Discovering Gilgamesh

Geology, narrative and the historical sublime in Victorian culture

Vybarr Cregan-Reid

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780719090516
• eBook ISBN: 9781526102386
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Details the discovery of The epic of Gilgamesh, and explores the broader tensions concerning history and time that it highlighted in Victorian culture

Part I: Gilgamesh

Introduction

[I]t is mostly in periods of turmoil and strife and confusion that people care much about history.⁴

(William Morris, News from Nowhere)

The rediscovery of the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh in 1872 became the fulcrum for a series of debates about time and history in the Victorian period. The oldest epic excavated from the earth contained stories that had been thought to be original to the Old Testament, but Gilgamesh, it was revealed, was written many centuries before even the earliest parts of the Bible. The manner in which the discovery was reported in the international media and the way in which the stories of King Gilgamesh were later taken up in periodicals, journals, and geological theory are indicative of an anxiety in Victorian culture concerning the status of history. Many critics, commentators, and historians have assumed that the extreme age of the earth was something of a settled matter for the Victorians after around 1830 (with the publication of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology).⁵ If this was the case, then there could not have been a Gilgamesh ‘controversy’ (as the poem’s first translator called it), where ideas about the age of the earth and about the length of humanity’s cultural history, so hotly debated at the beginning of the nineteenth century, again circulated in the international press.⁶ The time of Gilgamesh’s rediscovery was also one when interpretations and chronologies of the Bible were again being tested against other forms of historical evidence. And finally, the controversy revisited the centuries-old question of whether there had ever been a global flood with only a few survivors from which we are descended. There are whole series of such debates about the age of the earth, going back to the chronologies of the Venerable Bede, but they take on a certain urgency and considerable loquacious variety in the Enlightenment through to the early/mid-nineteenth century. At the latter point, the once-volcanic debates that had fascinated, rather than simply divided, geognosists, earth physicists, and finally geologists, cooled somewhat. For the savants of the early nineteenth century the age of the earth was believed to consist of aeons of time far beyond the five to six millennia of the most prominent biblical chronologers. For Europe and America’s mid-nineteenth century savants deep time was not really an issue when set against the young-earth model of time; instead, deep time was only something that needed to be titivated and refined by further research.

So if the idea of deep time was more or less settled for ‘western’ savants, then what is the controversy that surrounds the discovery of the Epic of Gilgamesh? It is a number of things, but the first is a cautionary warning that savants are not an entire culture; they do not write all of its novels, paint all of its canvasses, or compose all its music. What we can see in the nineteenth century is that some of the debates that emerge as a result of the epic’s translation reveal at the very least a considerable tension in Victorian ideas about the past, the present, and the future. Had the Victorians internalised ideas about deep time (the 4.55 billion years of history in which we now believe) then the rediscovery of the Epic of Gilgamesh would have been of interest principally to antiquarian specialists rather than the newspaper- and periodical-reading masses. The Gilgamesh controversy tells us that history, for the Victorians, was not a settled matter at all. While there are no stable models for how all ‘the Victorians’ may have thought, the controversy does suggest that the sublimity of deep time and the concept of short-earth, narrative-based biblical time were both stubbornly crouched in the reading public’s consciousness. If this is the case, then the mid- to late-Victorian period begins to look quite different, resembling an era in which numerous conflicting models of time coexist, rather than a more straightforward paradigm of one model shifting and giving way to the other.

I was, and still am, fascinated by a sentence that I read a long time ago in Gillian Beer’s Darwin’s Plots in which she explained that ‘evolutionary theory implied a new myth of the past: instead of the garden at the beginning, there was the sea and the swamp’.⁷ Where history had once been anthropocentric, starting with stories of humanity, the past had become something much stranger and emptier. It seemed to me then as it does now that the Victorians had had to undergo, endure, and internalise a change to their being almost unimaginable in its complexity. They were forced to question who they were, where they had come from, where they were placed in nature, and where they were going. But it is not possible to speak of ‘the Victorians’ as a homogeneous group. The Victorian intelligentsia may have been cautiously enthusiastic about evolutionary theory (in understandably varied ways), but that does not mean that all ‘Victorians’ had accepted Darwin’s ideas, or indeed Charles Lyell’s. An international debate over the translation of a newly rediscovered ancient epic is a reminder of the innate instability of the Victorian view of history.

