Dates in Mesopotamia

Date palms were very much a part of the Mesopotamian landscape and everyday life. (Source)

The Coachella Valley in California is known for being the home of a certain music festival, but few people booking their first trip to that festival realize it is also home to countless date farms.

Dates are the oldest-cultivated fruit, but they only made it to California after 1898, when the US Department of Agriculture sent out some guys to collect exotic plants from around the world to bring back for cultivation in America, including mangoes, avocados and, you guessed it, dates.

Inspired by One Thousand and One Arabian Nights, a book that had enchanted many stateside with its stories of Aladdin and Sinbad, set against a landscape rich with date palms, the men charged with bringing back dates went straight to Baghdad, Iraq.

Date palms in Coachella Valley, Calif. Dorothea Lange/Library of Congress, via NPR.

And so started the date’s journey from Mesopotamia to California. (Source)

Googling Dates

Sumerians first began their relationship with the date palm, a tree that towered up to 100 feet and could live up to 200 years, as early as 4000 BC, 5,000 years ago. Over time, they wound up with some 150 words to describe the different types of date palm and their different parts, a fact apparent in what Karen Rhea Nemet-Nejat refers to as the ancients’ “lexical texts,” in her book, Daily Life in Ancient Mesopotamia.

Nonetheless, they called the date palm (phoenix dactylifera) gishimmar, and its fruit, zulum.

Gishimmar and zulum might sound (and look) like perfectly Sumerian words to the untrained in Sumerian (me), but they are not. According to a German Assyriologist by the name of Benno Landsberger, these words are words from a pre-Sumerian language. This implies that the date palm and its fruit were a thing humans knew about before Sumerians became cultivators. Some sources I came across, including this resourceful HortScience paper from ChihCheng T. Chao and Robert Kreuger, place India alongside Mesopotamia as the origin of the idea to cultivate the date palm. Further, the Biblical Archaeology Society says in an article, “The earliest-known date seeds were found in Indus Valley settlements dating to the sixth millennium B.C., suggesting that dates originated in the East and were carried to the Near East and Egypt.”

This (Mesopotamia) Must Be the Place!

On the Natural History of the Date Palm Phoenix dactylifera page, Geoff Sanderson writes that the date palm needs “its feet in running water and its head in the fire of the sky.”

Such criteria made Lower Mesopotamia in the Tigris and Euphrates delta—where summers are dry, winters are mild, and irrigation was already a thing—the perfect location for the date palm to thrive and become a symbol of fecundity and success, as well as a vital part of the economy.

Even with the perfect conditions Lower Mesopotamia provided a date palm, however, it still took the plant four to six years from planting time to bear fruit, along with some 15 to 20 years to reach full productivity. To give some perspective, full productivity for a date palm is an annual output of about 45 pounds (20kg) of fruit per tree. For a plant that played such a vital economic role to so many people, it’s hard to imagine that such yields were enough to, one, support such thriving civilizations, and two, reach quintessence status.

Moreover, a natural palm grove features an even split of half female and half male trees. Such groves rely on Mother Nature to carry the males’ pollen to the females’ flowers via the wind or pollinating fauna. Needless to say, date palm yields were dependent upon which way the wind blew or how frisky a bee felt, something no bustling civilization could (or should, if it could help it) rely on.

Enter the quintessential Sumerian genius that increased yields and established a practice still in use today: artificial pollination.

We Should Date More!

To combat the uncertainty of nature, Sumerians took up artificial pollination. It sounds a lot more complicated than it was/is; all it took was grabbing a male plant, climbing up a female’s trunk and smearing the pollen from the male plant onto the female’s flowers. This not only ensured maximum yields regardless of Mother Nature’s whims, it also allowed for cultivators to have a lot more of the productive female trees per acre in their groves than male ones (a ratio of 49 females to one male).

