Gilgamesh Read Online Free PDF

morally Gilgamesh thinks he is acting, he wants to kill Humbaba “and drive out evil from the world,” not for the sake of the people, or to alleviate suffering, or to help anyone but himself.
    As the story proceeds, we hear another possible motivation: that Shamash, the sun god, god of justice and Gilgamesh’s special protector, has put this decision into his head. At least, that is the theory of Gilgamesh’s mother, the goddess Ninsun (neither Gilgamesh nor Shamash ever acknowledges it). According to her, the whole adventure is Shamash’s idea, and Gilgamesh is only an instrument in his hand, a warrior in the battle of good against evil. “Lord of heaven,” Ninsun says in her prayer to the sun god,
    â€œyou have granted my son beauty and strength and courage—why have you burdened him with a restless heart? Now you have stirred him up to attack the monster Humbaba, to make a long journey from which he may not return. Since he has resolved to go, protect him until he arrives at the Cedar Forest,until he kills the monster Humbaba and drives from the world the evil that you hate.”
    Here Ninsun, “the wise, the all-knowing,” is portrayed as a purely human figure, neither more nor less wise than any worried mother of flesh and blood. She knows her son well, and when she mentions his “restless heart,” she is pointing to what drives Gilgamesh throughout the epic, both before and after Enkidu’s death. Whatever Shamash’s part in the process may be, we can understand how Gilgamesh’s restless heart has stirred him up, as powerfully as his desire for fame. Psychologically, this restlessness can’t be inspired by the god of justice; it is the opposite of inspiration; it is ultimately desperation. One might even say that the attack on Humbaba stems from what Pascal called the cause of all human misery: the inability to sit contentedly alone in a room.
    Is Ninsun correct in her theory that this is a battle of good against evil? Everything in the poem argues against it. As a matter of fact, the only evil we are informed of is the suffering Gilgamesh has inflicted on his own people; the only monster is Gilgamesh himself. * If he has a real enemy, it is the selfishness that arises from his own restless heart. Uruk may be at peace now, but Gilgamesh isn’t. Themoral imbalance still exists; he is, as far as we are told, unable to acknowledge what he has done, unable to apologize or make amends to the young men and women he has been terrorizing.
    Whatever Gilgamesh’s mother may say, the poet makes it impossible to see Humbaba as a threat to the security of Uruk or as part of any “axis of evil.” Unlike Grendel in
Beowulf,
he is not seen as the enemy of God; there is no devil or negative metaphysical force in the poet’s cosmology for him to be an instrument of. He hasn’t harmed a single living being, as far as we know. If anything, our sympathies are with him. He may be ugly and terrifying, with his fire-spewing breath, thunderous voice, and nightmare faces, but to be terrifying is his job. He just stays where he is, minding his business and doing his duty, which is to take care of the Cedar Forest and keep humans out. “If anyone knows the rules of my forest,” he says later to Enkidu,
    â€œit is you. You know that this is my place and that I am the forest’s guardian. Enlil put me here to terrify men, and I guard the forest as Enlil ordains.”
    Like the precivilized Enkidu, Humbaba is a figure of balance and a defender of the ecosystem. (Having a monster or two around to guard our national forests from corporate and other predators wouldn’t be such a bad thing.)
    I love how the poet has morally situated his poem so that as soon as we are tempted to take a position about good and evil, we realizethat there is an opposite and equally valid position. This world, like ours, is not black and white; there is ultimately