One of my staff, Suzannah Alexander, recently noted that Columbia University scrubbed The Epic of Gilgamesh from its Core Curriculum in 2022. Once, not so long ago, Columbia’s Core Curriculum stood out in American higher education as among the last survivors of two-semester immersion in Western Civilization. It was launched in 1919. Though its contents were frequently adjusted over the decades, the main thread was never entirely lost. Recent years, however, have seen it diminished in various ways. Out went Antigone, Herodotus, Paradise Lost, and Macbeth. In came Aimé Césaire, Claudia Rankine, and Machado de Assis. Those particular additions didn’t last long either, but Columbia found other works of anticolonialism, race, gender and sexuality, and climate to take their place.
The “Core” at Columbia turns out to be a work in progress—which is as it should be. Worthy books are too numerous for a university to decide once and for all which texts should be the unshakable foundation of a college education. So perhaps it is not a surprise that Gilgamesh, after vacationing for a while in the underworld, reappeared in the 2025-2026 Core Humanities. He is accompanied this time by Enheduanna, “The Exaltation of Inanna.”
Gilgamesh is known to the modern world through the discovery in the 1850s of cuneiform tablets in the ruins of Ninevah, partly deciphered and translated in 1875. Their publication caused a sensation because they contain an account of a great flood that partially parallels the account of Noah in Genesis. The Ninevah tablets date to the seventh century BC but the tale of Gilgamesh proved to be much older. Older versions have been found that date back to the thirteenth, eighteenth, and perhaps the twenty-first centuries BC. By the time it reached King Ashurbanipal’s library in Ninevah, the tale was as ancient as Beowulf is to us.
For a long time, scholars believed Gilgamesh to be the oldest literary work in the world, but some scholars now make the case that Enheduanna should be granted priority. She was the daughter of Sargon, the founder of the Akkadian Empire, who flourished in the twenty-third century BC. Sargon conquered the Sumerian cities and appointed Enheduanna to oversee the Sumerian moon cult. Archaeologists have recovered various Sumerian hymns attributed to Enheduanna, including the Columbia Core reading, the 154-line hymn, “The Exaltation of Inanna.” One hitch to this story is that the only source for the poem was written 600 years after Enheduanna’s in a dialect of Sumerian unlike what she could have spoken.
So it is an open question which came first: Gilgamesh by an unknown bard, or “The Exaltation of Inanna” by a different unknown bard, perhaps owing something to the historical Enheduanna. Think of Sir Thomas Malory in the fifteenth century recycling the medieval tales of King Arthur.
This is a roundabout way of questioning whether either text belongs in a core curriculum that supposedly tracks the rise of Western civilization. In fact, both stories were utterly lost to history in the Middle East and never touched the West except perhaps by way of fragments of folklore that was wrapped into Genesis.
So, if the purpose of Columbia’s core curriculum is to advance knowledge of Western civilization among its students, these works are out of place. But it has been a long time since Columbia University upheld that goal. Its core started in 1919 as “Contemporary Civilization.” In 1937, Columbia added “Literature Humanities.” I imagine before then Columbia assumed that anyone who had been admitted had already read Homer, Shakespeare, Milton, and other truly foundational authors in the humanities. “Literature Humanities,” however remained fluid. In the 1994-1995 Columbia University Bulletin, the “Literature Humanities” readings came from: Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Thucydides, Plato, Virgil, the Bible, Augustine, Dante, Boccaccio, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Goethe, Austen, and Wolfe. (NAS has a nice collection of Columbia University Bulletins from the period.) How fluid the list was can be gauged by the list from five years earlier. In 1989, “Literature Humanities” also had readings from Aristophanes, Herodotus, Lucretius, Ovid, Apuleious, and Cervantes.
Does any of this matter? That depends on how much we care about what I’ll call the Great Tradition in the West. Plainly it is possible for people born in America or some other Western country to lead a good life without having read or even heard of any of these authors. Familiarity with them is no measure of intelligence or practical ability. Deep study of some of them may confer wisdom, spiritual insight, or enlightenment. But lots of people find their way without them. So why does Columbia University even bother? And why do the 1,500 or so classical academies that have sprouted in the last decade go to the trouble of teaching children the outmoded maundering of long-dead writers?