This book, then, is about the Gilgamesh controversy and what it reveals about the Gordian and complex status of time and history in Victorian culture, as well as how it is tied up in geological theory at the end of the century. This book’s aim, though, is not to demonstrate the unidirectional influence of Gilgamesh on Victorian culture or vice versa; instead, it is an assessment of how the rediscovery of the poem both emerges from and contributes to ongoing debates about the nature of time and history in the nineteenth century. To that end, the book is also a rereading of the Victorians’ principal modes of historical narrative so that a more accurate assessment of the cultural, poetic, aesthetic, and political productivity of what I will call the ‘historical sublime’ in the period is possible. Moreover, it will demonstrate how the Gilgamesh controversy is integral to the conceptualisation of an ever-increasingly sublime model of history at the end of the nineteenth century.

At every point throughout this book, the idea that drives the analysis and argument is that in order to understand the complexity of the Victorians’ relationship with the past (and perhaps more importantly, their present and future, too) we must be prepared to accept the state of confusion that they were experiencing regarding the status of time as they understood it. The interdisciplinary approach that this book adopts is integral to this goal. A monograph on the representation of time in any one of the three ‘arts’ that I look at here would yield more specific and detailed results. For example, the chapter on nineteenth-century historiography would be improved by a much wider consideration of the methodologies of Victorian historians like J. A. Froude, E. A. Freeman, William Stubbs, S. R. Gardiner, and even Leslie Stephen. Similarly, the chapters on the representation of time and history in painting and in the novel again would be improved by wider consideration and focus on authors, movements, genres, or subgenres. A study that moves across the disciplines, albeit in a more particular manner, is able to show how the confusion over historical timeframes saturates Victorian culture and is not merely the interest of the novel, or any other individual art form. In each case, the Victorian authors, historians, photographers, and painters that I have chosen reveal the lack of coherence in their precise understanding or knowledge of the past. More importantly, they each demonstrate the move towards a more sublime understanding of history that emerges after Gilgamesh is taken up by late-Victorian geological theory.

Working under the assumption that the extreme length of history was a completed debate in the Victorian consciousness, many previous studies have taken for granted that Charles Lyell’s theory of gradualism (where the earth is formed through slow change over millions of years) had been triumphant in explaining the mysteries that the earth presented.⁸ But the Victorian media interest in the new translation of Gilgamesh (coupled with the financial support of a national newspaper for further excavations in Ottoman Iraq), the mainstream publication of the poem, the public interest in it both in Britain and in America, all of these would not have existed were it not for the fact that biblical narratives such as Noah’s flood still held sway in the Victorian consciousness as a valid representation of times past.

Many books that address these debates about time and history in the Victorian period have been drawn towards a focus on Darwin’s contribution to the field of study, leading in my view towards two errors concerning the dissemination and understanding of scientific ideas in Victorian culture. Across the disciplines, Gillian Beer, Michael J. Freeman, Nicolaas Rupke, George P. Landow, Sally Shuttleworth, Colin Renfrew, Marcia Pointon, Norman Cohn, John Burrow, and George Levine have all made compelling cases for the pivotal importance of a historicised understanding of both time and history in the Victorian period – particularly in the context of Darwin’s theory of evolution.⁹ But, in their concentration on Darwin as the focal point for thinking about the impact of science in the period, they have, to very differing degrees, prioritised his influence on the cultural life of the Victorians, rather than the lack of it. As such, they have not been able to sufficiently emphasise the tensions that exist in various forms of Victorian historical representation. While Darwin necessarily had to have internalised the idea of deep time in order to develop a theory of natural selection, the extreme length of history was not something that his theory set out to prove, or indeed contribute to. Furthermore, the approach of historians (of art, literature, or science) that engage with such scientific debates has often been based on a particular author. The majority of the studies of Darwin currently piled high in the bookshops focus more on the ingenuity or controversial nature of his ideas and not on the Victorians’ understanding or reception of them. The longstanding assumption in Victorian studies seems to have been that, except for cases that involved a particular controversy (for example, the Essays and Reviews scandal, or the Huxley-Wilberforce debate, both of 1860) Victorian audiences of science were silenced by their assumed passivity and tacit agreement with new ideas. Little account has been taken of the enterprising and creative processes involved in the act of reading itself.¹⁰ This book will not attempt to create a new historiographical paradigm that will enable such investigation (James Secord’s expansive Victorian Sensation is very good on outlining the difficulties of such an endeavour while also positing a solution to them).¹¹ It is all too easy to forget that Darwin’s laudable crowning as the principal thinker of nineteenth-century science was posthumous and not contemporary. Even Darwin’s Plots, with its valuable assessment of his influence upon the work of George Eliot and Thomas Hardy (among others), traces the impact of evolution by means of natural selection via the highest of high culture, paying less attention to the Victorian reading public’s lack of engage...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Part I – Gilgamesh
• Part II – Narrative and the historical sublime
• Part III – Geology, Gilgamesh, and the historical sublime
• Select bibliography
• Index