The Epic of Gilgamesh - Anonymous [19]
The return is very summarily described and leaves much unexplained. It is like the breaking of a spell, when, at the end of trouble and search and with a prize almost won, everything suddenly returns to ordinary and we are back where we started, admiring the prosaic excellence of the city wall. All the fine things we had hoped to find - youth, eternal life, the dead friend - are lost. This ending has been described as ‘Jeering, unsatisfying, without tragedy or sense of catharsis.’ With this judgement I do not agree, for it is the true ending, it is what really happens, and in its way as tragic as the end of Hector under the walls of Troy.
The last act of all, the death of Gilgamesh, exists only in the Sumerian. It is a solemn lament; not so much a cry of individual sorrow, as part of a ritual, the elaborate burial of the dead. It is such a scene as the excavation of the Royal Cemetery at Ur has revealed with the mass immolations as well as the magnificent paraphernalia of the funeral: the gifts, banquets, robings, and the bread and the wine offered by the dead king to the gods of the underworld at his entry of the ‘Land of No Return’.
8. Survival
This is the story which has survived precariously, to be rediscovered only within the last century; for when Nineveh fell in 612 B.C. to a combined army of Medes and Babylonians, the destruction that followed was so complete that it never rose again; and under the rubble of the Assyrian capital was buried the whole library of Assurbanipal. The Assyrians of the later Empire were not much loved by their neighbours, and the Hebrew prophet Nahum spoke no doubt for the sentiments of many when in ‘The Burden of Nineveh’ he exulted over its imminent fall: ‘The chariots shall rage in the streets, they shall justle one against another in the broad ways: they shall seem like torches, they shall run like the lightnings.... Nineveh is laid waste: who will bemoan her?’
This seventh century was perhaps the last point in the history of the Near East when a great literature, and a story like that of Gilgamesh of Uruk, could have so nearly disappeared. The flood narrative had become once more an independent story, but the mechanics, as told by Eusebius, quoting from Berossus in, the third century B.C., have altered surprisingly little. In Babylonia the entire Epic probably survived rather longer than anywhere else, and copies are known from after the sack of Nineveh; but survival was a matter of a particular pattern of journeys and of adventures, which recurs in the frontierless, timeless world of folk-tale and romance. Aelian, writing in Greek c. A.D., 200 knew a Gilgamos, king of Babylon, and tells a story of his birth not unlike that told of Perseus, and also of Cyrus. Elements have been suspected in medieval Persian folk-tales and even further afield; but it was a twilight survival. Amongst the writings of the Near East and Mediterranean in the classical age there is no direct awareness of our Epic.
One of the reasons for this disappearance may have been the cuneiform characters in which it was written, and which were passing out of use, soon to become unintelligible to the new Mediterranean world. There may have been popular Aramaic versions which have not survived, but the Persians, who continued to use the old script, had their own literature and were apparently very little sympathetic to the history and legends of their late enemy. The Hebrews had still better reasons