Artificial pollination in ancient Mesopotamia’s palm groves is not much different from artificial pollination in today’s palm groves, even in California. (Source)

To this day, the Sumerian way of ensuring high date-palm yields is in use, as described in this NPR piece, “Forbidding Fruit: How America Got Turned On To The Date”:

“And they still hand-pollinate dates today to ensure a reliable, successful crop. Francisco Paniagua was a palm worker, or palmero, for decades and is now a farmer with an orchard … During the spring pollinating season, he climbs up into the fronds of 50-foot female date palms. He works his way around the spiky branches of the crowns, spraying little puffs of yellow pollen gathered from the flowers of a male palm tree onto each flower of the female trees. (Source)”

The Importance of Being a Date Palm

“The sacred tree in Assyrian mythology is a palm that symbolizes Ishtar connecting heaven, the crown of the tree, and earth, the base of the trunk.” (Source)

It is believed that the date palm may have represented fertility in humans in ancient Mesopotamia. (Source) This is a safe assumption to make, considering the symbolism of the sacred marriage ritual which took place each spring for the Sumerians and all those following them.

For the sacred marriage each spring, people gathered at the new year festival and watched the king’s procession from his palace to the city’s temple of Inanna (Ishtar), where he would meet up with the Mesopotamian goddess of fertility (represented by a high priestess) and be led into the temple to consummate the symbolic marriage of the god Dumuzi (Tammuz) and goddess of fertility. This is a symbolic effort to ensure that the coming year is a productive one.

According to the Pass the Flamingo blog:

“[Dumuzi’s] marriage to the goddess Inanna symbolized the annual date-harvest and storage; Inanna was the date-cellar, [Dumuzi] the fruit.”

Dumuzi’s association with the date palm extends to him being worshiped as Ama-ushumgal-anna, the power of the date-palm, by cities across Mesopotamia whose economies relied heavily on the date palm. Further, Inanna was considered “the one who makes the dates be full of abundance.” Both Dumuzi and Inanna are represented by date-palm paraphernalia; Dumuzi a date cluster or heart of palm, and Inanna a palm frond.

Inanna depictions, including two implying the consummation of the sacred marriage between her and Dumuzi, a god of the underworld. (Source)

Dumuzi and Inanna weren’t the only gods associated with date palms and their fruit. Mylitta, the Babylonian moon goddess of love, beauty, fertility and childbirth, is also represented by the date palm.

And from the gods, the importance of the date palm only becomes more prominent through its presence in the most technical of texts that dealt with practical matters, the Code of Hammurabi. In an article I found on JSTOR about date culture, A.H. Pruessner writes about the extent of this importance:

“The rather large space devoted to the subject of date culture in the Code of Hammurabi testifies to the important position which it occupied in the agricultural life of his empire.”

And in their paper, “The Date Palm (Phoenix dactyliferaL.): Overview of Biology, Uses, and Cultivation,” Chao and Kreuger further mention the Code of Hammurabi’s mention of “laws pertaining to date culture and sales.”

Pruessner includes some such laws, which you can read starting on page 216 of the JSTOR PDF document, “Date Culture in Ancient Babylonia.” Sinan Antoon also gives us an idea of what those laws might have been in his novel, The Baghdad Eucharist:

“Cutting down a palm tree was punishable by a fine under the Code of Hammurabi. Another section of the code warned date palm farmers against neglecting their orchards and enjoined them to be vigilant about pruning and pollination.” (Source)

So, the date palm was important in ancient Mesopotamia. Let’s dive deeper into why it was so.

Got a Date?

Really, date palms needed only to stand there to be useful (oh, to be a date palm!) and provide value to their cultivators; their groves provided a canopy that shielded less-keen-on-the-fire-sky crops from the hot sun.

The date palm’s sprout also brought something to the dinner table; a vegetable vaguely described as not unlike celery, which can only be the delicious heart of palm.

