“Events are as
much the parents of the future as they were the children of the past.” – JohnGalsworthy
I have a
fascination with things ancient. This is not new, it began when I was child, to
the extent of me wanting to become an archaeologist. I guess, in part this may
have been due to living in a country where things ancient were commonplace and
familiar. Wherever one turns in Greece, one finds evidence of the past. One
cannot ignore the past there, one is surrounded by it in both obvious and
subtle ways. I learnt to speak uttering some words in my mother tongue that
have remained unchanged for 5000 years. I learned to read and write using
letters that were the first truly alphabetic script devised to record the
vowels and consonants of speech. I grew up reading myths and legends that
children 2,500 years ago were reading also.
I still love
ancient things. This goes for ancient writings also. My tastes are more
universal and widespread nowadays. But in reading those texts from long ago, I
hear the voices of humanity from the distant past and feel strangely close to
them, for they are so similar to me. Their stories amuse me and entertain me in
the same way that they did them. Similar things move me or stir up my anger. I
am puzzled by the same things, I am in the same moral and ethical pickles that
they were in when they were writing all those millennia before today.
Today, let us go
back in time (about 4,500 years ago) to Mesopotamia. To the cradle of
civilisation, ancient Sumeria.
A highly sophisticated civilisation, one of the first to develop writing, and
as a consequence, a literature. “The Epic of Gilgamesh” is one of these
examples of Sumerian literature that we can read today in translation (for a
full online translation by Maureen Gallery Kovacs see: http://www.ancienttexts.org/library/mesopotamian/gilgamesh/tab1.htm
“The Epic of
Gilgamesh” is one of the oldest recorded stories in the world. It tells of an
ancient King of Uruk, Gilgamesh (who may have actually existed, his name is on
the Sumerian King List). Various Sumerian versions exist of this story and it
was widely known in the third millennium BC. The story was retold in many
different forms and finally recorded, in a standardised Akkadian version, in
the seventh century BC, and stored in the famous library of King Assurbanipal.
With the passing
centuries, the downfall of powerful empires and the forgetting of the ancient
tongues and writings, the story of Gilgamesh was lost to memory, except for
occasional fragments. The story was rediscovered with the excavations in Mesopotamia
in the mid-nineteenth century AD. The baked clay tablets incised with the
cuneiform script were unearthed, the ancient languages were deciphered and the
story of Gilgamesh made available in translation to German by the beginning of
the twentieth century. People read with fascination this most ancient of
stories, and realised that the flood story in Gilgamesh was a precursor of the
flood story in the Hebrew Bible.
This is a
summary of the story:
Gilgamesh is the
King of Uruk. His father is mortal and his mother is a goddess. However,
because he is part mortal, Gilgamesh must eventually die, as he discovers and
comes to accept during the course of the story. Gilgamesh is a bad ruler; he
sleeps with all the women subjects he wants and takes away children from their
families. His subjects ask the gods for help, and the gods have the goddess
Aruru create a man, Enkidu, who will be almost Gilgamesh’s equal.
Enkidu comes to
life in the wilderness. He is covered with hair, shaggy, wild, like the
wilderness. He eats grass with the gazelles and drinks water with the animals.
A trapper is frightened by the sight of Enkidu and asks his father what to do,
because Enkidu is freeing animals from the traps. His father advises him to go
to Uruk, find Gilgamesh, and tell him of the wild man. Then he should ask for a
harlot from the temple and bring her back with him. She will seduce Enkidu, and
then the wild animals will reject him and he can be lured to civilisation.
The harlot does
just that, seducing Enkidu, so he is rejected by the animals. She teaches Enkidu
some of the ways of civilisation, such as wearing clothing, eating bread and
drinking wine. Then she tells him of the strength of Gilgamesh. Enkidu wants to
meet and challenge Gilgamesh to a contest of strength. Enkidu hears how
Gilgamesh is sleeping with all the women of Uruk, and he is shocked. He now
wants to challenge Gilgamesh to conquer him and force him to behave properly.
They struggle like equals, but finally Gilgamesh throws Enkidu, who loses his
anger and recognises Gilgamesh as a true king. They embrace and become best
friends.
