The Epic of Gilgamesh is the one of the oldest written documents in history. It predates the works of Ovid and Homer by millennia. The Bible straight-up lifts a major character and a seminal moment from the pages tablets of Gilgamesh. It’s seminal in a way that almost no other document in human history can match, and it’s all about death. Specifically, it’s about overcoming the fears and anxieties associated with death and embracing it as an essential part of life.
The Epic
Our hero is Gilgamesh, who’s basically a Sumerian Herakles. He’s beautiful, supernaturally strong, and partially divine. Not half-mortal and half-deity, though; Gilgamesh was two-thirds divine. Not only does this make him 16% more godly than his Grecian equivalent, but it also means that he was conceived as part of a heavenly ménage a trois. Gilgamesh was a swinger from the very beginning. In fact, Gilgamesh’s voracious sexual appetites form the impetus of his hero’s journey.
Bored to death as he rules in Uruk, Gilgamesh passes the time by fucking all the maidens before they can be married. Sick of his shit, the people beg their gods to intervene, which they do via the creation of Enkidu. Enkidu is a sasquatch-type wild man who appears in Uruk to wrestle the king over his tyranny, but they inadvertently become best friends a la Step Brothers. The pair goes on a series of rollicking quests, battling giants and killing the behemoth Bull of Heaven. Their adventures are cut short when Enkidu falls ill and dies.
Gilgamesh is distraught at the death of his friend. It makes no sense to the king that his beloved Enkidu, with whom he had shared such glory, and who had survived such danger, could just die. Worse yet, if Enkidu can die, that means Gilgamesh can die, a thought that sends the mighty king into an existential crisis. Still in mourning and terrified of his own mortality, our hero decides that he’s going to storm the home of the gods themselves and demand eternal life. To that end, Gilgamesh sets off alone to wander the earth until he reaches Mashu, the mountain where the gods live beyond 12 leagues of darkness. He makes it to the other side, but not without cost. His fine clothing and youthful beauty have been stripped away, and he arrives in the land of the gods clothed in animal skins, looking frail and gaunt.
This is the part of the story where you might expect the gods to bestow immortality on our hero. After all, he showed matchless strength and resolve in his quest, and he fought his way to the very doorstep of the gods. That doesn’t happen. In fact, the gods chide Gilgamesh for wasting his time on such a foolish endeavor. As Siduri the beer goddess tells the incredulous hero,
Gilgamesh, where are you hurrying to? You will never find that life for which you are looking. When the gods created man, they alotted him death, but life they retained in their own keeping. As for you, Gilgamesh, fill your belly with good things; day and night, night and day, dance and be merry, feast and rejoice. Let your clothes be fresh, bathe yourself in water, cherish the little child that holds your hand, and make your wife happy in your embrace; for this too is the lot of man.
Shaken but undeterred, Gilgamesh demands to speak with Utnapishtim, his distant ancestor and the survivor of a cataclysmic flood. Utnapishtim can’t offer immortality, either, but he does tell our hero about a flower that can restore his youth, which he lost chasing eternal life. Gilgamesh dutifully dives to the bottom of the sea to fetch the plant, but a snake slithers off with it before it can pass his lips. Finally beaten, Gilgamesh hitches a ferry ride back to Uruk. As the mighty walls of his city appear on the horizon, the hero finally comes to terms with his eventual death:
Urshanabi, climb up on the wall of Uruk, inspect its foundation terrace, and examine well the brickwork; see if it is not of burnt bricks; and did not the seven wise men lay these foundations? One third of the whole is city, one third is garden, and one third is field, with the precinct of the goddess Ishtar. These parts and the precinct are all Uruk.
Gilgamesh’s sudden swelling of pride about his city is telling. Until this point in the story, our hero has been utterly uninterested in the business of ruling Uruk; first he was all about maiden-deflowering, then it was adventuring with Enkidu, and then he got really into existential dread. It’s only at this point, when he has accepted his mortality, that he begins to appreciate his responsibilities and accomplishments in this world. The story then flashes forward and ends with the funeral of Gilgamesh, where the people of Uruk assemble to praise the might and wisdom of their departed king, who saw mysteries and knew secret things. Although his body dies and cannot return, his towering legacy lives on forever.
Why Gilgamesh Matters
Admittedly, scholars and historians have differing opinions about what Gilgamesh would have meant to its original audience. Given that the story went unread for literal millennia, it’s not terribly shocking that parts of it remain inscrutable. In particular, there’s one sequence near the end where Big Mesh goes nuts and smashes some concrete pillars, the scholarly consensus on which is, basically, “Yeah, I don’t know either, dude.” But the broad strokes of the story continue to resonate, especially those for whom death is neither glorious nor terrible.
Gilgamesh presents a world where death is inevitable. It doesn’t tell us that great deeds or religious piety or true love will allow any of us to escape our ultimate fate, via immortality or via paradisiacal afterlife. It tells us, politely but firmly, that to fear death is to waste life, and like any resource, life is valuable because it is finite. It’s a remarkably affirmative view of oblivion. Glory, love, and friendship are not rendered meaningless by death; rather, they are made precious by it. The briefness of our own existence is mitigated by the individual legacies we leave, but also by our contribution to the human endeavor as a whole. As long as we leave this world better than we find it, we have nothing to fear.