Then there’s the date’s plethora of benefits, as listed by Chao and Kreuger:

• Iron
• Potassium
• Calcium
• Chlorine
• Copper
• Magnesium
• Sulfur

All these nutrients, plus 16 amino acids and vitamins A, B1 and B2, no doubt played a part in the date palm’s ability to produce antidotes for ailments like sore throats and intestinal issues. (Source)

Then we have the date’s high sugar content. We may villainize sugar today, but in the ancient world, sugar, and a lot of it, was prized for its ability to be a preservative while also, of course, satisfying a sweet tooth. That sweet tooth was satisfied through a sweet sap known as lal that came from the dates, and was a less dear sweetener than honey.

I feel this is a good spot to mention that one royal delicacy was dates from the Mesopotamian province of Hatra, stuffed with almonds.

Even date date pits were valuable, for they could either serve as food for livestock or could be made into decorative jewelry. In fact, to further drive home the latter, such pits were found in the Royal Cemetery at Ur.

Dates found at the Royal Cemetery at Ur. (Source)

And if all that doesn’t impress you, perhaps knowing that dates were also used to make alcoholic beverages will.

All this and we haven’t even gotten to the date palm’s resourcefulness as a building and manufacturing material, thanks to its by-products of leaves, fiber and timber.

Weaving palm fronds to make everything, from baskets to roofs. (Source)

Palm trunks were used to construct the temple of the moon god at Ur, and Mesopotamian homes were constructed with the palms’ trunks and fronds. Needles and thread came from the date palm, which surely helped in the production of baskets, mattresses and rope.

Nemet-Nejat writes that the date palm was unique for all its features. “Its position was unique, because every part of the date palm could be used,” she writes. Chao and Kreuger iterate further: “It is said that there are as many uses of dates as there are days in a year.”

The Picture of a Date Palm

So, the date palm was obviously the MVP tree in Mesopotamia and is to Mesopotamia what the olive tree is to the Mediterranean. Why else would there be a word dedicated to describing something specific, as Naomi F. Miller states on the University of Pennsylvania Museum’s Sex Life of the Date page: “…there is even a word, defined in the Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary, that refers to an item of jewelry in the form of the flowering branch of the date palm.” (I cannot find this word, but I trust it is in that dictionary.)

A. Leo Oppenheim further explains in his book, Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Civilization: “No other fruit tree has received similar attention,” Oppenheim writes. “Only in groves of date palms did the garden play an important economic role in Mesopotamia. The date palm was the only essential fruit tree in the region.”

Babylonian literature dating back to 2000 BC describes a quarrel between a date palm (likely of the Halawi or Zahidi varieties, as both originated in Mesopotamia, according to the Medjool Date Palms website) and a tamarisk tree in the internal courtyard of a palace. The argument centers around who’s better:

“The two trees, brother and sister, are quite different; the tamarisk and the palm-tree compete with each other. They argue and quarrel together. The tamarisk says: ‘I am much bigger!’ And the date-palm argues back, saying: ‘I am much better than you! You, o tamarisk, are a useless tree. What good are your branches? There’s no such thing as a tamarisk fruit! Now, my fruits grace the king’s table; the king himself eats them, and people say nice things about me. I make a surplus for the gardener, and he gives it to the queen; she, being a mother, nourishes her child upon the gifts of my strength, and the adults eat them too. My fruits are always in the presence of royalty.’

The tamarisk…his speech is even more boastful…the date-palm counters by pointing out that her fruits are the central offering in the cult; once they have been taken from the tamarisk dish, the bowl used to collect up the garbage.” (Source)

In the JSTOR article where I found the above excerpt, Stephanie Dalley argues that the Hanging Gardens of Babylon were not built in Babylon as has been the belief for centuries, but rather at Nineveh in Assyria, which was known as “old Babylon” in 700 BC. I mention this seemingly irrelevant detail, because to support her argument, Dalley includes insight and details about the date palm in Mesopotamia that I hadn’t come across anywhere else.

