Yi-Fu Tuan - Dear Colleague

February 15 , 2005

Dear Colleague,

On the new books table at Borders is Gilgamesh, first published in 1700 BC and still in print! The moral is patience. If you can't find a publisher for your manuscript, keep it in the back drawer, and who knows? in 3,500 years it may be re-discovered and become not only a world classic but also a best seller.

When Gilgamesh was first translated from Akkadian toward the end of the nineteenth century, it immediately attracted a lot of attention, not so much for its own high literary merit as because it told the story of the Flood in much greater detail than did the Bible, and also because it had a story that seemed to parallel the creation of Eve. Let me elaborate a little on the parallel. In Genesis, God decided that it was not good for Adam to be alone and so he created a companion for him--Eve. (Note that the original purpose for creating Eve was companionship, not procreation). In the Akkadian epic, a work that preceded the Old Testament by a thousand years, a Sumerian God decided that it was not good for Gilgamesh, a robust and handsome young man, to be alone and so he created Enkidu. Eve, female, complemented Adam, male. Enkidu, however, was also male. And so, where was the complementarity?

Answer: it lay in culture. Gilgamesh represented civilization, Enkidu wilderness. The one was king of Uruk, a city whose massive ramparts gleamed "like copper in the sun," enclosing a temple of unparalleled splendor, palaces, gardens, marketplaces and public squares. The other was a wild man, indeed, half animal, who lived a life of innocence cavorting with the gazelles, and whose idea of luxury was to drink from the fresh spring and sleep with his naked body caressed by the gentle wind. Well, Gilgamesh, the king, was determined to bring Enkidu into his orbit, but rather than doing the job himself, he assigned it to a temple priestess. Note, as an aside, that this ancient epic gave the civilizing role to woman, reminiscent of the way American women at the frontier, by opening schools and hospices and insisting on a decent standard of behavior in the home, civilized their unruly menfolk. (On this theme, see Page Smith, As a City Upon a Hill: The Town in American History, 1966).

Friendship between king and wild man--between culture and nature--entailed changes on both sides; indeed both could change for the better. Gilgamesh became less of a tyrant. Enkudu grew to love women rather than gazelles, cooked food, and clean clothes. But the epic did not have a happy ending. For neither civilization nor wilderness could provide human beings with immortality. Pray in a scented temple, drink nothing but spring water, and one day, as Gilgamesh was to discover, "maggots will [still] crawl out of your nostrils."

More than fifty years ago, when I was a student at UC-Berkeley, my attention was drawn to this world classic in a course on cultural geography. I wonder, what are students of cultural (human) geography reading today? The latest in post-modernist, neo-marxist, or feminist theory as propagated at that great center of learning, the University of Kentucky? Will any of these opinions and ideas still matter 3,500 years hence? Isn't it strange that whereas physical scientists still refer to their ancestors with respect--not only Einstein and Bohr, but even Newton--human geographers are ashamed to be associated with any author not mentioned in the Citation Index of the last ten years. "In fashion" today means, inevitably, "out of date" tomorrow. No?

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu