The Epic of Gilgamesh - Anonymous [12]
The dying Egyptian, on the other hand, had a reasonable hope of paradise to comfort and encourage him at the end. After judgement and weighing of souls the righteous man could expect, through a form of rebirth, to enter the fields of paradise, ‘I know the field of reeds of Re ... the height of its barley ... the dwellers of the horizon reap it beside the Eastern Souls.’ This rebirth was not for some single exceptional man alone, nor the king alone, but for ‘millions of millions ... there is not one who fails to reach that place ... as for the duration of life upon earth, it is a sort of dream; they say “Welcome, safe and sound” to him who reaches the West’.
7. The Story
Although the gods play a great part in the Epic, in its later form at least, Gilgamesh appears to have been as much a secular poem as the Odyssey. There is no suggestion that it was recited as part of religious ritual, as was the great Babylonian poem of Creation, the Enuma Elish, though it contains quasi-religious material in the laments over the dead, and in the set pieces of ‘Wisdom’. It is a secular narrative, divided into loosely connected episodes covering the most important events in the life of the hero.
These poems give to Gilgamesh no marvellous birth and childhood legends, like those of the heroes of folk-lore. When the story begins he is in mature manhood, and superior to all other men in beauty and strength and the unsatisfied cravings of his half-divine nature, for which he can find no worthy match in love or in war; while his daemonic energy is wearing his subjects out. They are forced to call in the help of the gods, and the first episode describes how they provide a companion and foil. This was Enkidu, the ‘natural man’, reared with wild animals, and as swift as the gazelle. In time Enkidu was seduced by a harlot from the city, and with the loss of innocence an irrevocable step was taken towards taming the wild man. The animals now rejected him, and he was led on by stages, learning to wear clothes, eat human food, herd sheep, and make war on the wolf and lion, until at length he reached the great civilized city of Uruk. He does not look back again to his old free life until he lies on his death-bed, when a pang of regret catches hold of him and he curses all the educators. This is the ‘Fall’ in reverse, a felix culpa shorn of tragic development; but it is also an allegory of the stages by which mankind reaches civilization, going from savagery to pastoralism and at last to the life of the city. It has even been claimed from the evidence of this story that the Babylonians were social evolutionists! Recently Professor G. S. Kirk has made an interesting attempt to interpret Enkidu, his birth, his seduction and the fight with Gilgamesh, along lines of Levi-Straussian structuralism; with Enkidu representing ‘nature’ opposed to Gilgamesh as ‘culture’, the purpose of the story being to mediate the contradictions and so to resolve tension. While this may be one of the threads in the story, I do not think it is the most important. It implies a baseless identification of civilized man with disease and natural man with health and well-being; while to equate the literate and sophisticated milieu of second millennium Babylonia, and early first millennium Assyria, with the simple world of Homer’s or Hesiod’s Greek contemporaries, let alone that of Levi-Strauss’s Amerindians, is highly misleading. It seems, in any case, that Enkidu is far from being a mere ‘type figure’. Professor Gadd, introducing the latest translated fragments from Ur, has drawn attention to the conversation between the doomed and dying Enkidu and the Sun God, in which it is implied that he had been living happily in the plains with his wife ‘a mother of seven’. Professor Gadd sees in his story a threefold tragedy: that of the husband seduced by meretricious charms to take up a life of which he soon tires, that of the nomad taken to the city and lost in it, and lastly the ‘noble savage’ tempted by a woman and winning