Hey! It’s me again. I will continue talking about the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Enkidu’s cursing madness and visions of hell is not unlike how in the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphosis, the Greek hero Heracles, dying, after a life of inhumanly extraordinary achievements and hardship, the hero extensively curses the gods for his tragic ending. Nonetheless Herakles was made a god, as the greatest Greek hero of all time, by his father Zeus. Enkidu and Gilgamesh however does meet with the same fate.

Enkidu was calmed down with promises of honours after his death, and he dies. Here Gilgamesh’s sentiments of loss are conveyed movingly:

“He [Gilgamesh] covered, like a bride, the face of his friend,

Like an eagle he circled around him.

Like a lioness deprived of her cubs,

He paced to and fro, this way and that.

His curly hair he tore out in clumps,

He ripped off his finery, like a thing taboo he cast it away.”

And Gilgamesh orders for a statue of his friend Enkidu to be erected, and jewels and gold buried with him. 

He says: “I’m less a man without my friend.” Again, it is a moment of rarity, development of character, the hero shows his vulnerability, as he mourns his dead companion, and the realisation of his own brittle mortality drowns him in fear.

So he goes in search of Uta-Napishti, survivor of the Flood who was given life eternal by the gods,  hoping to gain the secret to immortality.

Here notably, this flood survival story is much like the Christian story of Noah’s Ark that appears later. For example, when the flood has seemingly calmed, Uta-Napishti sent out a raven, a sparrow, and a dove respectfully, this is similar enough to the Christian story for one to suspect there’s some kind of connection between the two.

But back to the main story, now travelling with Uta-Napishti’s boatman Ur-Shanabi, Gilgamesh is advised to dive into the sea and retrieve a coral-like plant, which would help him become immortal. But after he had gotten the plant, while inattentive, a snake took it away. Gilgamesh realises he has lost his last hope to eternal life, here the theme of the epic starts to become apparent. In realisation of the inevitability of mortal death, he travels back to his city Uruk, and demands for his companion to climb up its city walls and look on his land and people. He says:

“Survey its foundations,

examine the brickwork!

Were its bricks not fired in an oven?

Did the seven sages not lay its foundations?

…

half a square mile the temple of Ishtrar:

three square miles and a half is Uruk’s expanse.”

The continual nature of his race transcends his own mortality. And arguably there is a certain irony in this, the city of Uruk has ceased to exist, but the legends of Gilgamesh has lived through time, and we’re hearing about them now.