies tend to classify the world in a hierarchical structure. The terms in which people imagined creation, and the gods, varied with the landscape. Sun, sky and water are sometimes viewed as the sources of life. Poetic accounts of cosmogony played an important part in literature throughout antiquity; they are not confined to the distant past. From the beginning, composing stories about cosmic creation was intimately related to thinking about human acts of creation. Creation stories are meditations on the act of making, and we should remember that the Greek word for poetry, poesis, primarily means “making.” Often some of the most self-aware works of literature, these stories raise questions about how human and divine agency relate to one another when we make up worlds of the mind.