Graham Hancock Asks If "Gilgamesh" Dates Back to the Neolithic

​In a new article this week, Graham Hancock speculates that the Epic of Gilgamesh may date back more than 10,000 years. His speculation is based on carvings at Sayburç in Turkey which date back to 8,500 BCE, one of which depicts a man engaging with a bull and another shows a man standing between two lions. In Gilgamesh, the hero fights the Bull of Heaven and kills lions, among other adventures. “There is,” Hancock writes, “no a priori reason why the Epic of Gilgamesh shouldn’t be much older than its oldest-surviving written recensions, no reason why it shouldn’t have begun life around 8500 BC, the date of the Sayburç reliefs, no reason why it shouldn’t already have been ancient when the reliefs were made, and no reason why the story behind the reliefs should have been confined to the Sayburç area.”

Hancock’s speculation is a mix of somewhat plausible and obviously incorrect, seemingly built without a deep understanding of either the epic or the academic study of mythology. If he knew more about academic studies of myth, he would realize he has stumbled upon an academic proposal that dates back decades.

​At the most basic level, the Epic of Gilgamesh as we have it today simply cannot be significantly older 2100 BCE. The text of the epic that we see in most popular translations is that of the Standard Babylonian version, supplemented by additional lines from other sources to bridge gaps. The Standard Version dates from somewhere between the thirteenth and tenth centuries BCE. It is a later edition of the Old Babylonian version, going back to the eighteenth century BCE, which survives only in fragments. The poems are filled with references to the culture of Mesopotamia at the time, including specific cities whose ages are known and references to wheels, which date back to 3500 BCE but not earlier.
 
More importantly, the epic was not, in fact, originally a single poem. Just as Homer wove several different stories and poems together to create The Odyssey, the Epic of Gilgamesh combines five originally separate Sumerian poems into a single narrative. Therefore, if we talk about the story going back 10,000 years, we need to talk about which of the five underlying poems we are referring to. Hancock treats the epic as though it was and has always been a single narrative, one that could have been handed down for “hundreds and perhaps even thousands of years” before being written down. This is unlikely since we know the combined text was redacted at a specific point in time. The underlying poems, of course, may have existed long before.
 
Hancock suggests that the figure later named Gilgamesh may have begun as the “Master of Animals” from Sayburç, on the other side of the Levant, six or seven thousand years earlier. 

… what I’m suggesting is that Gilgamesh might not have been invented out of the whole cloth by the Sumerians when they first set it down in writing less than 5,000 years ago, as archaeologists have hitherto proposed. My thought is it might already have been in circulation in oral form, in plays and songs and recitations, for millennia before the story made the jump into cuneiform. I propose the Sayburç panel, with its phallic symbolism and its two scenes depicting mastery of animals – the confrontation with the “Bull of Heaven” and the confrontation with lions/leopards – as prima facie evidence for this case.

​Lions and wild bulls were among the most fearsome creatures in the ancient Near East and also the most commonly depicted—think, for instance, of the bull paintings at Çatalhöyük, the carved lions above the main gate at Mycenae, the bulls on the frescos at Knossos, etc. There is no reason to connect common animals to Gilgamesh, particularly the lions, who play a much smaller role in the epic (Gilgamesh kills some lions that live between two mountains) than other adventures, such as the battle with the giant Humbaba, the meeting with the Scorpion Men, or the encounter with Utnapishtim.
 
However, the idea that there was a prehistoric mythology of a strongman hero who engaged in superhuman adventures is not an inherently implausible one. Many scholars have noted the similarity between Gilgamesh’s adventures and those of other Near Eastern strongman figures, including Hercules and Samson. Consequently, there is a hypothesis that all three figures derive from a common ancestor, a Near Eastern folk hero strongman. Walter Burkert, the great scholar of Greek mythology, made the argument decades ago that the original of Hercules was a Neolithic hero. (I don’t think we can trace him back that far directly, but it is not impossible, and the influence of stories over time is undeniable.)
 
Indeed, the figure identified in the Sayburç carvings is terms the “Master of Animals” in honor of the Near Eastern folk hero that it is possible that it depicts. Burkert himself wrote a 1980 book, Structure and History in Greek Mythology and Religion, in which he made the case that the Master of Animals was in fact the original of Heracles.
 
Unintentionally, Hancock has stumbled upon an actual scholarly argument, one he thinks he has discovered himself, but doesn’t recognize because he isn’t familiar with the relevant literature. He is therefore using the wrong evidence and weak arguments to make a case that scholars have already been pursuing for nearly a century.