Intertextual Study of the Scene of Divine Bull Being Killed in Imaging of Gilgamesh Narrative

Gilgamesh epic is one of the oldest human prose epics. This epic story is one of the bests among world’s epic literature masterpieces in its form. This epic story was carved on twelve clay tablets and is narrating the mythic hero, one of the oldest Orouk Kings, who eventually experiences a serious of events and comes to a self-scrutiny and surrenders to destiny while seeking for immortality and solving the mystery of death. This story is derived from a Sumerian myth which includes six disparate stories, the one that the Babylonians used to narrate another quotation about the very same epic. The perfect Babylonian text was discovered from the twelve clay tablets from Assyrian Banipal’s(  Assyrian King) library in Neinava city. The history of the written Babylonian text dates back to the second Millennium BC. These clay tablets have been translated to different languages by different authors and translators in history and have always attracted the attentions of many authors and artists. This subject deals with the study of scenery images of sixth tablets which depicts the scene of divine bull killed by Gilgamesh and his friend “Ankido”, as the act of killing a bull was one the honorable acts done by the believers of Mithraism and since killing a cow was a sign of creation. As in Persepolis there are several images of divine bull/cow with wings carved on stones, this scene was chosen as the subject of this paper. Approaching this goal, the literary recreation of Ahmad Shamlou with painting of Morteza Momayyez(1960) and compilations of Hanibal Alkhas and painting of Manouchehr Safarzadeh ( 1970) were taken into consideration. Although the plot of the two narrations are the same but there are obvious differences in scenes of this epic piece which are indicative different factors. This essay aims to discover the reasons of the differences in these images of the epic (Gilgamesh) by descriptive-analytical and tera-textual and inter-textual methods. So that it could disclose the hidden relations among the texts visual arts and inter-textual fields and measure the convergence of these different texts in order to find a comprehensive way toward studying these imageries with new ideas. As though of the chief reasons of this study is to find out the effects of cultural backgrounds or personal ideas in imaging systems of the same epic or narration, so that it can provide a more reliable knowledge about profound structures of these images and reveal their hidden relations as well as discussing the reasons of visual differences of these imaging systems by analyzing the images of the same scenes( the scene of killing the divine bull).Having analyzed these images, it was obvious that although these images where about the same scenes but they were depicted on the basis of different cultural - artistic backgrounds of the artists with different fictional points of views. This essay proceeds by comparing the content and inter-textuality of the two images of Gilgamesh epic drawn on the scene of (killing the divine bull) chosen from the sixth clay tablet. Since the field of study is too broad, we just suffice to study only two images of two different artists. These artists are Master Morteza Momaiiez and Manouchehr Safarzadeh. Ultimately, this essay deals with analyzing the mentioned images to find out how they their essence was derived from the previous texts and how where they were painted based on the different understandings of their artists from Gilgamesh epic which led to different paintings on the same scene, based on the theories and specially inter-textual findings of tera-textualism and multi-textualism. (These elements are Meta-texts of the authors, the age of the readers, Paradigms and styles of artists). The most important sources used in this paper are issues related to the topics of "intertextuality", in particular the article of “transtexual study” by Dr. Bahman Namvar Motlagh published in 2008 and Allen Graham’s book, “intertextuality” 2007, and the articles of the Second and Third Seminar on comparative art compiled by  Manizheh Kangarani in 2010.