Category: Academic

One time / all time

sophushelle

In Gilgamesh, Uta-napishti tells the story of the Flood, and I argue that this “epic inside the epic” illustrates two central but contradictory features of epics. The events narrated in epics are unrepeatable, since they belong to a distant past that cannot be emulated – meaning that Gilgamesh cannot gain immortality as Uta-napishti did. But epics rely on the expectation that the story itself will be repeated through performance – meaning that Gilgamesh can gain eternal life in literature through the epic he composes. Uta-napishti’s story thus brings out a temporal tension at the heart of Babylonian epics.

“Repeating the Unrepeatable: The Temporal Logic of Babylonian Epics.” Studia Mesopotamica, vol. 6 (2022 [came out in 2025]): 135–53. Link.

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Stories that stuck

sophushelle

For a special issue celebrating the twentieth anniversary of David Damrosch’s What Is World Literature?, I consider texts that claim not to want to circulate. I examine the literary tropes by which texts express a resistance to circulation, and argue that non-circulation can sometimes be not an aesthetic failure but a conscious strategy or cultural achievement. I look at two texts in particular: Enuma Elish, whose embedment in cuneiform culture has given it a far smaller modern circulation than Gilgamesh; and the Roman de Silence, a medieval romance that explores the cultural politics of non-circulation.

“Stories that Stuck: Tropes of Non-Circulation,” in David Damrosch’s Comparative World Literatures, edited by B. Venkat Mani, special issue of Journal of World Literature, vol. 9, no. 3 (Winter 2024): 390–401. Link.

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LBL 1: Enuma Elish

sophushelle

The inaugural volume of the Library of Babylonian Literature, which I edit in collaboration with Johannes Haubold, Enrique Jiménez, and Selena Wisnom, presents the Babylonian epic of creation, Enuma Elish, in facing-page translation accompanied by a detailed introduction and thirteen interpretative essays by leading scholars. The epic is a seminal work of Babylonian literature, and as I write in the introduction, “it is no exaggeration to say that, in cuneiform literature and religion, there is a time before and a time after the composition of Enuma Elish.” I contributed the introduction and translation, as well as this chapter.

With Johannes Haubold, Enrique Jiménez, and Selena Wisnom, eds., Enuma Elish: The Babylonian Epic of Creation, Library of Babylonian Literature 1 (London: Bloomsbury, 2024).

Download the volume for free here.

The shape of water

sophushelle

For the first volume of the Library of Babylonian Literature, my chapter argues that Enuma Elish depicts the creation of the world in fundamentally linguistic terms, that is, as a simultaneous emergence of shapes, names, and beings. The epic traces the transformation of the world from a nameless, shapeless, fluid state to a cosmos in which things—and people and gods—come to acquire fixed forms, identities, hierarchies, and roles to play within the world order, that is, fates. The medium of this transformation is language, which is also the medium of the poem, setting up a complex set of relations between the content and the form of the story.

“The shape of water: Content and form in Enuma Elish,” in Enuma Elish: The Babylonian Epic of Creation, edited by Johannes Haubold, Sophus Helle, Enrique Jiménez, and Selena Wisnom, Library of Babylonian Literature 1 (London: Bloomsbury, 2024), pp. 279–95.

Download the chapter for free here.

Janus-faced authors

sophushelle

In this response to a volume on ancient authorial fictions, I argue that “authorship” has come to refer to two things at once, what I call authorship-as-production and authorship-as-presentation: how and by whom a text was made, and how and by whom a text was thought to have been made. These are equally significant aspects of a text’s history, and I argue that differentiating between them is an important methodological step in the study of authorship, especially in the ancient world.

“Janus-Faced Authors: Production or Presentation?,” in Authorial Fictions and Attributions in the Ancient Mediterranean, edited by Chance E. Bonar and Julia D. Lindenlaub (2024, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck), pp. 225–40. Link.

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Circulation, again

sophushelle

In my response to a set of articles on circulation, I use the travels of Gilgamesh—both the text and the character—as a framing device to explore the rhythm of movement and return that shapes the concept of circulation. I argue that textual circulation consists of an alternation of difference and sameness at a number of different, interwoven levels, from the copy that repeats, returns to, and unavoidably differs from its Vorlage to the translation that both is and is not the same text as its source. To study circulation is thus to study a rhythm of sameness and difference as it unfolds simultaneously at various different levels, yielding “galaxies” of textual multiplicity.

“Gilgamesh Returns.” Articultations, by Temporal Communities. June 2024. Link.

World philology

sophushelle

The new field of world philology relies on comparing philological practices across periods and cultures. But similarities between practices can hide deep differences between underlying assumptions about texts and interpretation. In this article, I probe one example of such a disconnect between similar philological practices and different philological theories by examining a commentary on the Babylonian epic Enuma Elish, which develops the epic’s already striking notions about texts in an even more radical direction—challenging our understanding of what we are doing when we do philology.

“World Philology or Philology of the World: Commenting on Enuma Elish,” Avar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Life and Society in the Ancient Near East, vol. 2., no. 2 (Fall 2023): 265–96. Link.

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Return of the text

sophushelle

The article discusses a trope in cuneiform literature that I term the “self-referential climax,” in which stories end by describing their own composition in a final confluence of narrated time and the time of narration. This trope is crucial to the study of cuneiform literature because it affords us a glimpse of how ancient poets viewed their own poems. I focus on three case studies—Inana and Shukaletuda, The Cuthean Legend, and Gilgamesh—that all use the trope to set up an ambivalent contrast between the story’s medium and main character: in all three cases, form triumphs over content.

“The Return of the Text: On Self-Reference in Cuneiform Literature,” Journal of Cuneiform Studies, vol. 75, no. 1 (Spring 2023): 93–107. Link.

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Enheduana in English

sophushelle

The book includes a translation of the five poems attributed to Enheduana, the first known author, as well as an introduction and three essays that unpack her life and legacy. The translation is an innovative and fairly free rendering of her challenging hymns; a more literal translation can be found on the website I created to accompany the book, enheduana.org. The essays introduce the reader to the dramatic time in which Enheduana lived, the ancient reception and main themes of her poems, and the modern rediscovery of this unjustly forgotten figure.

Enheduana: The Complete Poems of the World’s First Author. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023. Link.

Invoking the goddess

sophushelle

The Exaltation of Inana is a complex poem, and scholars disagree on how its structure should be understood. But the text gains a previously unnoticed clarity of composition from its use of invocations—the rhetorically charged apostrophes to the goddess Inana. By following the patterns of repeated invocations, one finds in the text a neat subdivision into six sections, each with their unique form of address. The essay concludes by considering the poetic effects of these invocations.

“Enheduana’s Invocations: Form and Force,” in Women and Religion in the Ancient Near East and Asia, edited by Nicole M. Brisch and Fumi Karahashi, Studies in Ancient Near Eastern Records 30 (2023, Berlin: De Gruyter), pp. 189–208. Link.

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