Gilgamesh and the temporality of man. An archaeology of time in Mesopotamia
He who saw the depths - with these words, a tale from ancient Mesopotamia draws its audience not only into a magnificent work of literature, but also into a confrontation with the human condition. The story known today as The Epic of Gilgamesh recounts the heroic deeds and defeats of Gilgamesh, young king of the city of Uruk. But before he can take on this responsibility, he must travel a long and arduous path of self-knowledge, confronted by fundamental existential questions: What is man? What does "civilization" mean? Is there divine justice? Using motifs from the 3rd and 2ndmillennia B.C., this text is much more than a heroic tale: it is a discursive confrontation with Mesopotamian ideas about the human being. In this discourse, the "time" aspect plays a particular role: the question of immortality, the interdependence of present, past and future, the temporality of man.
The lecture will discuss these multiple temporalities, based on a narratological analysis of the text, and show how a philosophy of time develops almost en passant in the course of the text. This approach to the Mesopotamian epistemology of time is based on four perspectives:
- Introduction: time as the main dimension of the Gilgamesh epic
- Mesopotamian time management and the discovery of the concept of space-time
- Beyond time?
- Temporality and the human being
