Gilgamesh: A Review

In a famous episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, “Darmok” — an episode I previously wrote about here — Captain Picard finds himself trying to communicate with Dathon, the captain of an alien vessel whose mental framework is incomprehensible to that of Picard and, indeed, the entire Federation. Dathon’s people communicate solely through allusion to their inheritance of story. They say things like “Shaka, when the walls fell” or “Temba, his arms wide” with the expectation that the people they are speaking to will know the story and will understand its applicability to the current situation. But it takes Picard a while to figure this out, and indeed he only fully figures it out after Dathon has been mortally wounded. Rather than leaving him to die in isolation and silence, Picard tells him a story. And the story he tells is the story of Gilgamesh — the oldest human story that has survived. We know nothing of its origins except that it was almost surely composed orally in…