The Meaning of Gilgamesh

[meiji]

First of all, hello.

Just finished Harald Braem's book about the Epic of Gilgamesh. Then googled Gilgamesh, find myself looking into his Wikipedia entry. Wiki says that the earlier Sumerian records name him as Bilgamesh.
It sounds me like a modern Turkish name, Bilge is still common in modern Turkish, we had lots of great khagans in that name.

To be clear, I'm not trying to connect Sumerians with Turkic family. I just wanna know what Bilgamesh (or Gilgamesh) actually means. I'm more interested in the -mesh part, because in Turkish we have a suffix exactly sounds like this. It is a suffix for some kind of past tense, but it is could also be used for names, for example Bilgemiş would mean the man who become wiser. (or sth like that, my English is not sufficient to translate this) So I'm just curious, about what Gilgamesh actually means.
Since I'm a highschool kid who interested in history and such, please be more clear. I'm not an academician or sth else. Thanks in advance.

[sheshki]

Hello Meiji,

welcome on board.
I have the feeling that i somewhere have a pdf concerning your question, but i don´t have much time to search for it at the moment.
So to start, here is a quote from another thread. The Deities of Ancient Mesopotamia, an overview


From:
A Dictionary of Ancient Near Eastern Mythology
by Gwendolyn Leick,
first published 1991 by Routledge


Gilgameš
A Sumerian king of Early Dynastic Uruk; he was later deified and became
the hero of Mesopotamia’s eponymous epic. His name (written as
^dgiš.bíl.gín.meš, ^dgiš.bíl.ga.meš, ^dgiš.bíl) has been interpreted as ‘the old
man is (still) a young man’, but that may be a late etymology referring
to the Plant of Youth (see below). The Sumerian king-list calls him the
son of the goddess Ninsun and mentions that his father was lillu (an
‘unknown mortal’?) who later became a ‘high priest of Kullab’. In the
epic, Lugalbanda is his father.
Gilgameš appears as the recipient of ritual offerings in Old Sumerian
texts from Lagaš. During the Ur III period he became known as a ‘king
of the underworld’, ‘who pronounces judgement and gives final decisions’
on behalf of the sun-god Šamaš. The close relationship between Gilgameš
and the sun-god might have led to an eventual solar interpretation of
the hero himself. He was worshipped as a god at Nippur, Umma and
Drehem.
There are five extant Sumerian compositions concerning Gilgameš.
They were probably written down during the reign of the Isin kings, who
had dynastic connections with Uruk and were interested in the heroic
past of that city. The different versions of the various stories betray their
origin in oral traditions, although there are some indications that literary
versions existed as early as the Fara period
(Biggs 1977), 1–4.

[us4-he2-gal2]

Hello Meiji, welcome to enenuru.




I think it is great that you are looking into this type of thing because there aren't to many high school students that I know of who are interested in this topic. Of course, it is never to early to learn. The earlier the better.


Sheshki gave a great answer above. His answer used information from the scholar G. Leick. I use information from another scholar, Andrew George - as you will see the information is a little different. The reason is because Sumerology is not a perfect science. People make mistakes, and furthermore, the text from the earliest period is very hard to read and interpret and answers differ as to exactly what these texts say or what they mean.


For Gilgamesh I suggest the book called "The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic" (volume 1 and 2) by Andrew George (2003). This is considered the best translation and commentary on on Gilgamesh so far.


In chapter two of this book, Andrew George discusses the name, Gilgamesh's name. Yes, the spelling of the name Bilgamesh is older than the spelling Gilgamesh. There may have been an older spelling than Bilgamesh however. According to Andrew George's findings, in the very earliest writings from 2600 BC, the name was actually Pabilga-meš ... in very early texts, the cuneiform signs GIŠ-BIL-PAP or
PA-PAP-GIŠ-BIL were used to write this name - the reasons which George says the name would be pronounced "Pabilga-meš" are complex and complicated. But this is what the best scholar on the subject has determined. So what does Pabilga-meš mean? George says that pa means 'eldest' while bilga means 'offshoot, fruit'. Together the two elements pa and bilga may imply 'ancester' or 'forebearer'. George suggests that the oldest writing of the name Gilgamesh, pronounced Pabilga-meš, probably meant 'the ancestor (or forebearer) was a hero'.

George states that the spelling Bilgamesh (with the pa or pap sign left off) was first seen in the Sumerian city of Lagash in the Early Dynastic period. Later, in the time when the full Gilgamesh epic was composed, the Akkadian period, the spelling Gilgamesh started.


Although scholars say that Sumerian is a "language isolate" (meaning that they believe it isn't related to any language that we know about), it is like Turkish in that both language are agglutinative. So both language have a similar way of forming sentences so that many suffixes or prefixes are attached to the verb, and so on. So even though Sumerian and Turkish aren't related, they work in a similar way




Feel free to write and ask anything you want. And don't forget to use the Oxford website that provides free translations of Sumerian texts - as Sheshki mentioned in his above post, there were 5 Sumerian stories of Gilgamesh that came before the famous Akkadian "Gilgamesh epic". The Akkadians used these 5 older stories to make their much longer epic which, which brings all these stories together and adds new elements to the story - like Gilgamesh' quest for immortality (added by the Akkadians). The 5 stories of Gilgamesh from the Sumerian period are available at the Oxford website. Notice they spell his name "Gilgamesh" in these stories... its very confusing, but it was probably actually "Bilgamesh" but they translate "Gilgamesh" so readers know who is being talked about:



etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/


etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/etcsl.cgi?text=c.1.8.1*#

[madness]

Simo Parpola has interpreted the name of Gilgameš to mean

the one "who matched the tree of balance"

in an article called "The Esoteric Meaning of the Name of Gilgamesh" appearing in the book Intellectual Life of the Ancient Near East (1998).

But I don't have this article on hand at the moment, so I'm not sure how he reaches this interpretation.


If anyone wants to download this:

www.academia.edu/1784780/The_Name_of_Gilgames_in_the_Light_of_Line_47_of_the_First_Tablet_of_the_Standard_Babylonian_Gilgames_Epic_BuB_

It might be helpful.

[meiji]

Thanks, everyone. It seems that it is just a coincidence.