Trading up with Gilgamesh

by David Damrosch
The Chronicle of Higher Education, 9 March 2007
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[1] The third press was just right. Not only did the people at Holt want the book I wanted to write –
antiquity and all – but they also suggested ways I could revise my sample chapters to better effect. The “Aha!”
moment came when John Sterling, Holt’s publisher, pointed to the opening of my first chapter. I had begun
with a flourish, emphasizing the excitement created when a young curator at the British Museum first
deciphered the Gilgamesh epic, with its seeming confirmation of the biblical story of the Flood: “When
George Smith discovered the Flood story in the Epic of Gilgamesh in the fall of 1872, he made one of the
most dramatic discoveries in the history of archaeology.” Sterling ran his pen along these lines, but instead of
praising this bold beginning, he tapped the page and asked, “Couldn’t you make this opening just a bit more
dramatic?”
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[2] The current conflict in Iraq has led me to wrestle directly with these issues. Deeply disturbed on
many levels by the run-up to the invasion, I was particularly concerned with the rhetoric of a “clash of
civilizations” that was often used by proponents of the war and echoed uncritically in the press. It occurred to
me that discussing a favorite text of mine, The Epic of Gilgamesh, could provide an effective way to show that
the cultures of Islam and “the West” are not inherently, eternally opposed civilizations, but are outgrowths of a
common cultural matrix. Gilgamesh has echoes in Homer, the Bible, and The Thousand and One Nights, and
this early commonality has new relevance today, as “Middle Eastern” and “Western” cultures again become
increasingly intertwined in our globalizing age. Gilgamesh provides a particularly good case in point: The epic
was rediscovered in the 19th century amid clashing British, Russian, French, and Ottoman imperial interests,
and Gilgamesh himself has become a point of reference for figures as disparate as Philip Roth and Saddam
Hussein.
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[3] The second editor offered all too much editorial guidance. He wanted a sort of “lite” version of my
book, playing up the colorful Ottoman adventures but dropping the entire discussion of Gilgamesh and its
ancient world. That really would have entailed dumbing the book down, softening its political point along
with much of its intellectual substance.
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[4] The problem isn’t that academics “can’t write,” as is often claimed, but that we are typically
engaged in what scholars of the Renaissance know as coterie writing. In 16th-century England, for instance,
small groups of aristocrats such as Sir Philip Sidney, his sister Mary Herbert, and their circle would compose
poems for their mutual entertainment, circulating them privately from one country estate to another. Scholars
today may reach a somewhat larger circle, but most academic writing is part of a continuing conversation
among a coterie of fellow specialists with common interests and a shared history of debate. Even for scholars
who are elegant prose stylists, it isn’t an easy matter to make the transition from writing for Milton’s “fit
audience, though few” to a larger but less fit readership.
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[5] With the scene now set, Smith was on his way, and so was my book. I could still make my central
cultural and political points, but they had to be carried by a strong narrative line, built around intriguing
characters and fleshed out with a judicious use of telling detail. An ominous mongoose, for instance, made an
effective lead-in to a chapter on the Assyrian empire, “After Asurbanipal, the Deluge.” The mongoose’s
sudden appearance beneath King Esarhaddon’s chariot led to a revealing exchange of anxious correspondence
between the king and his chief scribe, who tried to reassure the king that the mongoose was not a warning sign
from heaven but merely a bit of imperial roadkill.
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 [6] By “too hard,” I mean a publishing house that was actually too hospitable to hard-core academic
writing. That was the trade division of a large academic press, one that regularly publishes well-regarded
general-interest scholarship. The editor loved the initial chapters he’d seen and didn’t want me to change a
word. A very generous response, but I had a lingering concern that I could have done more to draw in readers
who would never have heard the name Gilgamesh, much less such terms as “firman,” “Akkadian,” and
“haruspex.” I appreciated the approval, but I felt I needed help.
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[7] He was right. I had told the reader that George Smith had made a dramatic discovery, but I had
failed to dramatize the scene at all. Rewriting my opening, I placed Smith at the long trestle tables where he
worked amid the watery sunlight coming in through the museum’s windows. I went on to detail his awkward
social position: Never having gone even to high school, he had been apprenticed as a bank-note engraver.
Brilliant and ambitious, he had taught himself Akkadian and begun to haunt the museum’s Near Eastern
collections during his lunch hours, making his way up from Fleet Street through the press of carriages,
pedestrians, and hand-drawn carts full of cabbages and potatoes.
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[8] So I had my topic, together with a fund of gripping Victorian archaeological travelogues and
ancient Mesopotamian texts, including an extraordinary hoard of letters preserved on clay tablets in Nineveh,
a unique window into the region’s early imperial politics. Yet by anyone’s definition, Assyriology is an arcane
field, rarely discussed outside such highly specialized venues as the Journal of Cuneiform Studies and the
always informative Zeitschrift für Assyriologie und vorderasiatische Archäologie. Even my Victorian
archaeologists were getting into regions and issues that would be familiar to few readers today.
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[9] The lesson I would draw from my Goldilocks experience is that it is neither necessary nor desirable
to dumb our projects down when writing for a general audience. At the same time, we need to write quite
differently when we want to reach beyond the comforting confines of our disciplinary coteries. It is good to
have a clear and vivid style, but equally, we have to retrain ourselves to write for readers who don’t already
know what we’re talking about, and who need to be shown why they should care about the things we know
and love so well. The trade market can bear an impressive degree of scholarly substance if we can teach
ourselves to reach out to a substantial nonscholarly clientele.
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[10] The American public has a deeply ambivalent attitude toward scholarship. Parents are eager to
have their children taught by leading scholars but are often bemused by what the scholars actually do,
particularly in their work outside the classroom. Regularly mocked as purveyors of arcane topics in clotted
prose, professors often display a reciprocal ambivalence toward the general public. To call a young
colleague’s work “rather… journalistic” is to signal a negative vote on tenure. As much as we might like to
help shape public understanding on contentious issues – and to earn royalties in the tens of thousands of
dollars rather than in the tens of dollars – we hesitate to set aside our highly honed analytical skills, our close
attention to history, nuance, and shades of meaning, and start turning out sound bites in prose.
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[11] In speaking with colleagues who have written trade books, I have often found them using quite
negative language to describe the task. “I had to dumb it down,” I’ve been told. Or else they may hold the line
and keep on writing much as they would for a university press, but then find their manuscript being
eviscerated by the editor and copy editor. “They took out all my footnotes,” one friend complained gloomily.
The books I’ve heard described in such terms have usually had disappointing sales.
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[12] Just how should I frame this varied and challenging material for a nonspecialist audience? That
was my major concern when talking with the editors who ended up expressing interest in the project. Like
some modern Professor Goldilocks, I found that one publisher was too hard, one was too soft, and the third
was just right.
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