Books come from books. That realization set me on a quest to read The Great Books. I’d been reading some really good books at a clip that was ambitious for me. I was attempting a book a week and did that or got really close between 2017 and 2022. Then, I started reading books that took one idea from another book and expanded upon it. I began to question why I was reading these secondary books and not the source books from which those ideas had first appeared.
It was also around this time in late 2022 that I kept encountering people talking about The Great Books through podcasts and social media. I had heard about this corpus during my life and had even been collecting many books considered to be the world’s best, but I had never dedicated my reading life to The Great Books.
I decided to shift my reading project towards The Great Books in the year of our Lord, 2023. I scoured book lists from websites, books, and professors. I began to see many of the same books included in most of those lists and started to create my own.
Most lists begin with the Greeks and with Homer. Some went back further to Mesopotamia and Egypt. I decided to do the latter and kicked off my list with The Epic of Gilgamesh. This work is over 4,000 years old. I didn’t know what to expect. Would the language, style, and ideas be so antiquated that it would make for difficult reading?
I was pleasantly surprised and immediately hooked. I started with the Stephen Mitchell version and then proceeded to two different translations, the gold standard by Andrew George, and a new one by Sophus Helle. I loved the essays in Helle’s translation and sought out more books about ancient Mesopotamia.
In April of 2023, Sophus Helle released another translation, this time of a work even older than Gilgamesh. It was poetry by a priestess named Enheduana. The subtitle of the book was “The complete poems of the world’s first author.”
Here I was, getting started with what I thought was our oldest surviving work, only to encounter something older. Something compiled 1,500 years before Homer and written by a woman. How many Great Books lists have you seen that start with Enheduana? We’re closer in time to the life of Jesus than Jesus was to Enheduana.
What an amazing time to be alive. Archaeology has provided us with ancient clay tablets containing Cuneiform writing, sitting in museums waiting to be read by scholars. We can read about the temples of Ur through the eyes of this priestess, the very land that Abram was called out of in the book of Genesis.
Right away, in my quest to read The Great Books, I was encountering new, old works. There was an immediate sense of adventure, of exploration, of excitement. That has not subsided. There are endless rabbit trails connected to the Great Books. At first, I thought I’d be able to read through my Great Books list in 10 years. I quickly realized it will take more like 40 years. I want to leave room to explore these rabbit trails. Here’s to 36 more years of adventure!
A lifetime, truly! What a cool find. That Mitchell version was what I read last year, not realizing it wasn’t a true “translation,” but wow did I love the story. I think about it a lot. I will look for that new old book as well.