Gilgamesh Games - Author's Note

For the past century modern day Mesopotamia (Iraq) has been dominated and colonialised by firstly the British and currently the US who have kept it and the entire Middle East backwards and dependent on providing oil to maintain Western economic and military hegemony.

 

But what preceded these military colonial invasions was a far more pervasive ideological and racist cultural invasion that legitimised the military invasions and occupations that were to follow. The late Edward Said explained this prejudiced and distorted historical interpretation of Middle Eastern histories, cultures and peoples by Westerners in his famous theory of Orientalism which purports that Western history functions primarily to serve colonial and political ends. This Orientalism framework purposely diminishes Middle Eastern cultural heritage and history by polarising the world between the progressive, democratic, enlightened “West,” and its “Other,” the regressive, autocratic, undeveloped “East.”

 

A firm geographical and historical foundation was laid through a revisionist theory that alleged that the division between the "West" and the "East" can be traced back as far as the Greco-Persian War of the fifth century BC, when Athenian historians supposedly drew a sharp, distinctive line between their Greek “democratic” culture and Persian “despotism.”  Frantz Fanon eloquently describes the link between cultural and military colonialism and the need for historical revisionism in The Wretched of the Earth. “Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys it.” Western tradition went on to define the “West” as the direct heir of Greece and the "cradle of Western civilisation," which, at the dawn of history, stood as an insular, isolated near-miracle of burgeoning culture.

 

This distortion of history was also articulated by Martin Benal’s Black Athena which explains whereas Greek civilisation was known originally to have roots in Egyptian, Semitic [Middle Eastern], and various other southern and eastern cultures, during the last two hundred years it was redesigned as “Aryan” during the course of the nineteenth century, its Semitic and African roots actively purged or hidden from view while simultaneously exaggerating the history of ancient Greece.

 

Little has changed since. Today the ideological theory that preceded the latest phase of US-led colonialisation was first articulated in 1993, after the end of the Cold War, in Samuel P. Huntington’s book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.  Building his theory on the previously established framework of Orientalism, Huntington segregated the world along culturally divisive lines. In a prescient premonition of what was to follow he stated, “The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.”  His theory provided the ideological legitimisation of American-led Western aggression against the Middle East and Islamic countries which continues to this very day.

 

The majority of modern day Assyriologists and Hellenists have unfortunately not only been trained, but thanks to a corporate media continue to be immersed within the same framework of Orientalism subconsciously categorising history and peoples into either Western or Eastern compartments. A few examples from one of the main sources used for this thesis, The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age, written by Walter Burkert will highlight just how pervasive the theory remains.

 

Picture: A hellish landscape yields scant forage for camels wandering beneath the black plumes of burning oil wells in Kuwait. Courtesy National Geographic.

 

Throughout his book Burkert works tirelessly to highlight clear similarities between the “West” and the older “East” but on a few occasions even this champion of cultural continuity succumbs to the framework of Orientalism that saturates him. He astonishingly attributes democracy to Greek lawlessness (page 60), when he states, “The Greeks lacked straight forward institutions of monarchic power and law, uncertainty being the touchstone of freedom.”

 

He continues with the “Western democracy” versus “Eastern despotism” myth (pages 24-25) by stating that, “…since the influence of the [Eastern] despots was limited in extent,” he continues, “It can be presumed that this factor could act as a strong incentive for [Eastern] emigration to the freer West.” Yet two paragraphs later he contradicts himself, “Nor would there have been a shortage of Greeks trying their luck in the East at that time…”

 

Walter Burkert blatantly displays the starkest example of Orientalism (page 26) when he subjectively describes the Greek acquisition of the Semitic [Aramaic] alphabet, “For us the Greek alphabet is the first perfect writing system, being the earliest alphabetic script to use signs for both vowels and consonants consistently, whereas Semitic [Aramaic] writing was, and is, basically concerned with consonants. Its perfection is confirmed by its success in the West.”

 

With a proponent of cultural continuity such as Burkert reluctant to even “scratch the surface” of the so-called “pillars of Western civilisation” the task of revealing the origins of the Olympic Games will be a Gilgameshean undertaking indeed.

 

In the years to come the Gilgamesh Games will be described by writers, who persist in the same framework of Orientalism, as the ‘primitive-Olympics,’ or ‘proto-Olympics.’ Some will even make the ludicrous claim that the Gilgamesh Games “anticipated” the Olympic Games.  However no self-respecting archaeologist will now be able to easily ignore the revelations about the games revealed in this thesis.

 

The revelation in this thesis that the Olympian “jewel in the crown” of Western civilisation may trace back to the Middle East will unsettle many of this thesis’s readers who have been immersed within the framework of Orientalism. This revelation will also sound the final death knell for the artificial concept of “Western civilisation.”

 

There is neither Western civilisation nor Eastern civilisation. This man-made division is no longer tenable. Civilisation cannot be nationalised nor geographically divided. And just as humanity refuted the racist theory of Eugenics by tracing its shared genetic link back to Africa, it also needs to refute Orientalism and trace its shared civilisation back to the Middle East. In debunking this flawed concept of disparate “Western” and “Eastern” civilisations we are finally left with a possibility of a non-restrictive and non-coercive universalism.

 

In correcting the mistakes of the past we also need to be mindful of a tilt towards Occidentalism by making it quite clear that civilisation developed in Mesopotamia not because of any genetic predisposition, but because of its ideal geographical location, at the confluence of three continents, in stark comparison to a land-locked, mountainous and isolated ancient Greece.

 

The main author would also like to express his appreciation for Professor Simo Parpola from the State Archives of Assyria, at the University of Helsinki in Finland, and one of the founders of the Melammu project, a project that investigates the continuity, transformation and diffusion of Mesopotamian culture. Having such a background it came as no surprise that although originally sceptical, Professor Parpola was still willing to help me with this thesis. His ability to dare challenge conventional wisdom and step into uncharted territory was invaluable in bringing this new revelation to light.

 

Finally I would like to dedicate this thesis to an independent and free future Iraq liberated from American, British and Australian military colonialism, as well as ideological Orientalism and peacefully integrated with its neighbours in a democratic pan-Arabian economic community with religious and democratic freedom for all its multi-ethnic and multi-religious inhabitants.