The Epic of Gilgamesh

"Gilgamesh is an irresistible epic poem that spans the ages and continues to speak to readers in different ways. It is thought to be based on a legendary king of Uruk (today known as Warka, in Iraq) who ruled in the first half of the 3rd millennium BCE. The Standard Babylonian full length version that we find in translation in bookshops and libraries nowadays predates the Iliad and the Odyssey by a few centuries, but there are older versions, and the earliest surviving poems about Gilgamesh would have been performed as standalone stories far earlier, over four thousand years ago. It is no wonder that this tale still resonates with readers today. It tells us so much about being human — about love and loss, our fear of death, and search for meaning. Gilgamesh starts out as a magnificent but tyrannical ruler, a demigod with superhuman strength, great to have in battle but no protector of the people. The gods send the wild man Enkidu as a companion for Gilgamesh, and they become inseparable. Full of energy, they embark on youthful adventures together, but their arrogance leads to Enkidu’s death. Destroyed by grief, Gilgamesh sets out on a quest to learn the secret of life and death from Uta-napishti, who was made immortal after surviving the Flood. The quest is a failure, but Gilgamesh comes back to Uruk with a different understanding of kingship. His restlessness exhausted, what he now seeks is good advice and wisdom. Of course he does find a kind of immortality, by writing his story on a slab of stone. What is so exciting with this ancient epic is that the story continues to evolve, not only because we retell and reinterpret it all the time, but because new fragments turn up from time to time, enabling gaps to be filled and lines to be added."

"Gilgamesh is a hero in the ancient mould. He’s half-god, enormously strong, a bit randy, a bit dim, and he goes through adventures which embody the human experience writ large. He starts off as the king of a small kingdom, making a nuisance of himself – enforcing droit du seigneur , sleeping with women on their marriage night, pushing other men around, being a bit of an arse. So the gods make a rival to him in strength, a wild man. They fight, realise neither can win, then become best friends and go off on all sorts of adventures. They kill all sorts of ogres and beasts, until the gods think this is getting a bit much and decide Gilgamesh’s friend has to die. It’s then that Gilgamesh realises the truth of mortality. He sees his friend die, and thinks if this heroic human being, the strongest of the strong, can die, that means I’m going to die too. He faces his own mortality, and it’s terrifying. He leaves his kingdom and roams the wilderness, looking desperately for some solution to the problem of mortality. Eventually he comes to the end of the world, where he finds a Noah figure called Utnapishtim, who survived the great flood and to whom the gods gave immortality. He’s disappointed of course. Utnapishtim says the gods gave him immortality as a special case – for mortals this life is all you can have. Finally Gilgamesh meets this wonderful figure called Siduri, the barmaid at the end of the world. Siduri imparts to him the wisdom which is really the point of the epic, that you will never find immortality. The gods jealously keep eternal life for themselves. So let your belly be full, enjoy yourself day and night, make merry, dance, keep your clothes clean, wash, love your children, love your wife, lead a good life, and that’s it. Deal with it. “The life that you seek you never will find,” she says, “When the gods created mankind, / Death they dispensed to mankind, / Life they kept for themselves.” It is ironic, and not straightforward. Here we have a story about a man coming to terms with mortality. At the same time he does achieve the eternal fame for which many people have fought and died, in the Greek tradition of Achilles. There are also Sumerian legends in which he is king of the underworld, and so lives on in a form there. When Gilgamesh is in the wilderness, he lives like an animal. He has left civilisation behind. When he appears in the bar, Siduri at first tries to escape onto the roof because she thinks this wild animal of a man has come to murder her. He has abandoned his duties in pursuing what we might think of as a selfish or egotistical search for immortality. What he ought to be doing, as Utnapishtim says to him, is going back to his kingdom and ruling over it sensibly until the end of his days. So the search for immortality is an abdication of our real duties in life. It’s brilliant. I love it. It has a very distinctive verse style that really stays with you. It’s haunting, beautiful and in a tradition with which we’re not familiar, but which speaks to us immediately."