Olympic Games (interesting, actually)

[Sean Manning]

I've finished reading that site through, and I think their basic argument is sound, but their conclusions go too far. Its now clear that there were sacred sporting events in Mesopotamia, and that these have definite similarities with the ancient Olympics. It does make some leaps in time. For example, we don't know if the custom recorded in the Death of Bilgames poem was still common by the Iron Age. The text about the Abu festival is from the early second millennium BCE.

There are references to the festival of ghosts and the Gilgamesh games during the reign of Ashurbanipal showing that the Games were not only continuously conducted during the Sumerian, Babylonian and Assyrian periods of Middle Eastern history but even after the fall of the empire under Greek ruke they continued to practise the games.

In fact four hundred years after Homer wrote the Iliad and following in the tradition of Gilgamesh and Achilles, Alexander the Great, during his military campaigns, also mourned the death of his friend Hephaistion with similar extravagant funerary games in 324 BC in the heart of Mesopotamia, at Babylon, in which about 3000 athletes took part!

Regards,
David Chibo
http://www.gilgameshgames.org

Very interesting! Thank you.