Gilgamesh in Ireland by Macnas
George Smith & the Ashurbanipal Library Project provided the narrative.
“You will gorge on your savage crimes… to the last rotting morsel…”
Macnas1 is a street spectacle theatre company based in Galway (city), Ireland. The company has released Gilgamesh, the first hero’s journey.2 Macnas has made three short films, visual tablets that introduce the story, the characters and the themes of Gilgamesh.3 (see video clip at bottom of this post before footnotes)
Q: How does Macnas have access to the epic tale of Gilgamesh?
A. Because of the preservation of the Epic of Gilgamesh, ancient Babylonian poetry. The epic was among the clay tablets written in cuneiform of the Royal Library of Ashurbanipal found in 1849 at the archaeological site Kouyunjik (ancient Nineveh, capital of Assyria) in northern Mesopotamia. Today this is Iraq near Mosul.
The archaeological discovery is credited to Austen Henry Layard4; most tablets were taken to England and are now in the British Museum. The Epic of Gilgamesh was translated by English Assyriologist, George Smith in 1872. 5
The University of Mosul and the British museum have been compiling a catalog record of artifacts from Assurbanipal’s library since 2002.6 For details see writings of Jonathan Taylor, Curator, Middle East: The Ashurbanipal Library Project at the British Museum 7 or read his “A Library Fit for a King” on the British Museum blog.8
Dineen, Terry. Macnas: Joyful Abandonment. Dublin, Ireland: Liffey Press, 2008.
Macnas. Gilgamesh. 2020; Kelly, Brian (2020). Macnas unveils the beautiful and terrible Gilgamesh. Galway Daily.(November 14).
Kavanagh. Noeline (2020). Macnas' Noeline Kavanagh on the Epic of Gilgamesh. RTÉ (Nov.18).
Layard, Austen Henry. Discoveries Among the Ruins of Neneveh and Babylon: With Travels in Armenia, Kurdistan, and the Desert: Being the Result of a Second Expedition Undertaken for the Trustees of the British Museum. G. P. Putnam and Co. 1853.
Damrosch, David. The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh. New York: H. Holt, 2007.
Taylor, Jonathan (2013). "The Ashurbanipal Library Project at the British Museum" in De Graef, Katrien, and Anne Goddeeris, eds. Law and (Dis)Order in the Ancient Near East: Proceedings of the 59th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale Held at Ghent, Belgium, 15–19 July 2013. Vol. 59, Penn State University Press, 2021, pp. 291–296.
Taylor, Jonathan: The Ashurbanipal Library Project recreates digitally the cuneiform tablet library of Ashurbanipal, King of Assyria (668 – c. 630 BC). Since its discovery in the nineteenth century, the Library has been the most popular and most informative of all Assyriological resources. It is the foundation on which Assyriology has been built.
Taylor, Jonathan (2018).“A Library Fit for a King.” British Museum blog. (Oct.25).