Gilgamesh longs
to perform great deeds, so his name will be remembered. He wants to go to the
cedar forest and slay its guardian monster, Humbaba. Enkidu is terrified,
because he knows Humbaba, but Gilgamesh insists, and they prepare for the
journey. Enkidu’s hand is paralysed when he touches the cedar forest gate, but
Gilgamesh helps him to continue. They have disturbing dreams, but nonetheless
cut down a cedar tree. Humbaba approaches and they fight; Humbaba begs for his
life, but they cut off his head.
Gilgamesh washes
himself and puts on clean clothes and his crown. He is so attractive that
Ishtar, the goddess of love, wants to marry him. He refuses, quite rudely,
pointing out how she had ruined the lives of her previous husbands. Ishtar is
hurt and furious and she goes to her father, Anu, demanding that he send the
Bull of Heaven (drought) to punish Gilgamesh. She threatens to smash down the
gates to the underworld if her father does not comply. Anu sends the Bull of
Heaven, but Enkidu catches it by the horns, and Gilgamesh kills it.
Unfortunately,
as Enkidu discovers in a dream, the gods are holding a council to determine who
should die for these attacks on divinity, Gilgamesh or Enkidu. Naturally, since
Gilgamesh is part divine and part human, while Enkidu is part human and part
animal, the judgment falls on Enkidu, who sickens and dies, at first cursing the
harlot who led him to civilisation, Gilgamesh and death, but then blessing her
for the joy of friendship with Gilgamesh.
Gilgamesh is
distraught with grief and is in denial of death. First he keeps the body of Enkidu
for a week, until the body became wormy. Then, he has him buried and wanders
out from Uruk into the wilderness as a wild hunter, dressed in animal skins.
Gilgamesh despairs for the loss of Enkidu, but also for his own death, which he
now understands must come some day. Seeking to avoid death, Gilgamesh looks for
Utnapishtim, the only human being who was granted eternal life by the gods. He
wants to learn the secret of how to avoid death.
Eventually,
Gilgamesh comes to the entry to the land of the gods, an other-world, which is
under a mountain, guarded by a Man-scorpion and his mate. Gilgamesh gains
entrance to the mountain and travels for leagues in the dark until he arrives
in the jewelled garden of the gods. Gilgamesh
continues in his search for Utnapishtim and the secrets of life and death. He
meets a divine wine-maker, Siduri, who gives him shelter and advises him to
accept his human fate and enjoy life while he can. But he insists that he must
find Utnapishtim, so she tells him that the boatman Urshanabi can take him
across the Sea of Death to the place where Utnapishtim lives with his wife.
After a complicated
boat-trip, Urshanabi brings Gilgamesh to Utnapishtim, who tells his story. It
is the story of the Flood (remarkably similar to the Flood story in Genesis).
The point is, the Flood was a one time ever event, will never recur, and the
only reason Utnapishtim and his wife are now immortal is because the gods chose
to make them so after they survived the flood. The final blow to Gilgamesh here
is seven loaves of bread which Utnapishtim’s wife made, one for each day that
Gilgamesh slept while he was their guest. He could not even stay awake for
seven days; how could he ever hope to live forever?
Utnapishtim’s
wife takes pity on Gilgamesh and asks her husband to tell him about the plant
that can make him young again, if not immortal. Gilgamesh dives into the sea to
pick the plant, but loses it later, while bathing, because a snake slithers up
and eats it. Gilgamesh returns to Uruk with the boatman Urshanabi, and
points out to him the mighty walls; this is the proper work of a human being,
not the search for eternal life. The final segment of the story tells of the
death of Gilgamesh and the mourning for him of all the people of Uruk.
A more extensive
summary with quotes can be found here:
http://www.wsu.edu/~dee/MESO/GILG.HTM
These ancient
voices speak to us through their stories. Why did they need to tell stories,
why do we read these stories? For entertainment? For passing a few hours
pleasantly, amused by the storyteller’s skill? To learn something? To
sympathise with the story’s characters? To find parallels with our own life? To
distil some universal message on the meaning of our existence? A successful
story will do all of these things and more. Through the story we gain an
understanding of our own life, we are forced to analyse and make sense of our
own complex existence. Gilgamesh is still a fascinating story as it is one that
makes us acknowledge our humanity, it one that causes us to confront our
mortality, justify the purpose of our existence and makes us look within
ourselves in order to understand the world outside us.
