Rating: 
Summary: I love ancient poetry...
Review:
There is something so direct about ancient and mediaeval poetry. The very style of it is clearly designed to be read out aloud, with repeated lines varied, like in modern blues, combined with heavily alliteration.
The vigour of this poem, which is four thousand years old, is astonishing. Literally, modern writers could learn a great deal from this long-extinct style of writing.
My favourite part is where Gilgamesh crosses the ocean at the edge of the world: the poet writes something like: "He rowed one mile. And darkness was before him, and darkness was behind him. He rowed two miles. And darkness was before him, and darkness was behind him. He rowed three miles..." etc. This is magical writing, evoking the style of oral tale-tellers of the time. One gets a real sense of Gilgamesh's trip into the murky and Jungian darkness of the outer ocean.
Also, of course, there is a lot of fine detail of Assyrian life, such as the details of the palaces; also, the mythological monsters are fascinating, such as Humbaba the ogre, who attacks people with somethign called an "aura", which seems related to later Gnostic ideas about the multi-layered universe.
To round things off, we get bits of five even more ancient Sumerian poems about Gilgamesh, or Bilgames, as he was then called. These deal with tales that precede the later Epic. I particularly liked the tale of the captured prince who watches out for the attack of his allies that will liberate him and vanquish his captors.
Unfortunately, the Epic of Gilagmesh and most of these poems are fragmentary. I'd like to have known what exactly happened to the Scorpion-People that Gilgamesh encounters; or what the nature of the Stony Ones was.
We will probably find out some day, as there are plenty of tablets either waiting to be excavated, or awaiting study. Unfortunately, many of these tablets, read and unread, were kept in museums in Baghdad. No doubt some shady dealer in antiquities is trying to flog them off even now, unable even to read what he is selling!
Rating: 
Summary: worth reading
Review: A very interesting story of the flood that predates the Bible. The Bible's version of the flood most likely came from a older source, the Sumarian version of the flood came first.
Rating:
Summary: Probably the best version out there today.
Review: Andrew George gives you the best of both worlds. He reprints the Old Babylonian version of Gilgamesh, which I find the poetry to be gritty, raw and exciting. (. . . until the maggot dropped from his nose.) He also gives you the newer versions of the story,including tablets 11 and 12. I found that these two additions to the story, written at a later date, did not quite match the OB version. Each version twisted the story from the original Man vs. Hero, into Man vs. King and then Man vs. God. I do believe, though, that this is the best of any Gilgamesh book you will read.
Rating:
Summary: The Search for Immortality and the Fear of Death
Review: I fully agree with the previous reviewers who praised the qualities of this book and the translations by Andrew George. The introduction and supplementary material that accompany the standard version of the Gilgamesh epic really help to put this story into the proper historical context.This was my first reading of the Gilgamesh epic and what surprised me most about this story was its humanistic focus, especially considering that most of the literature at that time focused on the gods and how they created the universe and mankind. We learn about the superhuman heroes Gilgamesh and Enkidu, who openly spited the gods by performing deeds that ran counter to their interests. After Enkidu dies, however, Gilgamesh gets a reality check and attempts to avoid a similar fate by searching for the secret of immortality. Instead, he only discovers that even a powerful king like himself will never be able to escape death. But he also learns that instead of performing silly quests like searching for immortality, Gilgamesh should "seize the day" and actively use his time among the living to perform actions that will make a king great to his people. In this way, he will be able to ensure that his name lives on among future generations. Now this is great literature! As other reviewers have commented, Andrew George's translation of the Gilgamesh epic is very approachable and makes for very entertaining reading, even for the general reader (like me) who is not a serious student of ancient history. However, if you want to study the history of the Western literary canon, you have to start here in Mesopotamia.
Rating:
Summary: The Search for Immortality and the Fear of Death
Review: I fully agree with the previous reviewers who praised the qualities of this book and the translations by Andrew George. The introduction and supplementary material that accompany the standard version of the Gilgamesh epic really help to put this story into the proper historical context. This was my first reading of the Gilgamesh epic and what surprised me most about this story was its humanistic focus, especially considering that most of the literature at that time focused on the gods and how they created the universe and mankind. We learn about the superhuman heroes Gilgamesh and Enkidu, who openly spited the gods by performing deeds that ran counter to their interests. After Enkidu dies, however, Gilgamesh gets a reality check and attempts to avoid a similar fate by searching for the secret of immortality. Instead, he only discovers that even a powerful king like himself will never be able to escape death. But he also learns that instead of performing silly quests like searching for immortality, Gilgamesh should "seize the day" and actively use his time among the living to perform actions that will make a king great to his people. In this way, he will be able to ensure that his name lives on among future generations. Now this is great literature! As other reviewers have commented, Andrew George's translation of the Gilgamesh epic is very approachable and makes for very entertaining reading, even for the general reader (like me) who is not a serious student of ancient history. However, if you want to study the history of the Western literary canon, you have to start here in Mesopotamia.
