Category: Babylonian literature

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 (MĂźnster: Zaphon), pp. 279–95.

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Worm v. world

sophushelle

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 Amândio Reis (London: Bloomsbury, 2026), 35–48.

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

Download the chapter for free here.

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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Invoking the goddess

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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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Tales on tablets

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For the volume on cuneiform narratives I co-edited, I wrote about the episodic nature of Babylonian epics. Akkadian narrative poems were often divided into a series of tablets, and those tablets—I argue—shaped the story told upon them. In Gilgamesh, divisions between tablets often correspond to physical borders in the story, in a conflation of form and content; and in Enuma Elish, the events of Tablet I take on a very different tenor if they are read in the isolated context of that Tablet, instead of the epic as a whole.

“Tablets as Narrative Episodes in Babylonian Poetry,” in The Shape of Stories: Narrative Structures in Cuneiform Literature, edited by Sophus Helle and Gina Konstantopoulos, Cuneiform Monographs 54 (2023, Leiden: Brill), pp. 93–111. Link.

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The shape of stories

sophushelle

Together with Gina Konstantopoulos, I edited a volume on narratological approaches to cuneiform literary, historical, and religious texts. The goal of the volume is to function as a methodological toolkit, with each of the papers – which span from the third to the first millennium, covering a wide variety of genres in Sumerian, Akkadian, and Hittite – presenting one possible approach to studying the narrative structures found in cuneiform texts, and illustrating that approach through a concrete case study.

With Gina Konstantopoulos, ed., The Shape of Stories: Narrative Structures in Cuneiform Literature, Cuneiform Monographs 54 (2023, Leiden: Brill). Link.

Gilgamesh in English

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The book includes a translation of Gilgamesh, and five essays that introduce readers to the world of the epic. The translation is a fresh take on the ancient epic and seeks to bring out the poetic power, clarity, and enchanting cadence of the original text. The essays discuss the epic’s long history, its literary form, its depiction of emotions (especially the homoerotic bond between the main characters), its engagement with death and the power of narrative, and its social context, including the role of women and of the natural world.

Gilgamesh: A New Translation of the Ancient Epic. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021. Link.

The two-act structure

sophushelle

The majority of Babylonian epics are organized according to the same narrative structure: the story is divided into two acts, where the second act mirrors and expands the first. The essay shows that this structure applies to Atra-hasis, Enuma Elish, Gilgamesh, Etana, and more, for a total of nine texts.

“The two-act structure: A narrative device in Akkadian epics,” Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions, vol. 20, no. 2 (2020 [April 2021]), p. 190–224. Link.

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Thresholds in Gilgamesh

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The essay explores the representation of time and space in Gilgamesh. The figure of the threshold is a key aspect of the epic, separating highly different, but internally homogeneous kinds of time and space—a structure that also affects its depiction of characters and textuality.

“The chronotope of the threshold in the Epic of Gilgamesh,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. 141, no. 1 (April 2021), p. 185–200. Link.

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