Gilgamesh: book for our time

The Epic of Gilgamesh is the world’s oldest tale, going back 4000 years. (See timeline at foot of this article.) It has survived by virtue of being impressed on clay tablets buried in the desert in “cuneiform”, the oldest known form of writing, which dates back 5000 years. Only with the work of generations of archaeologists and scholars could it be pieced together and translated. Following some thought-trail connected with my own reading, I’d already downloaded a scholarly translation of Gilgamesh to my Kindle. It appears to be just a fragment, dwarfed by footnotes and a line-by-line transliteration of the text in the (extinct) Akkadian language. My curiosity flared briefly then subsided, like a match lit to view the scribblings on the wall of a damp old cave.

But the other day I dropped into the Oxfam shop, where I regularly check the Collectibles and Classics shelves, to see what chance has thrown up for my benefit on those abandoned shores. I found an unread copy (its original bookshop receipt still inside) of the new English version by Stephen Mitchell. Until now there has not been a version that is a literary text in its own right, says the blurb. I bought it, still dubious, reflecting that if all else failed I was still contributing to charity.

Now I can’t remember being so excited about a book. I’m writing this to try and explain why. The translator’s 66-page introduction is gripping in itself: masterful, poetic, revelatory. I don’t know how much I owe to Stephen Mitchell’s rendering and how much to the ancient texts. I don’t care: singer or song, they merge into one. Gilgamesh is longer than a song, but a lot shorter than “epic” suggests.

Part of the fascination of Gilgamesh is that like any great work of literature, it has much to tell us about ourselves, says Mitchell.

Yes, I think I would like to concentrate on that: what it does for us, in our time. It’s a tale of friendship, lust, death and grief; masculine and feminine; savagery versus civilization; unnecessary violence and its consequences. It’s surely just one of many story compilations from those days. I reckon it survived the millennia because it’s the best seller of them all.

In what it teaches us, I compare it favourably with the Old Testament. Indeed it has its own tale of the Flood, much better than the one of Noah’s Ark in Genesis. It tells how the gods had decided to destroy the earth. One of them anonymously leaked the plan to the king of Shuruppak, together with the idea of a ship to save the people and the different kinds of creature.

By the end of the fifth day the hull had been built:
the decks were an acre large, the sides
two hundred feet high. I built six decks . . .

Exactly like a cruise liner, then. The flood comes, all land disappears, but the ship runs aground on a mountain-top.

On the seventh day
I brought out a dove and set it free.
The dove flew off , then flew back to the ship,
because there was no place to land.

Word of God? The author of Genesis was an incompetent plagiarist! He botched together an inferior version to demonstrate how darkly hateful the Israelites’ one and only god, Jehovah, could be. Gilgamesh is altogether more gentle in its lessons. Its gods are not half as nasty, and don’t provoke us to terror. For sure, there is some brutal smiting. But—this is the beauty of the tale—we see that the consequences rebound upon the smiters, who live to regret their actions. I find myself marvelling as to what has happened to the art of popular story-telling in the last four thousand years. How come the authors of Gilgamesh create flawed heroes and redeemed villains, when Hollywood has hardly emerged from the stark portrayal of unmitigated evil—deformed and ugly—versus flawless good—with perfect hair and skin?

Let us cut to the chase. Gilgamesh is the big man in the historical realm of Uruk, a real city, huge for those times, in what’s now Iraq. The tale starts

Surpassing all kings, powerful and tall
beyond all others, violent, splendid,
a wild bull of a man, unvanquished leader,
hero in the front lines, beloved by his soldiers ...

We know the type.

The city is his possession, he struts
through it, arrogant, his head raised high ...

He’s not so beloved by the citizens. No one can stop him when he seizes a maiden to possess her at a wedding, before releasing her to the arms of her new husband. No one can do anything when a young man is liquidated on his orders. The gods hear the people cry out: “Should a shepherd savage his own flock?”—a valid question being repeated in parts of the same region today. Anu, father of the gods, is moved by their pleas and devises a plan. Are the gods to cruise the skies like NATO forces protecting rebels on the ground? No. Anu’s plan is subtle, psychological. He instructs Aruru, the god who created Man, to create a doppelgänger for Gilgamesh.

