Category: Scholarship

Touching Gilgamesh

sophushelle

Written during the lockdown and social distancing measures of the Covid-19 pandemic, this essay reflects on the psychological impact of touch in the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh. Discussing every appearance of the word lapātu, “to touch,” in Gilgamesh, I argue that the epic attributes a strong but undetermined power to the fleeting moment of physical contact: touches are repeatedly shown to transform the characters of the epic, but in unpredictable and contradictory ways.

“The touch in Gilgamesh,” in Kultur – Kontakt – Kultur, edited by Doris Prechel, Alexander Pruß, Thomas Richter, and Dirk Wicke, Comptes Rendu de la Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale 66, dubsar 35 (MĂŒnster: Zaphon), pp. 279–95.

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Worm v. world

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This essay, co-written with my partner Aya Labanieh, considers the relation between the smallest and the largest scales of the epic genre: worms and worlds, bugs and Floods, single lines and massive cycles. The essay culminates with a new reading of the interaction between Gilgamesh and Uta-napishti in the Babylonian epic Gilgamesh, showing that the two men are arguing in part about the nature of grief (Gilgamesh mourns his lover, Uta-napishti mourns the whole world) and in part about the proper scope of the epic genre, paving the way for an elegant and heartrending compromise in the last lines of the poem.

With Aya Labanieh, “The shortness of epics: Gilgamesh between
worm and world,” in Short story as world literature: The deep history and modern lives of an impure genre, edited by Delia Ungureanu and AmĂąndio Reis (London: Bloomsbury, 2026), 35–48.

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Beowulf

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My Danish translation of Beowulf was the first in over two decades: despite its canonical fame in the English-speaking world and its setting near the Danish city of Roskilde, the poem remains little-known in Denmark. That is why I decided to depart from my usual Babylonian haunts to render this epic poem in Danish alliterating verse. The book ends with a lengthy afterword in which I explore the poem’s history and literary structure, arguing that the poem can be read as an extended meditation on time.

Beowulf: En gendigtning. Copenhagen: Lindhardt og Ringhof, 2025. Link.

Repeating the unrepeatable

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

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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

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The inaugural volume of the Library of Babylonian Literature, which I edit in collaboration with Johannes Haubold, Enrique JimĂ©nez, 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

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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 JimĂ©nez, and Selena Wisnom, Library of Babylonian Literature 1 (London: Bloomsbury, 2024), pp. 279–95.

Download the chapter for free here.

Janus-faced authors

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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, TĂŒbingen: Mohr Siebeck), pp. 225–40. Link.

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Circulation, again

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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

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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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