Rating:
Summary: A peephole into the distant past
Review: I ordered the hardcover edition of this book from ... , and it is unfortunate that it is not readily available in the US. At least the softcover edition is now available, and worth acquiring for anyone interested in a glimpse of what life-and thought-was like nearly 4000 years ago. I was unaware, before reading this volume, that Gilgamesh, despite it's significance and popularity in its day, does not come down to us in any complete form. George provides both a background of the civilization that produced Gilgamesh and also a history of the various partial versions that have survived and been found. Throughout the text he is careful to explain where different versions disagree, where he has interpolated fragments from other versions to fill gaps, and where no known version exists. He appends translations of various fragments and of earlier Sumerian poems of "Bilgames". While lacking the completeness, and therefore coherence, of the Homeric epics, George's translation of Gilgamesh offers at least a peephole, if not truly a window, into a civilization very far removed from ours. Despite the distance the desires and fears-particularly the fear of death-expressed seem very human and recognizable. In fact, and in spite of, the archaic structure of the verse, Gilgamesh seems more human to me than many of the semi-divine heros of Homer. Certainly not light reading, but very much worth the time and effort.
Rating:
Summary: A good book
Review: Not having read scores of Gilgamesh translations, I really don't know how many stars to give this one, but I am very happy with it. In addition to giving a 'complete' version, mainly from Standard Babylonian texts from the Nineveh library but supplemented from other sources (even Hittite editions) for the sake of having a complete story, the book publishes in separate chapters, older, more fragmentary sources. Even Sumerian versions are covered. Also, in the beginning is an excellent treatment of the history of the rebirth of the Gilgamesh epic and the state of cuneiform translation and research in general. No speculation about the epic on literary or religious levels is given. George doesn't bother to tell us about the literary or historical relationship of Gilgamesh to the bible, nor does he try to use the epic to define for us Mesopotamian religion. He is simply interested in providing a good translation and is very thorough and scientific in cataloguing his sources and judgment calls, yet he hands us a lively and fluid English text.
Rating:
Summary: Beautiful and readable translation.
Review: So many translations are either painful transliterations, coming from someone who knows the language better than his mother tongue; or they arwe car-crash renderings into a stale "academica-eese." Andrew George manages to avoid the Scylla and Charybdis in this translation. I hope more people with the "gift of tongues" can add some honey like Seamus Heany did in his beautiful rendfering of Beowulf a few years of god. These stories are beautiful, and we need to transpose that beauty in to English. I love the format of this book. It has the standard text of Gilgamesh, but has copies of all the alternate texts and readings, so you are getting the full whammie with the book. George also included maps, "dramatis personae," helpful chronologies, a glossary of the oddf names you read in the story, adn a publication history. His essay on "from tablet to stone" is helpul in expalining all the lacunae and the gaps in the poem. I love the illustrations which seve as a sweet spice to the text you are reading. You can actually picture Gilgamesh moving in the ancient Babylonian realm, going forth conquoring and to conquor. This book is designed for college level reading, and it more than delivers with all of the goodies. You rarely see a book this good, that hits all of the targets in tyhe right way. I hope that other ancient texts get a similar five star treatment.
Rating:
Summary: Beautiful and readable translation.
Review: So many translations are either painful transliterations, coming from someone who knows the language better than his mother tongue; or they arwe car-crash renderings into a stale "academica-eese." Andrew George manages to avoid the Scylla and Charybdis in this translation. I hope more people with the "gift of tongues" can add some honey like Seamus Heany did in his beautiful rendfering of Beowulf a few years of god. These stories are beautiful, and we need to transpose that beauty in to English. I love the format of this book. It has the standard text of Gilgamesh, but has copies of all the alternate texts and readings, so you are getting the full whammie with the book. George also included maps, "dramatis personae," helpful chronologies, a glossary of the oddf names you read in the story, adn a publication history. His essay on "from tablet to stone" is helpul in expalining all the lacunae and the gaps in the poem. I love the illustrations which seve as a sweet spice to the text you are reading. You can actually picture Gilgamesh moving in the ancient Babylonian realm, going forth conquoring and to conquor. This book is designed for college level reading, and it more than delivers with all of the goodies. You rarely see a book this good, that hits all of the targets in tyhe right way. I hope that other ancient texts get a similar five star treatment.
Rating:
Summary: gilgamesh, where are you walking?
Review: vor wenigen tagen (5. september 2000) ist eine neue gilgamesch-übertragung bei penguin erschienen, die die bisherige, von chr. lindenberg mir noch persönlich empfohlene übertragung [besser: nacherzählung!] von n.k. sandars nun definitiv abgelöst hat. ich habe sie mir gestern aus dem tempel des (an-)stössigen stiers, dem cour khorsabat, mitgebracht: genial. kleiner wehrmustropfen: zwar werden (nach 4800 jahren!) auch erstmalig alle sex&crime-scenes übersetzt ('while the two of them together were making love', P 46, gemeint sind, um missverständnissen vorzubeugen, shamhat und enkidu); bei schott (reclam) heisst es noch: 'endlich wurden hier und da (...) in unserer übersetzung unerträglich scheinende sachliche und sprachliche härten gemildert...'. die namen der götter wurden zwecks besserer lesbarkeit jedoch aus dem text bereinigt. (Bsp: I 109: 'coated in hair like the god of animals' muss heissen: '...like sumukan').
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