For instance, Dalley writes that it was actually Sennacherib who had built the Hanging Gardens of Babylon at Nineveh, adding that the date palm’s trunk served as inspiration for the design of the irrigation system in the gardens. The texture of said trunk also served as a decorative motif for columns. She also mentions that for a city to have a palm grove was a source of pride for that city, pointing to the prologue of the Epic of Gilgamesh:

“…[It] boasts of the famous city Uruk, saying: ‘One square mile is city, one square mile is orchards, one square mile is claypits.’ … By ‘orchards,’ date-palm groves are probably implied.”

Live Long and Prosper

The date palm continues to be important in modern-day Mesopotamia, aka Iraq.

It is part of the landscape, towering over gardens and prominent in art (as you’ve noticed by All Mesopotamia’s logo, designed by Nadia Khafaji). Its fruit is celebrated with festivals and is a staple of the Iraqi sweet tooth that can be satisfied with the date or through the quintessentially Iraqi date syrup/molasses known as dibis.

One of the most famous folk songs from Iraq is “Above the Date Palms.”

The date palm has a definite (albeit decently long) lifespan, but it has immortalized the Sumerian genius of working with nature and helping it along for humanity’s benefit.

 

Shaduppum, A City Full of Surprises.

Shaduppum. Ain’t it a beauty?

In 1945, on the southeastern outskirts of Baghdad, the ancient city of Shaduppum was discovered at Tell Harmal.

Excavations soon got underway, led by Iraqi archaeologist Taha Baqir, and Muhammed Ali Mustafa of the Iraqi Department of Antiquities. (Source) The excavations unearthed an Old Babylonian city with a collection of close to 3,000 tablets.

Now, with so many tablets in its hold, it’s no wonder Shaduppum’s patron god is that of writing and record-keeping, and that it was an administrative hub for Babylonia.

First Things First

Although it was established as early as the late third millenium BC, during the days of Sargon of Akkad, Shaduppum didn’t rise to prominence until the second millennium BC, when it served as a Babylonian accounting hub.The city’s name reflects this, by translating into “the treasury,” or “accountant’s office.”

Within Shaduppum’s walls, private homes, one administration building, and seven temples were unearthed, some reconstructed. Of the seven temples, a large one dedicated to Nisaba, the Sumerian goddess of writing and record-keeping, and her consort, sits just inside the city’s gates. That temple’s entrance was guarded by two roaring terra-cotta lions.

One of the terra-cotta lions at Shaduppum, on display at the Iraqi National Museum.

That Terra-cotta lion with his buddy guarding the temple of Nisaba in the city of Shaduppum. (Source)

 

Accountants aren’t all about numbers!

So, almost 3,000 tablets were unearthed at Shaduppum, but only a few weren’t of an administrative nature, and you’ll find that the nature of these non-administrative tablets is a little surprising.

I find it surprising, anyway, that a city with such a cut and dry purpose had a copy of The Epic of Gilgamesh, the world’s oldest written work of literature, in its vaults. It was some nine decades after the standard Akkadian version of the ancient poem was discovered in Ashurbanipal’s library at Nineveh, that two tablets of it were unearthed at Shaduppum.

The next surprise is actually two surprises in one.

You see, Iraqi archaeologist Taha Baqir also discovered a set of laws some two centuries older than the Code of Hammurabi at Shaduppum. The Laws of Eshnunna were written in Akkadian on two tablets, marked A and B, dating back to 1930 BC. That’s the first surprise regarding this find. The second one might make you do a double take…

The Laws of Eshnunna, Eshnunna being the city north of Ur where they originated, were promoted by that city’s ruler, Bilalama. In 1948, a year after Baqir’s discovery, Albrecht Goetze translated and published the laws, revealing that though Bilalama had some two-hundred years on Hammurabi, he was a little more progressive than the man whose laws inspired the Ten Commandments. That’s right. Unlike Hammurabi, whose punishments usually featured maiming, if not death, Bilalama implemented a monetary, fine-based penal system. But don’t get too comfortable with Bilalama’s laws, because the more serious offenses, including sexual ones, were punishable by death. That’s pretty progressive!

