Gilgamesh Read Online Free PDF Page A

fragmentary and obscure. We aren’t told how long Gilgamesh and Enkidu stayed in Uruk deepening their friendship; we don’t know what they did during those weeks or months. How do vigorous young giants spend their free time? This is not one of the poem’s interests, but it’s easy to imagine an ongoing revel of feasting and beer drinking, wrestling matches, swimming, polo, bullfighting perhaps, Gilgamesh delightedly teaching his friend all the new dances and songs, daily visits to the Eanna temple to make love with the most beautiful of the young priestesses (Shamhat included),and—because ancient Babylonian kings prided themselves on being scholars as well as warriors and athletes—daily visits to the royal library, where Enkidu can take lessons in elementary cuneiform.
    At a certain point, though, out of the blue, Gilgamesh announces that it is time to leave Uruk and begin the fatal adventure that provides the shape for the rest of the epic: an ascent to an ambiguous victory, followed by a plunge into death, unassuageable grief, and the futile search for immortality. “Now we must travel to the Cedar Forest,” Gilgamesh says,
    â€œwhere the fierce monster Humbaba lives. We must kill him and drive out evil from the world.”
    Living in the year 2004, one can’t help hearing this statement of an ancient Mesopotamian king in eerie counterpoint to the recent American invasion of Iraq. From this perspective, Gilgamesh’s action is the original preemptive attack. Ancient readers, like many contemporary Americans, would have considered it to be unquestionably heroic. But the poem is wiser than the culture from which it arose. It wonderfully complicates the ostensible moral certainties, and once again, when we look closely, the mind finds no solid ground to stand on.
    What impels Gilgamesh to go on this adventure? Why should he kill the monster? At first, all we hear is the sudden announcement itself. As listeners to a great adventure story, we don’t need any more motivation than this. After all, that’s what heroes do: they slay monsters. The motivation in this sense is literary rather than psychological. Story, not character, is fate.

    But a bit further on, the poet does provide a motivation for the decision to leave for the Cedar Forest. What Gilgamesh wants is fame, as he explains in a passionate speech to Enkidu:
    â€œWe are not gods, we cannot ascend to heaven. No, we are mortal men. Only the gods live forever.
Our
days are few in number, and whatever we achieve is a puff of wind. Why be afraid then, since sooner or later death must come? … I will cut down the tree, I will kill Humbaba, I will make a lasting name for myself, I will stamp my fame on men’s minds forever.”
    It is obvious that Gilgamesh considers himself fully human and that, for him, “two-thirds divine” is just a polite compliment or a rhetorical flourish. His mother may be a goddess, but he is as mortal as any other human. The only way for him to transcend death, he thinks, is to make an everlasting name for himself.
    The desire for fame is at the heart of the ancient heroic traditions, Babylonian, Greek, and Germanic. It is one of the nobler delusions, and it can produce great art—in addition, as we know, to great havoc. There is something very human and even endearing about all this posturing; human nature hasn’t changed much from Gilgamesh—or Enkidu, with his
“I
am the mightiest!”—to Cassius Clay. But heroic? It’s hard to take the boasts and the derring-do seriously in28 comparison with the actions of what we would all consider true heroes: those who risk harm or death for the sake of others. The anonymous, everyday heroism of fire fighters and police officers makes the desire for “a lasting name” seem far less admirable to us than it has seemed to other cultures. In any event, the poet makes it clear from the outset that however