Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. Mythology The semidivine king of Erech, a city of southern Babylonia, and hero of an epic collection of mythic tales, one of which tells of a flood that covered the earth.
Wiktionary
- n. Legendary king of Uruk.
- n. Hero of a Babylonian poem, "Epic of Gilgamesh".
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. (Sumerian mythology) A legendary king of Sumeria and the hero of famous Sumerian and Babylonian epics.
- n. The
Epic of Gilgamesh , a long Babylonian epic written in cuneiform in the Sumerian language on clay tablets. Early versions of the written story date from 2000 B. C.; it is probably the first written story still in existence. A longer version was written in the Akkadian language, on 12 clay tablets found at Nineveh in the ruins of the library of Ashurbanipal, king of Assyria from 669 to 633 B. C. The story depicted the life and heroic deeds of the legendary Gilgamesh, apparently derived from stories about a real king of ancient Mesopotamia who lived around 2700 B. C. The story includes a tale of a great flood, which has some parallels to the biblical story of the flood survived by Noah. The Nineveh tablets name the author of that version of the story, a Shin-eqi-unninni.
WordNet 3.0
- n. a legendary Sumerian king who was the hero of an epic collection of mythic stories
Etymologies
- From Akkadian 𒄑𒂆𒈦 (Gilgameš). (Wiktionary)
Examples
“What I like the most about Gilgamesh is how emotional a story it is.”
“The Epic of Gilgamesh is among the oldest surviving pieces of literature in the world.”
“Gilgamesh is so energetic he "would not leave young girls alone" and "would not leave any son alone for his father," according to Dalley's translation.”
“Gilgamesh is introduced as a builder of walls, which is to say, a builder of civilisation as the enclosed domain of formal, definitional structures -- the outer temple, the inner temple, the city walls.”
“The now of Gilgamesh is a present with past and future; when Inanna courts him, he applies hindsight and foresight, listing her trail of jilted and cuckolded lovers as he rejects her.”
“The whole turning point of Gilgamesh is the death of Enkidu.”
“So in the same way that my near-future Gilgamesh is going to be American, in the same way that he's going to be an academic, an anthropologist, upper-middle-class and a whole bunch of other things I'm not, he's going to be black.”
“So Gilgamesh is a quest story, maintains Mitchell, but on close inspection, it's a "bizarre, quirky, and postmodern" one.”
“It is only proper to add that Professor Jastrow assumes the responsibility for the explanation of the form and etymology of the name Gilgamesh proposed in this volume.”
“Our main character, a young poet called "Orphan" by his blind mentor/surrogate father which goes by the epic name Gilgamesh, works as a bookseller assistant in an independent bookstore associated with the "revolution", as well as moonlighting as part of a "gang" that exposes the hypocrisies of society with pranks and the like.”
Tweets
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