Hello, I just read Andrew George's Epic of Gilgamesh and I stumbled upon this passage :
From what I know, the word "chapel" is quite distinctly meaning a place of worship for Christian, which surely this Epic predates by many centuries. The mention of juniper incense made me think that Gilgamesh and Enkidu performed divination and purification ritual, since in ancient Mesopotamia juniper incense is usually used for those rituals. And those rituals are also commonly performed in temple. But I don't understand why the translation didn't use 'temple' like in many other instances in the Epic, especially since the segment before located in a temple, more specifically Ninsun's temple where she adopted Enkidu as his foster son. Like, do Gilgamesh and Enkidu moved place? Do the word for 'chapel' there is different from 'temple' in other segment so it cannot be translated with the same word? What does exactly that 'chapel' word sounds in Sumerian/Akkadian?
Hello, and thanks for clarifying (in dms) which section of the Epic this comes from - it's Tablet III, lines 148-154. The word in question is the Akkadian bīt, which means "house" or "building", and is the root of many more specific terms for different buildings. It could also be used for "temple" or various other kinds of structures. It's the equivalent of the Sumerian e, which has the same set of meanings, and both are written 𒂍 in cuneiform.
George was, like many modern translators, presumably trying to make the text as recognizable as possible to his (assumed) reader, so used "chapel" as a creative liberty. Helle (2021) here uses "temple" with the same surrounding phrasing: "Enkidu in the temple of ... / and Gilgamesh in the temple of ..."
The term used for the temple of Ninsun earlier in tablet III is egalmah, a Sumerian term that literally means "great big building", but is used for a major temple. It starts with the same e sign, 𒂍. Given that we don't know what comes after bīt in the lines here, it's possible it was egalmah, but without a more complete version of this section we can't know for sure. The term bīt is also used in this tablet as part of the phrase for "bath-house" (bīt narmaku III.37), illustrating its more generic "building/house" meaning.
If I were to translate this, I'd probably use "building", just because the lack of context makes any more specific term seem too confident in meaning (this section is extremely fragmentary). As to what this section refers to, it could basically be anything - though if any Akkadianists have thoughts, please reblog with them! And thank you again for your question.
I was thinking akkadian bīt could be cognate with hebrew בית (beit, bayit) and then was like "nah there's no way" but it IS in fact!
with a definite article (הבית) it can refer to the temple in jerusalem (usually written out as בית המקדש). see also בית כנסת, synagogue. apparently ܒܝܬܐ in classical syriac also has some sort of religious-building as its secondary meaning.
I don't know if this is because the proto-semitic *bayt- does also carry the religious-building meaning (I mean, it doesn't seem to do so in arabic بَيْت)? or if it's coincidental / for some other reason.
(not to say that any semitic connotations of the word would be applicable to its sumerian meaning, but something I found cool nonetheless.)