Epic of Gilgamesh

Epic History

In the ancient world, gaining power was a simple deal: the gods gave it you. Or so say the old legends Having a mother or father who was a god didn't hurt your chances at being chosen to keep those mortals in line. To the people of the ancient world, their rulers were often part human, part god. After all sitting around eating grapes all day and being adored by court lackeys is hard work that no mere human could endure.The Sumerian king and bad boy-- Gilgamesh, was no different.

Being two-parts god and one-part human made him stronger than any other man on the planet. And Gilgamesh wasn't shy about letting everyone know how powerful he was. Like a school bully, Gilgamesh abused his power using every play in the proverbial book.

He rang the town bell just for the amusement of watching the people run around looking for the emergency. You can imagine the guy sitting on the balcony of his palace yelling down "made you look".

But his abuse went way beyond pulling pranks only a third-grader would find funny. Gilgamesh kidnapped children from their fathers. He beat up and killed any man who ticked him off, or at least he paid someone to do it for him. The sources are unclear on this one. And those magnificent building projects…built by slave labor so brutal that thousands died under the oppression.

The good people of Uruk got tired of being pushed around and appealed to the gods to save them. The Mesopotamian gods were more like immortal and really powerful humans and less like the god of the Jews and Christians. They liked to party and have a good time and when disrespected would rain down all sorts of nasty punishments from floods to plagues. But the gods had a heart too and they heard the cries of the people of Uruk.

So they held a divine council and decided that to pass the buck to Aruru, the goddess of creation. Basically telling her: "you created Gilgamesh now you deal with the problem".

And so Aruru did. She created a sort of Gilgamesh clone named Enkidu. But there was one big difference between the two. Where Gilgamesh was might king of the major city, Enkidu was a hairy wild man who literally was raised by animals. Enkidu liked to hang out with his animal friends doing animal things like eating grass and romping through the fields. But one day a trapper came upon him and naturally got really freaked out by seeing a massive hairy man eating grass and acting like an antelope. But Enkidu might have acted and smelled like an animal but he had the mind of a human.

One of Enkidu’s favorite games was destroying the trapper’s traps

The trapper ran straight to complain to Gilgamesh who gave him some pretty messed up advise. He told him to hire a temple prostitute and take her to Enkidu. The plan was that once the animals saw Enkidu lying with a woman, they would abandon him. And that’s exactly what happened.

The prostitute tells Enkidu that he is a man and shouldn’t be running around with wild animals. She leads him to a shepherd’s tent and when he tries to drink wild milk she offers him bread and wine instead. Having never seen these things before, Enkidu is naturally dumbfounded about what to do with bread and wine. That is until the prostitute tells him to eat the bread and drink the wine, at which point Enkidu is like “oh, that makes sense”.

Now you might be sitting there scratching your heads thinking “what the…?” But if you read between the lines the story of Enkidu is a Sumerian tale of civilization. Enkidu represents humanity before the Neolithic Revolution, the hunter-gatherer who lived in the wild like an animal. Enkidu is innocent but after he meets the prostitute he becomes wise. The prostitute represents a woman’s civilizing influence on men. The bread and wine represent, well, bread and wine. But these are not foods that you can get in the wild but must be cultivated, another sign of civilization.

The Quest

Enkidu is happily living with the shepherds as their sort of king body-guard. Until one day a man comes running into their camp complaining that Gilgamesh is up to his old tricks. Gilgamesh has demanded to have his way with a new bride. In the ancient world this was sometimes the practice of tyrannical kings. When Gilgamesh gets to the house, Enkidu is waiting for him and blocks the doorway. The two men wrestle, bust the house up, and in the end Gilgamesh is the winner. But rather than hold a grudge the two men end up swearing a pact of brotherhood and set out looking for an adventure.

But the turning point for Gilgamesh comes when the demi-god duo set out for the forbidden cedar forest (probably in modern-day Lebanon). Their mission: steal some trees guarded by the terrifying giant, Humbaba whom the gods have created to guard it. They enlist help from Shamash the sun god who tries to talk them out of it. But Gilgamesh is determined to make a name for himself. Having accomplished their goal, the hulking heroes return to Uruk where the goddess of love—Ishtar— is so impressed with Gilgamesh’s machismo that she offers herself up to him.

