Epic of Gilgamesh - Preamble

Great literature tells us something about the struggles and concerns of the era in which it is written. It also speaks to us about issues which continue, perhaps indefinitely, to distress mankind. Even a work of pure fantasy, The Lord of the Rings trilogy (to the contrary of Professor Tolkien's denial about the use of allegory), is burdened with the tension between the agricultural and the industrial, the former in its last death throes as twentieth-century Western society became almost wholly industrialized. The great tales of Western civilization, even it's most ancient foundational stories, are no less concerned with the pre-occupations of the cultures from which they spring.

The Epic of Gilgamesh, almost certainly the oldest known story outside those contained in the earliest chapters of the book of Genesis, is fraught with the difficulties experienced in three different relationships: that between civilization and wilderness, that between man and his fellow man, and that between man and god.

Part One: Civilization vs. Wilderness - "Is it not burnt brick and good?"
Part Two: Gilgamesh and Enkidu - A Love Story
Part Three: Ancient Religion - Mortality and Fickle Gods

The Enuma Elish and Ancient Religions

The Enuma Elish is essentially the Babylonian Creation tale. It is probably based on a tale told by the Sumerians, who were the antecedent culture in Babylonia. This makes the story at least 5,000 years old, and it is probably much older. It may have acquired it’s formal structure during the rise of the first cities (1) but it is possible that the tale originates in our pre-civilization era, when people still lived in villages or even as roving bands of hunter-gatherers.

This creation story is not really a great book of Western Civilization, or of any civilization. Unlike the Iliad or Milton’s Paradise Lost, it does not continue to be read for entertainment by anyone, and is not found in complete form anywhere (The preceding can be considered as a just the initial requirement for a great book). While some books included on the reading list also suffer from lacunae or missing pages, such as Beowulf, their meaning is not greatly affected and, furthermore, they have continued in the popular imagination (or have re-emerged into the popular imagination in the case of Beowulf) in a way that the Enuma Elish has not.

What remains of the Enuma Elish is found on seven broken stone tablets discovered in 1849 near Mosul, Iraq (2). It is a story that little involves mankind, though there is a fragment which suggests that some of the battles between the gods (which the tale describes) took place after "the cities" had been established. The Enuma Elish is difficult to read, even in translation, because several sections of these tablets are missing(3). Thus one cannot summarize the story well, since no one is exactly sure of what is happening at a number of points, and it is not clear what causes lead to which effects and so on.

What is evident, and what is crucial for us in understanding the later stories that we will study, is that the story depicts a world dominated by gods who resemble men in the worst possible ways. The multiple gods of the ancients, be they Babylonian, Greek, Roman or Hindu, are described as a great inter-related (and incestuous) clan of deities, who spend most of their time in power struggles and petty bickering which often result in strife for mankind or the world in general. Indeed, the creation story told on these seven tablets is more a tale of divine war than it is of creation. Those accustomed to the sedate and orderly procession of the days of Creation in Judeo-Christian scriptures may be shocked, and perhaps a little disappointed, in the chaotic scenes described in the Enuma Elish.

The world begins, as in Genesis, with the waters dominating the scene. There is no name for anything else, just the awesome waters and the primeval gods. We are told that much time passes in this uncertainty at the beginning of all things.

Somehow, the gods come into conflict and an alliance is formed around the Great Mother of the gods, Tiamat, or Chaos, against the ascendant Marduk. Tiamat takes a new husband, Kingu, and gives him the "Tablets of Destiny". She also creates many monsters, such as dragons and scorpion-men, to fight battles for her. The meaning of all this is best left for the study of history and has little importance for our goal: an understanding of the literature of Western Civilization. Let it suffice to say that Marduk eventually wins and becomes the greatest among the gods.

The most significant information for our study is found in the depictions of the deities involved. In the West, we live in a society founded on an orderly concept of divinity. Judaism, the foundation for both Christianity and Islam, is a legalistic religion, which describes a god who is somewhat mysterious yet very regular and logical. He is also the greatest of the all "the gods" and completely in charge of the universe. Christianity, which began as a Jewish sect, later embraced Greek philosophy, in particular that of Aristotle, who sought to organize thought in a way never before attempted. The god of Islam is also a god of order and law. These three religions being the essential foundations of culture in the West, they have been the springboards for a viewpoint which sees an orderly, almost mechanistic deity, such as in Deism. And, though many in the West no longer follow any of these religions, they usually eschew religion in favor of science, which also presents an ordered and logical universe to its followers.

This orderliness was unthinkable to our ancestors. When we pick up the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Iliad and the Odyssey, we will read of multiple gods, ever in conflict, ever scheming and altering not only the physical world at a whim, but even breaking moral codes when it suits them. We shall see some examples of this in our first Great Book - the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Writing

People invented writing for economic purposes, possibly because transactions involving camels, cows and bushels of barley were becoming too numerous for a man to keep track of everything in his head (1).

This means to say something more than the modern mind might imagine. People today have a hard time remembering their own telephone numbers. Ancient man, and men in some societies today still possess these abilities, could keep track of incredible amounts of data simply by storing it in that moist computer we call the brain. To demonstrate, I need only point out that tales like the Iliad and the Odyssey (later featured here on this blog) were told by illiterates who memorized them (2). If ancient man was capable of such a feat, the complexity and amount of their economic dealings must have been considerable for writing to have been necessary.

Or, was it not an issue of data involved but rather a trust issue? Did it become too difficult to be sure that each man’s memory was correct when it came to remembering how many wagon wheels were promised in exchange last fall for this summer’s wheat crop? Was writing invented in order to keep everyone honest? It doesn’t matter much for our purposes here. But it may be of interest later on, when we come to more modern writings and we see that people begin to suspect that the written word has lost it’s certainty, and the signifier no longer has the same signified.

Regardless, the first writings we know of involve business. Writing was not invented to tell heroic stories or to express love in a poem. Ancient stories and poems, those known and unknown to us, probably existed long before writing, and existed alongside writing for some period of time before two things happened - sufficient written vocabulary came into existence and it was deemed useful, for whatever reason, to actually write the stories down.

Archaeologists have discovered tokens that were presumably used previous to the existence of writing(3). A wooden or stone token may signified a sheep, or ten sheep, or a hundred sheep. At some point, it became useful to make marks that looked like the tokens on tablets of stone or clay. Thus writing was most likely born (4). At some later time, there were enough words in the written vocabulary (presumably more than numbers and animal or crop names) to enable a man to actually record, in writing, a tale that was already known to people through oral traditions.

This transition, from business to literature, happened first in Southwest Asia (5), the place we know today as Mesopotamia, where the earliest cities, those of Sumer, were built. Amid the wreckage and ruins of this ancient civilization, we have uncovered tablets that tell of the heroes and deities whose tales entertained our ancestors.

The oldest story is called the Enuma Elish. These words are simply the first two words in the story, meaning "when on high..." in English. The next essay will concern this account of the beginning of the world and the gods who witnessed it.

Reading List

1. Enuma Elish
2. The Epic of Gilgamesh
3. The Iliad
4. The Odyssey
5. Greek Plays
6. Herodotus
7. Thucydides
8. Plato
9. Marcus Aurelius
10. Virgil
11. Plutarch
12. Tacitus
13. Augustine
14. Beowulf
15. Dante
16. Chaucer
17. Machiavelli
18. Rabelais
19. Shakespeare
20. Cervantes
21. Milton
22. Swift
23. Goethe
24. Melville
25. Tolstoy
26. Dostoevsky
27. Dickens
28. Stephen Crane
29. Joseph Conrad
30. James Joyce
31. Hemingway
32. Cormac McCarthy