Shamash: These aren’t the first laws. Hammurabi: What?! Wait–. Shamash: Shhh. Now smile for the chiseler! 

Poor Hammurabi.

Stealing some Greek thunder

Hammurabi was not the only one whose thunder is stolen by tablets at Tell Harmal. The one-upping found in Shaduppum’s collection of tablets didn’t even stop at Mesopotamia’s borders, for it extended all the way to the Greek realm, delivering the two bombshells I’m going to talk about now.

Now, even if you used math class (or history) as nap time, the names Euclid and Pythagoras should sound familiar to you. And if not (it’s okay), I’ll refresh your memory: Euclid of Alexandria is the father of geometry, and Pythagoras of Samos proved that  in a right-angled triangle, aka, the Pythagorean Theorem.

The tablets that steal a bit of Greek mathematician thunder. Sorry, Bros.

Though the fact still remains that Euclid and Pythagoras gave us the official real deal, complete with proof and universal mathematical truths, two tablets dating to the early second millennium BC deliver the same newsflash Hammurabi got about his laws: Kinda’ been there, kinda’ done that.

The algebraic-geometry on one tablet (the one on the left in the picture above) features work similar to Euclid’s, dealing with the hypotenuse of a right-angle triangle. The other tablet features a problem with a rectangle whose length and width are calculated using what is essentially the Pythagorean Theorem.

Pythagoras: *A long, deep, deep, deep SIGH*

Sorry, Bros.

Another look at Shaduppum

So, the first round of excavations at Tell Harmal was fruitful, but a second round in 1997 turned out to be all about details. The Iraqi Department of Antiquities and Heritage allowed more excavations at Tell Harmal that year, this time by a joint effort between Baghdad University and the German Archaeological Institute.

Because of Shaduppum’s relatively late rise to prominence, in the spring of 1997 and autumn of 1998, the collaborative project took a closer look at the rock layers of the city, confirming different ages in the multiple building layers.

Most interestingly, stratigraphy of the city’s walls showed it was not fortified until the rise of Babylonia in the second millennium BC, suggesting that its rise to prominence was quite significant–it went from being a city so inconsequential it lacked fortification, perhaps, to a city with pronounced walls. Evidence also suggested then that the city had been destroyed by fire and destruction around the time of Hammurabi, then rebuilt.

It’s a very interesting project that you can read more about here.

A city of consequence

There remains much we don’t know about Shaduppum, that we may never know, but one thing is clear: Shaduppum was a city that had a little bit of everything that made it a Mesopotamian city worth a look.

 

Sources and Further Reading

http://www.miglus.de/Themen/Harmal/harmal.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eshnunna

http://books.google.com/books?id=1C4NKp4zgIQC&pg=PA29&lpg=PA29&dq=tell+harmal+city+of+agade&source=bl&ots=Ss36wkEcA9&sig=sN53Fql2w0iVsHKZpsJrwvwwPpc&hl=en&sa=X&ei=XS15U7bNK4iRqAb76YCQAQ&ved=0CGMQ6AEwCA#v=onepage&q=tell%20harmal%20city%20of%20agade&f=false

https://allmesopotamia.wordpress.com/?s=sargon+the+great

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/akka/hd_akka.htm

http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/articles/o/old_babylonian_period.aspx

http://proteus.brown.edu/mesopotamianarchaeology/994

http://www.ezida.com/cats/lion%20t1.jpg

http://www.goddessaday.com/mesopotamian/nisaba

http://www.fofweb.com/History/HistRefMain.asp?iPin=MESP0046&SID=2&DatabaseName=Ancient+and+Medieval+History+Online&InputText=%22Nisaba%22&SearchStyle=&dTitle=Shaduppum&TabRecordType=All+Records&BioCountPass=0&SubCountPass=4&DocCountPass=0&ImgCountPass=0&MapCountPass=0&FedCountPass=&MedCountPass=0&NewsCountPass=0&RecPosition=3&AmericanData=&WomenData=&AFHCData=&IndianData=&WorldData=&AncientData=Set&GovernmentData=

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_of_Gilgamesh

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Hammurabi

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albrecht_Goetze

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclid

http://cojs.org/cojswiki/index.php/Tell_Harmal_Mathematical_Tablets

http://www.miglus.de/Themen/Harmal/1997/1997.html

 

Part IV: Gilgamesh!

