GILGĀMEŠ BEYOND CUNEIFORM. ANCIENT LITERARY TRANSMISSION AND THE ROLE OF EMPIRE RECONSIDERED.

The Mesopotamian literary figure Gilgāmeš has long been known to have survived outside of cuneiform literature, but the extent and manner of his reception has been a source of controversy. Using "top-down" methodologies which generally presuppose intercultural literary transmission as a result of imperial processes such as ancient "globalisation," one line of thought has argued for the widespread influence of works associated with Gilgāmeš outside of the cuneiform literary corpus. Noting issues of insufficient falsifiability in such approaches, a novel, "bottom-up" methodology is instead articulated in this study, constructing detailed "literary microhistories" of the individual extracuneiform attestations of Gilgāmeš-like figures, and conservatively positing their relationships both to the Akkadian literary corpus and to each other. This not only supplies a new basis for literary historical research into the extra-cuneiform dissemination of the character Gilgāmeš, but also posits overlooked routes of literary transmission within first-millennium BC empires. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]