Among the answers one might venture to this is that our civilization is built on these foundations. If the foundations crumble and are forgotten, can the civilization still stand? Those foundations include the ideas that life has meaning, that the universe has an order, and that its order is moral as well as physical. Much more could be said about this than I will venture here. True, science can advance in the hands of scientists who have no grasp of the civilization that makes science possible. Artificial intelligence can accomplish astonishing mathematical proofs without any consciousness of what lies behind the quest. Still, civilization depends on our comprehension of the gifts and burdens of the past.
That past may well extend beyond “our” civilization. Gilgamesh and “The Exaltation of Inanna” are worth knowing, even if they belong to a civilization other than our own. It is testimony to our common humanity that we can connect to Gilgamesh’s love of the city, his friendship with companion Enkidu, his grief when Enkidu is killed, his quest for immortality, and his resignation to being mortal. We are offered a glimpse into a universe not our own but that has touches of poignant familiarity. The Sumerian epic is like a vivid dream.
But I’d still give priority to Homer and the Bible, and to the works that built on those beginnings.
This topic comes up because NAS held a conference in Washington in January on “Renewing the Humanities.” It could well have been a day-long lamentation by the fourteen invited speakers, but it wasn’t. While the participants were not hiding their disappointments with the age in which we live, all of them were essentially optimistic. And their optimism generally rested on their assurance that the humanities will survive no matter how much they are ignored, demeaned, or twisted out of shape. The champions of the anti-humanities can do their worst, but civilization still summons young minds to pay attention. I was especially impressed by the accounts of children who knew nothing of the classical tradition when they first encountered Oedipus Rex and were overwhelmed by the “reveal” at the end.
This edition of Academic Questions deals in large part with the disasters that have overtaken the academy because of its hostility to the civilization that gave it life. Nathan Gallo and Arnoldo Cantú ponder whether social work can be pulled from the quicksand of “critical social justice.” That word “critical” now signals a desire to replace the conscientious search for truth with the peanut butter of ideology. My fellow anthropologist Warren Shapiro observes how our discipline has traded a century of hard-won insights into how societies build on the facts of kinship with outlandish theories that were discredited long ago but that appeal to feminist and post-modern sensibilities.
We have the testimony of Yili Olson who, growing up in China during the Cultural Revolution, saw the invasion of illiberal ideology into daily life—something we may see again. Likewise, John Kainer defends young people from the charge that they are apathetic. No, he says, they are the victims of mis-education. Edward Shapiro argues that the treatment of Jews on American campuses after October 7 augurs further decline in the liberal arts. Harry Haufele expounds that DEI keeps finding new ways to corrupt the academy. He details the rise of “Citation Diversity Statements,” which require scholars to load up their articles with citations to minority scholars regardless of actual relevance.
John Gentry chases the demon of DEI into the library stacks, as he reports on how many academic libraries continue to prioritize DEI book selection, even as they declare that they have stopped doing that.
And Erwin James Casareno ventures an historical parallel between the ideological tools of the campus left and some of the techniques of the Spanish Inquisition. If that seems a stretch at first, hear him out.
This issue is packed with book reviews—I suspect more than we have ever published before in a single go. Mostly this is because we had a flood of books we thought deserved to be reviewed and we summoned some of our best reviewers for the task. But we also received unsolicited reviews that we judged too important to pass up. I’ll forego reviewing the reviews but I’ll trust you will encounter some books here that will prompt a quick trip to Barnes & Noble or visit to Amazon.com.
I’ll make a partial exception in recommending William Briggs’ review of Adam Kucharski’s book Proof: The Art and Science of Certainty. NAS has invested a lot of time and effort in documenting the flood of irreproducible “science.” The question of what should count as “proof” is of high moment, not just in the sciences but in how the media and the public deal with the large claims so often put forward on the basis of small evidence. Briggs’ review shines a welcome ray of light on these matters.
And when you finish the issue, find an hour or two to read Gilgamesh on your non-clay tablet, and consider why a college intent on restoring the humanities might or might not include it in the curriculum. May Enheduanna bless your efforts.
Peter Wood is president of the National Association of Scholars and editor-in-chief of Academic Questions.
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