A statue of Gilgamesh overpowering a lion. It was found in Khorsabad, Iraq, at the palace of Sargon II. Now housed at the Louvre. (Source)

He’s the other guitarist with The Mesopotamians band, wearing a pointy helmet. He can’t seem to be able to keep himself together- he plays his guitar and his arm falls off, he joins Hammurabi at the microphone and his teeth start flying out of his mouth, his jaw falls off, and at one point he ends up a heap on the floor.

He is Gilgamesh! (And our last king in The Mesopotamians series of kings!)

Gilgamesh is a name steeped in myth, but there are some things sprinkled here and there that support the idea that Gilgamesh, or Izdubar as his name was erroneously translated in 1872, was an actual historical figure we can discuss, albeit briefly when not talking about the oldest story the world has ever known…

An Epic King

Most people know Gilgamesh through the Epic of Gilgamesh, which holds great importance to humanity today as the world’s oldest piece of literature. It appears to have been just as important to humanity in ancient times, too. For one thing it was written down centuries after the death of the enigma that is its hero, and was circulated in the ancient world so much, that aside from various sites across Mesopotamia (most notably in the Library of Ashurbanipal), fragments of it were also found written in non-Mesopotamian languages, in non-Mesopotamian regions.

This means that Gilgamesh was a figure known across the Ancient Near East for centuries, which leads us to asking: why was Gilgamesh so important?

Before we delve into the Epic, it’s important to know that Gilgamesh’s name appears in material other than the Epic, like the Sumerian King List, which identifies him as the fifth king of Uruk. According to the List, his reign took place between 2500 and 2800 BC (a date I have been unable to pinpoint exactly because of differing dates from different sources), and lasted for 126 years. Bilgames, as he is known in the earliest Sumerian texts, also appears on tablets that list deities, like this one. Gilgamesh also appears in Mesopotamian mythology as a demigod, and a judge of the dead. Although Gilgamesh’s parents had cult followings and temples built for their worship, nothing other than a god’s epitaph in texts has been found to prove that Gilgamesh himself was an actively worshiped deity.

Going back to the The Epic, which paints the clearest picture of this mysterious man, we are presented with Gilgamesh as the king of Uruk, the builder of its great walls and its all-powerful ruler. The Epic begins with a prologue that introduces us to Gilgamesh, part of which is:

He had seen everything, had experienced all emotions,

from exaltation to despair, had been granted a vision

into the great mystery, the secret places,

the primeval days before the Flood. (Mitchell, 69)

“Gilgamesh between two Bull-Men with Sun-Disc (Wikimedia Commons)” (Source)

The Epic’s Gilgamesh possesses incredible physical strength, thanks to his parentage and demigod status, with two-thirds god and one-third human DNA. He needs no sleep and can complete a six weeks’ journey in three days. He need only eat after covering 400 miles, and pitch a camp after 1,000.

But he is also described as an arrogant ruler, and does what he wants to those he rules, including bedding all brides on their wedding night, even before their husbands do.

The people of Uruk cry out to the heavens from such tyranny, and the gods respond by sending down Enkidu, a wild man who lives with the animals in the wilderness. He is Gilgamesh’s equal in strength and ability, he is sent down to balance Gilagamesh. After a series of fantastical and sexually explicit events involving one of the most enigmatic women represented in literature, Enkidu is tamed and brought to Uruk, where he and Gilgamesh face off and become the best of friends. Together, they take on challenges that defy vengeful gods and end with a tragic loss that sends Gilgamesh on a journey in search of immortality. Gilgamesh’s journey to the Great Deep in search of immortality brings him face to face with Utnapishtim, a figure whose description of the biblical Flood marks him as a non-biblical representation of Noah.

