Basic Human Nature
The Oldest Stories in the World.
Translated and Retold with Comments.
By Theodor H. Gaster.
Viking. 238 pp. $5.00.

According to the translator and editor, these thirteen stories are literally the oldest in the world. Five are Babylonian, five Hittite, and three Canaanite. All were found written in cuneiform script on clay tablets in languages of which one, the Hittite, was not “cracked” until 1916. The Hittite tablets probably date from the middle of the second millennium B.C.E.; the stories are thought to have been composed some centuries before that. Some have never before been printed; none, according to the editor, is well known.

The method of presentation involves a rather odd but on the whole successful compromise between the “scholarly” and the popular. On the one hand, we are provided with a historical introduction, rather elaborate commentaries on each story pointing out parallels and interpreting some in terms of nature myths, and an elaborate cross-index of motifs referring to Stith Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk Literature. On the other hand the stories are retold in a modern idiom, just how freely being nowhere explained. Undoubtedly they are extremely well told and probably this was the best way of presenting them. Nevertheless the reader is almost certain to have been attracted by historical curiosity as well as by the intrinsic interest of the stories themselves and is bound to wonder just how close he is keeping to the tone of the oldest stories as the oldest readers felt it. My guess would be that the answer is: sometimes pretty close, sometimes not very. It is hard to believe, for instance, that when domestic discord among the gods is being described and we are told, “Up and down they raced, bawling and screaming at the tops of their voices, until poor Grandma Tiamat was nothing but a bundle of nerves,” we are so very close to the original Hittite. A good many questions could have been answered by the inclusion of an appendix giving a few passages in direct translation. This is, however, the only complaint that one reader has to make.

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Even if we were not told, it would be at once apparent that many of the stories are more primitive than Homer. For one thing the monsters and supernatural beings tend to hold the center of the stage instead of being, as in the Iliad especially, relegated to secondary roles. The slow but irresistible tendency of civilization to focus attention more and more upon the familiar, the usual, and the commonplace until we concern ourselves almost exclusively, first with men, then with “little men,” is here hardly evident at all, as in Homer it already is. For another, there is relatively very little concern with unity. If the Iliad really was once a loose aggregation of separate tales it has already, in the version we know, been reduced to that degree of wholeness which Aristotle, rationalizing what he found to exist, declared sufficient for an epic but not for a tragedy. The Babylonian “epic” of Gilgamesh, on the other hand, is still merely a string of separate adventures as little connected as those of Paul Bunyan—whom in some respects Gilgamesh resembles.

And yet for all this the oldest stories in the world are not as strange as some might expect. The universe of imagination which they represent is obviously one in which any reader of myths—classical, Nordic, or for that matter Polynesian—is more or less at home. They are a little wilder than the classical, rather more coherent and rational than at least those with which the present reviewer happens to be familiar from the South Seas or the North American Indians. But it is easy to believe that most primitive people would find them to some extent interesting and comprehensible just as we of the 20th century still do!

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That they are thus still comprehensible and interesting, that some of them are actually very good stories indeed, is no doubt in some small part due to the parallels which we would often recognize even if Mr. Gaster did not point them out. Sometimes these are obvious, like the borrowed plumes in the story of the Babylonian Icarus or like the lovers-turned-into-animals by the Circe in “Gilgamesh.” Sometimes they consist merely in familiar motifs like the ambiguous oracle or the earthly paradise. But it is also hard not to believe in the one case as in the other that they would strike some chord, seem intrinsically interesting and right, even if we were meeting them for the first time. Whether you explain it in terms of something as vague and general as “racial memory,” or in terms as fantastically explicit as the Freudian symbols, there is obviously something very powerfully appealing about such themes and such stories.

Mr. Gaster is content to cite the parallels and to indicate the metaphorical references to the seasons or other great natural phenomena. He expresses no opinion on the question whether the widespread occurrence of various motifs means that they were independently invented many times or represent something carried away by very early men as they wandered further and further from some original center of. distribution. Such a question is probably too thorny for an expert though it is irresistible to an amateur. And if we did know the answer it might throw some light on a problem which is coming to be increasingly important.

If we can still read with interest the oldest stories in the world, then there is obviously something very stable about human nature. The case for that belief is perhaps strongest if men have inevitably hit again and again on the same fancies, but it is still somewhat supported even if they have only remembered for thousands of years. And if human nature really is fundamentally a very stable thing, then it is not as plastic and as indefinitely conditionable as the most radical psychologists and sociologists maintain. This was the conviction to which the 18th century clung to save itself from the anarchistic relativism into which certain rationalists were trying to drag it. Perhaps it could do the same thing for us. Morals are at least a little bit more than mores if three or four thousand years of changing fashion have left a good deal still unchanged.

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