Create a new hero, let them balance each other
perfectly, so that Uruk has peace.

Gilgamesh is two-thirds god, one-third human. Enkidu his soon-to-be companion is two-thirds animal and one-third human. He drinks from the ponds with the deer, grazes with the sheep. He must be civilised, by means of a pleasant process administered by Shamhat, a temple priestess, one of those who offers her body to visiting pilgrims.

She used her love-arts, she took his breath
with her kisses, held nothing back, and showed him
what a woman is. For seven days
he stayed erect and made love with her ...

This is his first education in becoming fully human. Enkidu goes to Uruk, meets Gilgamesh, acts to block him from gatecrashing a wedding and claiming his “rights”. It turns into a big fight, very Hollywood, bumping into doorposts, shaking houses. Gilgamesh wins, Enkidu yields graciously.

They embraced and kissed. They held hands like brothers.
They walked side by side. They became true friends.

Then we see the results of their friendship. Gilgamesh wants to go and slay a monster. The city elders beg him not to. Enkidu begs him not to, tells of bad omens presented to him in dreams. Gilgamesh goes ahead anyway. When the monster begs for mercy and threatens a great curse, Gilgamesh is scared and ready to be merciful. Now Enkidu eggs Gilgamesh on:

Two intimate friends cannot be defeated.
Be courageous. Remember how strong you are.
I will stand by you. Now let us attack.

After the monster has been slain the terrible mistake becomes apparent, for it had been a guardian of natural resources, the sacred Cedar Forest, and only dangerous to those who came to steal timber. Besides which the monster’s curse must now be fulfilled. In Gilgamesh, curses are always fulfilled, the gods always interfere, men with flaws always do regrettable things and bring consequences on their own heads, or on others. But the listener (reader) is never preached at. Right and wrong is never drummed in with a hammer, as in the Old Testament.

You couldn’t use Gilgamesh as a holy book for any fundamentalist ideas. Good! It’s my new favourite book. I would quite like to be living four thousand years ago. Life might have been brutish, insecure and brief. There would have been no washing machines. But I’ve seen in Borneo women washing clothes in the river, hitting them against rocks, washing their own bodies without removal of the sarong. Uruk would have had no dryers. But I’m sure there was no law against hanging them on a line. (See comments on previous post.) They had no science. So there would be no weapons of mass destruction. I could live with that.

They didn’t even know the world is a sphere. They made up their own explanations. There’s an episode near the end where Gilgamesh, whose grief for the loss of his friend has no end, finds it difficult to come to terms with death—especially his own. He consults the only immortal he knows, who tells him how it’s done. You have to chase the sun when it sets, without sleeping, till it comes up on the other side the next morning. If you can conquer sleep, the little death, you can conquer the Big Sleep too. The sun, we learn, goes through a tunnel under the earth. OK, if my entire world was bounded by the Tigris and the Euphrates, I would have no problem with any of that.

I’m a sceptic about the myth of progress.

Timeline

• 2600 BC Instructions of Shuruppak (It starts “In those days, in those far remote times, in those nights, in those faraway nights, in those years, in those far remote years ...” It’s a book of handy tips from father to son.
• 2200 BC Epic of Gilgamesh
• 1400 BC Genesis
• 800 BC Iliad & Odyssey
• 450 BC Ramayana
• 400 BC Mahabharata
• 900 AD One Thousand and One Nights

Special viewpoints

Poor blog! Your master has neglected you: deliberately. And taken a vow also to write briefly and more or less spontaneously, as opposed to elaborate literary essays: the better to do other things elsewhere—to be elaborate in a more spacious (i.e. book) format, conducted with an excellent collaborator: sometimes sparring partner, sometimes antagonist. It’s going well. I’ll keep you informed when it’s shaped itself into something more definite.

