Intertextuality script, part 1 (Patreon)

The intertextuality/plagiarism video is morphing from one video into two or three, mainly because it's so fascinating that I want to spend some time on it. Here's the rough draft of the script for video one!

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“When the seventh day arrived, I brought out a dove, setting it free: off went the dove. No perch was available for it and it came back to me. I brought out a swallow, setting it free: off went the swallow. No perch was available for it, and it came back to me. I brought out a raven, setting it free: off went the raven and it saw the waters receding. It was eating, bobbing up and down, it did not come back to me.”

If you’re at all familiar with the biblical story of Noah and the flood, then this passage probably sounds pretty familiar to you. This is a section of the Mesopotamian flood narrative, as found in the Epic of Gilgamesh. The Mesopotamian flood narrative heavily influenced the writers of the flood account in Genesis, leading some people to label Noah’s adventures in the Bible as plagiarism – something that Western society frowns upon as being dishonest and unimaginative.

But was this actually plagiarism? Join me in this video to look at the use of intertextuality in ancient literature, and to find out what makes this (and other examples) more than simply copying someone else’s creative property.

In the introduction to this video, I used two terms – plagiarism and intertextuality – somewhat interchangeably. While similar, they actually have two distinct ranges of meaning…and because I’m an academic, and I want to be clear, I’m going to take a minute to define my terms.

‘Plagiarism’ is defined by Merriam-Webster as stealing or passing off someone else’s ideas or words, or to use someone else’s creation without crediting the source. 

In contrast, ‘intertextuality’ is defined as a complex interrelationship between a written composition, and the texts that are essential to either the interpretation or creation of that piece. 

Both words require some kind of derivative relationship between an earlier and a later creation – whether the latter draws upon, references, or straight-up reproduces the former. However, ‘plagiarism’ implies a moral judgement and is an illicit, sometimes criminal act, while ‘intertextuality’ does not. 

For example, if I took Jane Austen’s book, ‘Emma’, and wrote it out, word for word, and attempted to publish it under my own name – that would definitely be plagiarism. I’m not adding anything of my own, merely attempting to profit from someone else’s creativity. However, the movie ‘Clueless’ takes elements of the original book and reworks them for a modern audience, creating something new and original that is related to, but separate from, the original. Similarly, the movie ‘Robin Hood: Men in Tights’ draws upon various different Robin Hood traditions (most notably ‘Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves’ starring Kevin Costner and the world’s worst mullet), but is an entirely new entity. In both of these examples, I would argue that one’s enjoyment of the remake is greatly increased through a familiarity with the original, but that such an understanding isn’t necessarily required. Intertextuality can also include “…the deliberate use of characters or passages from one work in another” (Black 2004: xxix), as well as a creation’s relationship to other compositions – to return to films, for example, the “Scary Movie” film franchise relies on the viewers’ knowledge of horror films in order to understand the humor contained within it. 

In this video I’m going to argue that the use and reuse of existing stories and themes by ancient authors generally falls under the heading of intertextuality, rather than plagiarism.

Right, now we’ve defined our terms, let’s move on to looking at some ancient literature!

The ancient world didn’t prioritize named authorship and originality in the way that the modern world does. While there are some authors named in Mesopotamian tablets, more often than not the creative act is attributed to one of the gods – channeled through a human, of course, and, even more usually, the human author remains unnamed. The individual author wasn’t credited as the creative force, rather, the external nature of artistic inspiration was emphasized. Foster suggests that “Authors in Mesopotamian civilization well knew and were wont to recall in their texts that composition was an ongoing, contributive enterprise, in which the author…was present only at the beginning”. Textual compositions, in other words, had a life beyond their initial creation. 

This is visible in the adoption and adaptation of various stories, themes, and yes – whole compositions – in the ancient near east. 

Let’s start by looking at one of the most well-known compositions from Mesopotamia – the Epic of Gilgamesh. The composition we commonly refer to as ‘The Epic of Gilgamesh’ is a lengthy poem written in Akkadian, known from various different time periods and geographical areas of the ancient near east, spread from the early 2nd millennium BCE to roughly 130 BCE, and from Anatolia, to Emar, Ugarit, and Megiddo, as well as Mesopotamia proper. There is also a separate collection of 5 compositions written in Sumerian. Most copies of the Sumerian tablets date mostly to the 18th c. BCE, roughly the same time as some copies of the Akkadian epic, but earlier exemplars exist showing that these Sumerian poems were already in written circulation by the end of the 3rd millennium BCE. As explained by the foremost expert on Gilgamesh, Andrew George:

“We can suppose that lays of Gilgamesh circulated in lower Mesopotamia in the latter part of the third millennium, a time when Sumerian and Akkadian were both spoken, and that the two traditions of sung literature gave rise to both the Sumerian poems and the epic poem in Akkadian. In due course these two corpora were captured in writing and passed into the literature handed down by scribes.” (George, 2009: 5-6).

The epic that most people read and enjoy today is the Standard Babylonian epic, preserved most notably in Ashurbanipal’s famous library from Nineveh. This version of the poem, attributed to one Sin-leqi-unninni, is a heavily-edited version of the earlier Akkadian epic, and includes a new prologue that frames Gilgamesh’s adventures in a way that emphasizes “…the theme of wisdom gained through suffering” (George: 2009: 12). This prologue is a form seen regularly in so-called ‘naru’ literature, a specific genre of Mesopotamian texts that are often instructional in nature. Sin-leqi-uninni is probably also responsible for adding in the flood narrative of tablet xi, and for the inclusion of one of the Sumerian poems, ‘Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the Netherworld’, as the final tablet, tablet XII. 

By the time that Sin-leqi-uninni carried out his reworking of the Akkadian poem, the Gilgamesh stories had most likely been in circulation for close to 1,000 years. Was he committing plagiarism by including the flood narrative and the additional Sumerian poem? Well…not really, no. To begin with, Sin-leqi-unninni isn’t mentioned anywhere in the surviving tablets of the epic – there’s no line saying “I am Sin-leqi-unninni and I wrote this all by myself”, so it’s not as though he was taking credit for…well, anything, really. Instead, his reworking showcases what appears to have been the Mesopotamian understanding that “…every text from the past may be a paradigmatic point of reference for later texts” (Pongratz-Leisten 2001: 200). Sin-leqi-unninni took several pre-existing compositions and wove them together into a unified whole, adding some original sections to create an entirely new epic, one that reframed intensely familiar characters and stories into a new entity that explored themes of wisdom and immortality, calling on the audience’s knowledge of naru literature to add an instructive dimension to a literary composition. Rather than being a mindless act of derivation, this was a clever and successful act of creation. 

Again, George puts it far better than I can:

“…the poem that told of the glorious feats and heroic exploits of the mightiest king of old was recast in Sin-leqi-unninni’s hands as a sombre meditation on the doom of man…the poem became a vehicle for more than entertainment.”

(George 2003: 32-33).

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Part two of this series will look at the evolution of the Enuma Elish epic, from a relatively minor myth about Ningirsu/Ninurta, to the creation epic we know and love, and finally the appropriation of the myth by the Assyrians. Part three will concentrate on points of connection between the Bible and Mesopotamian mythology, most notably the flood narrative. Maybe only the flood narrative...I haven't decided yet. I might even remove the introduction portion of this script and use it for the Noah/flood video.
Thoughts and suggestions are welcome!