Gilgamesh being Gilgamesh spurns her love which causes her to fly into a rage. You just don’t diss a goddess. She runs to her dad the sky god who sends down a heavenly bull to bring famine to the land. Because after all, bulls are known for their meterologic properties and why not punish tens of thousands of innocent people because your man-crush was a jerk. But Gilgamesh is still king and is not just going to sit back and watch a drought-causing bull run amuck. He and Enkidu wrestle the bull and kill it. The gods call together a council and decide that one of the two must be punished with death. Guess who gets axed?

You guessed it. Poor Enkidu.

Up to this point the epic has been pretty much brain candy. Interesting tales about how the gods are fickle and can come to your aid or rain down all kinds of hurt depending on how humans treat them. The Sumerians, like everyone in the ancient world, were after all polytheists who believed that there were many gods and goddesses who took an active role in the affairs of humans when it suited their needs. But the moral of Gilgamesh is not about the gods, it’s a tale of what it means to be human.

Gilgamesh the lion catcher

Bust of Gilgamesh

Epic of Gilgamesh Animated

In Ancient Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) there lived a king named Gilgamesh who ruled the mighty city of Uruk. Built by the Sumerians around 5000 b.c.e. the city of Uruk was one of the oldest and largest in the world. But it was under Gilgamesh that the city would reach its high point. Gilgamesh did all the sorts of things that great kings are supposed to do— he built the city walls, granaries, and temples to the gods. He also terrorized his people because let’s face it, a guy that kidnaps brides on their wedding night and his way with them is a total tool.

The Moral of the Lesson

After Enkidu’s death, Gilgamesh is devastated. Sure, he’s upset about losing his BFF, but he is even more concerned about how to avoid the same fate. Gilgamesh decides that he wants to live forever like the gods. Now everyone in Sumeria knew about Utnapishtim— the Mesopotamian Noah. Utnapishhtim and his wife had become the only humans given immortality by the gods after they decided to flood the world, sparing Utnapishtim by instructing him to build a huge boat and fill it with the living things of the world. Unlike the Biblical story of Noah, the reasons for the great flood are far more immature. The gods were cheesed that humans were partying a little too loudly.

Gilgamesh needs some immortality advise and sets out for the end of the world to have a chat with Utnapishtim. Gilgamesh does all the typical deeds that a mythological hero is required to do, like crossing the acidic River of Death, and fighting giant scorpions, subterranean monsters, to reach the old man. When he finally has his talk with Utnapishtim, the immortal human naturally challenges him to a task. If Gilgamesh thinks that he can be immortal then surely he can stay awake for a full week. Because those two things are totally related.

Gilgamesh needs his beauty sleep and fails the task. Immortality is not in the cards but Utnapishtim teaches him that to be human is to be mortal. But just because Gilgamesh will die doesn’t mean that humanity won’t live on. Gilgamesh returns to his throne in Uruk and realizes that the way humanity can live forever is through its cities and great monuments. From that day forward Gilgamesh gives up his cruel ways and becomes known as a wise and beneficent king.

Cracking the Code

The Epic of Gilgamesh is considered to be one of the great literary masterpieces of the ancient world. It also is the world’s oldest surviving work of literature. But the story itself was almost lost to history. The epic was passed down as bedtime stories from generation to generation util they were finally written down on clay tablets in the sixth century b.c.e. (500 years before the Christian era). But then the Persians sacked the place and

Fast forward to 1838 when two archeologists go poking around the ruins of Nineveh along the Tigris River in modern-day Iraq. The pair uncover the library of the last Assyrian king. But what they find is not a booby-trapped room full of books. This is (sadly) not the Raiders of the Lost Ark. Instead, they find a bunch of broken clay tablets filled with weird wedge-shaped markings. They have just rediscovered the ancient language of cuneiform. The problem is that no-one alive has ever seen such a system of writing; and so decades and centuries of painstaking translation must happen before the tablets could be made to make sense.