But it is looking like something new in philosophy, and we hope entertaining too, as well as deep. When I say deep, I mean that the reader will be inspired to go deep, without the intellectual exercise being at all painful. The aim (that is, my aim—Bryan can do what he likes) is to understand why the world—the human world—is the way it is. Not by giving any answers to any big questions. Not giving any recipe for how it can be made better. We have enough of those. But perhaps debunking some misconceptions. I have a feeling we may understand more by knowing less. Unknowing will be encouraged through a list, or even a catalogue—at any rate a catalyst—of absurd possibilities. You see, we tend to force our world into making sense, by following the crowd, by ignoring as best we can the awkward feelings which don’t fit in or seem to make no sense. We call them illusory, or fake, and so on. Which they might well be. Or not. It’s up to you and me to discriminate.

I realized the other day that when I go out wayfaring, or even when I hang out the clothes in the backyard,

I have no need of philosophy at all. There, I’m an animal, or perhaps a small child, wide-eyed in wonder connected to all things, merged with my evolutionary roots, in a sensual paradise of birdsong; the exhalations of earth when yesterday’s rains are dried out by today’s sun; the glowing colours of everything; the half-moon in the blue sky above the red chimney-tops. In my body is joy. In my being is timelessness. Photography can’t capture this. Even words can’t.

But I understand now the need for philosophy, and why I need to see its connections to psychology, and theology, and the connection of all these to human biology, and how it has evolved, in a great inseparable whole. I need these studies to understand the society of which I am a part, a society which seems so strange when I’m away from it, in some meadow sown with wildflowers, or when gazing into the eyes of a young bull or goat.

I want to understand it all, not as a scientist, for that requires a specialized way of looking at things, but just as a human with time to stand and stare.

The meadows above are at Beacon’s Bottom, not far from here. The chimneys are as viewed from the backyard, just after hanging the wet clothes on the line. You can’t see anything special in the photos, of course, but from a primitive impulse I like to show you the places where I feel immeasurably rich and blessed.

Capturing the moment

I was going to write about Wales. And then I was going to write about child looters rampaging the evening streets of English cities. I probably won’t finish either of these essays though they exist in partial drafts. So here instead are a few photos of a recent camping trip. You can click on them to see larger versions.

But when it comes to capturing a moment, a thought, a feeling, I prefer words. See the foot of this post.

Mountains near Tywyn, in Powys

Me scraping toast outside the awning of our tent

Cheeky sparrow and curious heifer, snapped from inside the tent

Sea holly on the beach in Tywyn

A back street in Welshpool

Wales clings to its past. These petrol pumps, on the other side of the road shown above, have been superannuated, but the same company has a modern filling-station nearby.

We took a train to Portmeirion, a Mediterranean fantasy village started thirty years before Disneyland, and designed for grownups, though small children love it

Fountain in the main square

K framed in an archway

Another view of the main square

I took more photos of Portmeirion but they all show the same kind of artificiality. I think its designer, Sir Clough Williams-Ellis, would have been insulted by the comparison with Disneyland—through what adds up to snobbery I suppose, but snobbery with a solid basis, like the difference between a good and an average wine.

We’re not really the kind of tourists who go to see the sights, pretty as Portmeirion is. I’ve mentioned the place before in these “Wayfarer’s Notes”, (click here to view the post), in reference to a singe moment in a particular spot, a moment I’m grateful to have captured then, because I could not remember it when we passed the same spot the other day. I remembered the spot but not the thought, so I’m grateful to have recorded it at the time, in the following words, extracted from the post linked above. The spot is not in Portmeirion village at all but just before you enter it, and the moment was about twenty years ago, when I passed the spot with my two young children:

“What am I doing here? All I have ever wanted is this feeling. I recall the various moments in my life when I felt this way. Why are we coming here to look round this place? Why do I have children? How has all this happened, when all I wanted was a feeling? Why am I weighted with impedimenta, when all I ever wanted was to sniff the air and sip the moment like a wine?”
. . .
Do I have to strut on this stage? I haven’t learned my part. I don’t know who I am, but the clock ticks on and I have to act anyhow. Can’t I start again, and be fancy-free, as when I was a student, hanging out in Paris, Tarascon, Marseilles, Florence, Assisi? I was lonely then and aimless, but I didn’t compromise.”

I think I have learned my part a bit better since then.