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Gilgamesh lesson
Sometimes you have a lesson that the first time you teach it, you have a mild interest in it, and then something catches your interest and suddenly you are much more interested in it. That’s what happened with our Gilgamesh lesson. The first time I taught Ancient History back in Kindergarten, I barely even registered this lesson. Then we taught it again in 4th grade and it was more of interest. But it really caught my eye our last time through our history lesson cycle in 8th grade. Then I noticed all sorts of fun parallels to so many things.
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Epic of Gilgamesh Resources
- Mystery of History 1– this is what we used the first two times I taught the lesson
- The epic of Gilgamesh– a picture book that summarizes the five different epics
- Gilgamesh the King- our library no longer has this book, but the pictures are great, I don’t remember the text sadly, but it’s a good summary of the story
- The Revenge of Ishtar– the second book of the trilogy
- The last quest of Gilgamesh– The final book in the trilogy of the epic
Online resources:
I used those for my notes the last time through for history, and for additional fun we had these two videos:
And then, because I find Overly Sarcastic Productions hilarious, but I have to warn you their videos are for middle school and older, and I suggest watching ahead of time to see if you approve of letting your kids watch the videos.
Okay, we’ve talked about all of the resources available, but now let’s talk why should we learn about this story?
Why learn about Gilgamesh?
Let’s talk about common themes and epic tales. A few years ago I shared how we did a prehistory unit. Most of this showed up in a worldview unit. Part of this was looking at the many different flood stories around the world. One of the oldest and most complete versions is the Epic of Gilgamesh.
This has led to much discussions online as to which came first, the Epic of Gilgamesh or the Bible. Obviously, as a Christian, I have my own opinions, and there are a lot of opinions. People with their opinions frequently look like this guy.
No seriously, that’s how I sometimes feel people arguing online look like.
But that’s besides the point, getting back to why it’s important to teach this. It’s helpful for us to see how stories are universal.
We are constantly telling stories about friendship, and our sorrow about the loss of friends, and our struggle against evil, and terrible things.
This is probably the oldest story we have records of. Now I could be wrong, I don’t think any of the stories from Asia are older. though they may be around the same age. I think the oldest stories from Asia are around 1000 BC, and this is from around 2400 BC.
More lessons from Ancient Mesopotamia
Another reason the Epic of Gilgamesh is cool
Okay, so that is the reasons it’s cool for story reasons.
But there are some interesting history things going on there.
Like, we didn’t even know it existed until 200 years ago when we found some random fragments, and all of our study of it has happened in the last 200 years as we’ve found more and more fragments to slowly piece the story together.
We think Gilgamesh may be based on a real king. The epic may be based on the fifth king of Uruk, who was recorded to have an especially long reign, like 126 years, which is part of why you get those stories of Gilgamesh having immortality.
- Kadumago, CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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