“This, the eleventh tablet of the Epic, describes the meeting of The Gilgamesh with Utnapishtim. Like Noah in the Hebrew Bible, Utnapishtim had been forewarned of a plan by the gods to send a great flood.” Source: http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/me/t/the_flood_tablet.aspx

In his article titled “The Flood of Noah and the Flood of Gilgamesh,” for the Institute for Creation Research website, the archaeologist Frank Lorey, M.A. writes of Gilgamesh’s deeds, which are also listed in the Epic: “He was one who had great knowledge and wisdom, and preserved information of the days before the flood. Gilgamesh wrote on tablets of stone all that he had done, including building the city walls of Uruk and its temple for Eanna,” Lorey writes.

The Eternal Significance of Gilgamesh to Humanity

It is safe to say that Gilgamesh represents a most human hero, despite his supernatural credentials. What could be more human than arrogance, or love, or fear of death?

In his essay, “Storytelling, the Meaning of Life, and The Epic of Gilgamesh,” Arthur A. Brown writes, “We read stories — and reading is a kind of re-telling — not to learn what is known but to know what cannot be known, for it is ongoing and we are in the middle of it.”

To this day, Gilgamesh’s story resonates with us, not with its fantastical and ancient details, but with its profound reflection on the human condition that seems to have changed little over the centuries.

Gilgamesh’s surviving legacy, beyond the Epic or the walls he built around the city he ruled is his humanity.

Sources and further reading:

Mitchell, Stephen. Gilgamesh: A New English Version. New York: Free Press, 2006. (Version used for the Prologue except.)

http://homeschoolcourses.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/gilgamesh_louvre.jpg (First picture)

http://www.louvre.fr/en/oeuvre-notices/hero-overpowering-lion (Louvre description of Gilgamesh statue)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilgamesh (Wikipedia)

http://novaonline.nvcc.edu/eli/eng251/gilgameshstudy.htm (Study guide that talks about Epic)

http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/me/t/the_flood_tablet.aspx (The Flood Tablet at the British Museum website)

http://www.ancienttexts.org/library/mesopotamian/gilgamesh/ (Translated text of the Epic of Gilgamesh tablets)

http://eawc.evansville.edu/essays/brown.htm (Storytelling, the Meaning of Life,
and The Epic of Gilgamesh essay by Arthur A. Brown)

http://www.pantheon.org/articles/g/gilgamesh.html (Brief biography on Encyclopedia Mythica)

http://www.icr.org/article/noah-flood-gilgamesh/ (The Noah Flood and the Epic of Gilgamesh, by Frank Lorey, M.A., who is believes the Genesis was preserved as an oral tradition before it was handed down to Moses, who finally wrote it down, making the Genesis the influence for the Epic of Gilgamesh, and not the other way around.)

http://www.jasoncolavito.com/epic-of-gilgamesh.html (Translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh with an introduction that includes a bit of the history behind the historical aspects of the story and the tablets and translations.)

http://www.mesopotamia.co.uk/geography/story/sto_set.html (Gilgamesh and the Cedar Forest interactive story.)

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/233644/Gilgamesh (Encyclopaedia Britannica entry that talks about the Epic of Gilgamesh and its hero. Gives titles of each poem in the Epic.)

http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/csgeg/background-gilgamesh-epic (Background of the Epic of Gilgamesh, which has footnotes and sources.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumerian_King_List (Wikipedia entry about Sumerian King List.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uruk (Wikipedia entry about Uruk.)

http://www.magyarsag.org/uruk13.jpg (Picture of Walls of Uruk.)