Gilgamesh and the theft of the mystery of time

Author: Saeed Al-Ghanami Classification: Literature Publisher: Dar Al-Rafidain Publication date: 2025 Cover design: Regular paper Number of pages: 332 About the book: The book addresses the heroic Sumerian tales initially, which are scattered stories, with multiple characters as heroes. It follows how the Babylonians integrated these scattered stories into a single narrative structure, organized by a single plot, and with a single hero as well. The unification of the scattered tales and their integration into a single structure, with one plot and one hero, indicates a founding period, meaning the creation of a new genre we now call "epic." This was then completed by examining the typological characteristics, social functions, and internal mechanisms for transmitting and performing the "epic" in its ancient cultural context, both as an oral text and as a written work. The study focused on extracting the fundamental units in the construction of the epic. Since the epic involved, at the same time, a symbolic structure alongside the narrative structure and independently of it, the research also addressed the symbolic constructions that the epic attempted to utilize. The book presents a literary study of an ancient text. This means employing various human sciences, as these fields exist in border areas, so they can be recruited within a framework belonging to the latest temporal approaches that have proven their ability to analyze texts and trace their sources positively. It also preserves the epic text’s belonging to its past and distant history, when it was a pioneering work in exploring human consciousness and its ability to solve the problems of its era. Therefore, the research will focus on analyzing this text by placing it within its temporal framework, but using a modern methodological approach that responds to the latest methodological achievements developed in our era.