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Comment by thrower123 | Hacker News Reader

I'd say it's probably Proto-Indo-European roots, although I seem to think the Assyrians were always classed as Semetic in my textbooks.

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Gilgamesh was written ~2000 years after PIE's theorized origins. It actually lines up well with the Rigveda, one of the oldest surviving Vedic Sanskrit texts.

I believe it was originally written in Sumerian, a language isolate originally found in southern Mesopotamia.

I should check out the Rigveda.

Yep definitely true. I meant that the original author of Gilgamesh would have lived at a time when certain Sanskrit names may have been heard of in Mesopotamia.

Sumerian and the story of Gilgamesh predated Sanskrit.

We have a similar story in one of the older Sanskrit works.

http://edition-open-access.de/proceedings/7/6/index.html

Your link suggests the Indian story is based on the Sumerian or Akkadian. That would be news to me. It’s certainly possible, but in my personal opinion people often go astray with these methods - there’s little reason to believe many examples couldn’t have evolved independently based on similar real world occurrences or common human archetypes.

You should. It is interesting. I've read it.

If you consider a gap of roughly 700 years to be "lining up well", then sure.

But from a more conventional perspective, the epic of Gilgamesh is much, much, much older than the Rigveda.

Yes, Assyrian was a dialect of Akkadian, an East-Semitic language.

Is. Assyrian is still spoken.

Right, but the modern Assyrian is "Neo-Aramaic," not a dialect of Akkadian like the old one.

Giving one language the same name as another language from which it doesn't descend isn't really a good reason to claim that the earlier language is "still" spoken.

Not really; Akkadian is East Semitic and Assyrian is Central Semitic.

It was (at the time).

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