Gilgamesh Translated Into Ape-Language

Yes – in ‘Unusual But True’ News, that great ol’ Mesopotamian epic, The Epic of Gilgamesh, has been translated for Apes, using lexigrams. Lexigrams are picture-words, and are often arranged on boards for apes to point at while conversing with humans.

You can read Gilgamesh For Apes here in pdf format. I found out about it on Flávio Souza’s fairly new biblioblog, Ad Cummulus.

“It is far from certain what these apes will make of this text if it would be presented to them. Hopefully they would recognize the lexigrams as similar to those they have been taught to use, but I do not know if the convention of reading (from left to right and from top to bottom) means anything to them. […] But I do present this version of Gilgamesh in the good faith that some day, many generations from now, some ape will enjoy the experience of meeting Gilgamesh. At the moment, perhaps, this story will appear to them like the Jabberwocky poem appeared to Alice (in wonderland): ‘Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas–only I don’t exactly know what they are! However, SOMEBODY killed SOMETHING: that’s clear, at any rate–’.”

The question for me is – when will the Bible be translated into Ape? Can Christians continue to overlook the salvation of apes in their anthropocentric Bible translations? Apes need Jesus too.