Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

The greatest literary creation of Babylon, the first imaginative masterpiece in the world, was the epic of Gilgamesh, or ‘He Who Saw Everything to the Ends of the World’, as the title of the poem has it. Almost certainly, Gilgamesh ruled in Uruk around 2900 BC, so some of the episodes in his epic are rooted in fact.⁶⁷ His adventures are complicated, often fantastic and difficult to follow. In some respects, they recall the labours of Hercules and, as we shall see, are echoed in the Bible. In the poem, he himself is two-thirds god and one-third man. In the first verses, we learn how Gilgamesh has to overcome the resistance of the people of Uruk and push through ‘a wondrous feat’, namely the building of the city wall. This, 9.5 kilometres long, boasted, it is said, at least 900 semi-circular towers. Some of this part of the story may be based on fact, for excavations have identified semi-circular structures in the Early Dynastic period (i.e., around 2900 BC) using a new type of curved brick.⁶⁸ Gilgamesh is a hard taskmaster, so much so that his subjects appeal to the gods to create a counterforce, who will take on Gilgamesh and let the citizens have a quiet life. Sympathetic, the gods create Enkidu, a ‘hairy wild man’. But here the plot twists and Enkidu and Gilgamesh become firm friends and from then on undertake their adventures as companions.⁶⁹ The two return to Mesopotamia where the goddess Inanna falls in love with Gilgamesh. He spurns her attentions and in retaliation she sends the awesome ‘bull of heaven . . . which even a hundred men could not control’ to kill him.⁷⁰ But Enkidu joins forces with Gilgamesh and together they defeat the bull by tearing off its limbs.

This early part of the poem is in general positive, but it then turns darker. Enlil, the god of the air and of the earth, decides that Enkidu must die for some of the heroic killings he has performed. The loss of Enkidu affects Gilgamesh badly:

All day and all night have I wept over him

and would not have him buried –

my friend yet might rise up at my (loud) cries,

for seven days and nights –

until a maggot dropped from his nose.

Since he is gone, I can no comfort find,

keep roaming like a hunter in the plains.⁷¹

Until this point, Gilgamesh has given little thought to death. From now on, however, his sole aim is to find everlasting life. He recalls the legend that, at the end of the world, beyond ‘the waters of death’, lives an ancestor of his, Utnapishtim, who is immortal and therefore must know the secret. Alone now, Gilgamesh sets out to reach the end of the world, beyond the mountains where the sun sets. He finds the dark passage through which the sun disappears at night, and eventually arrives on the shore of a wide sea.⁷² There, he meets Utnapishtim’s boatman, who agrees to ferry him over the waters of death, ‘a single drop of which means certain destruction’.⁷³ When, finally, Gilgamesh reaches Utnapishtim he is disappointed. The ancestor’s immortality, he tells Gilgamesh, is due to unique circumstances that will never be repeated. He confides that, in an earlier age, the gods had decided to destroy mankind and had caused a flood. Utnapishtim and his wife were the only ones allowed to survive: they were forewarned and built a large boat, in which they stored pairs of all living things. After the storm had lashed the boat for six days and nights, and when all was quiet, Utnapishtim opened a window, and saw that his boat was beached on an island, which was in fact the top of a mountain. He waited for another six days, then sent out a dove, followed by a swallow. Both returned. Finally, he let loose a crow, which did not come back.⁷⁴ Later on, Utnapishtim reports, Enlil regretted his rash decision and rewarded Utnapishtim with immortality for saving life on earth. But the gods will never repeat this act.