It's a common belief among storytellers that storytelling is the most important facet of
humanity, which is a very understandable bias for us to have.
And while branding it the absolute pinnacle of human nature might be a bit indulgent,
there's something dizzyingly awe-inspiring about the endless chain of tales and legends
that links us through a hundred thousand years of forgotten names and vanished lives.
Our roots run deep and dark through the forgotten places of history - stories so old we don't
even realize how old they are.
Some of those stories are stellar.
In many places around the world, the Pleiades star cluster is referred to as "The Seven
Sisters", which is noteworthy because only six stars are visible.
And in the myths, one of the seven sisters is typically missing - dead or abducted or
hiding in shame, leaving the other six behind.
What's interesting is that there actually are seven stars in the pleiades, but two of
them have drifted so close together that they cannot be distinguished with the naked eye.
How does the myth know that there were once seven sisters, and that their number has been
reduced?
Well, there was a time when there were seven visible stars in the pleidaes - one hundred
thousand years ago.
So maybe the story knows that they went from seven to six because the story is a hundred
thousand years old.
Some of the stories describe a world that no longer exists.
Australian Aboriginal mythology and folklore often warns of giant, dangerous creatures
that align very, very closely with the megafauna that used to roam its plains, like the Diprotodon
- megafauna that's been extinct for forty thousand years.
Rock art in the region depicts marsupial lions that have been extinct for a brisk thirty
thousand years.
It's very cool to catch glimpses of the truly staggering longevity of storytelling, but
unfortunately these cases are the exception and not the rule.
While the lineage of many myths and legends can be theoretically traced back tens of thousands
of years to key events in the archaeological record that may have shaped them, it's the
nature of stories to change with every telling, which is why searching for crisp historicity
in ancient legends is a recipe for madness.
The evolution of stories is very similar to biological evolution: it's often the odd little
consistencies across a seemingly unrelated menagerie that let us identify and trace back
a lineage, and, just like in biology, in the grand scheme of storytelling, almost everything
is lost.
We might want to find or reconstruct the "original" version of these ancient tales, searching
for those truly ancient stories, but the original is gone - shattered into the branches of a
family tree with the vast majority of its defining narrative lost forever, only scraps
and hints and fragments cluing us into what shape the common narrative ancestor might
have once taken.
The great tragedy of this kind of research is that, sometimes…
things are just gone.
Paleolithic cave paintings are eroded away by wind and water.
The key historical details in a legend are lost when the teller doesn't think them interesting
enough to pass along to the next generation.
A civilization's records are miraculously preserved, but the language they're written
in dies out, and so the knowledge dies with them.
Geological upheaval buries a city under a hundred meters of rock and within two hundred
years nobody remembers its name.
Storytelling may not be the most important thing humanity is responsible for, but it
is alive, and like all alive things, it dies very easily.
This is why it is truly, genuinely incredible that we have the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Before 1853, the Epic of Gilgamesh was a pile of broken pottery in an Assyrian ruin.
Before 1872, it was a pile of broken pottery in the basement of the British Museum.
It wasn't until assyriologist George Smith translated the cuneiform in "the flood tablet,"
which would be later known as Part 11 of the Epic of Gilgamesh, that it became clear that
there was a story here - a coherent written narrative older than anything anyone had found
before.
It was only a fragment, but it told an epic tale of a cataclysmic flood very similar to
the one in the Tanakh.
And they still had a lot of broken pottery to go!
There is no single complete version of the Epic of Gilgamesh.
The oldest stories about him we have access to are Sumerian, from the 18th century BCE,
where his exploits were literally used as writing homework for scribes, which is why
we have about five million copies of them.
In these poems, Gilgamesh is called "Bilgames", and while a few details from the overall Epic
show up - like Enkidu being Gilgamesh's best pal, and Gilgamesh overall being a totally
badass king - it doesn't have a whole lot to do with the Epic, and it's clear that there
was basically a corpus of episodic folklore about Gilgamesh popular in the cultural consciousness
long before his story was consolidated into the Epic.
There was also clearly a prototypical version of the Epic of Gilgamesh in cultural circulation
before it was locked down by the poet and scribe Sin-lique-unninni somewhere between
the 13th and 11th century BCE, when he wrote down what is now considered to be the standard
version of the Epic of Gilgamesh, or as it was called at the time, He Who Saw The Deep.
Now three thousand years of wear and tear on the tablets has left the story somewhat
fragmented, but because this tale was so popular in various forms, new tablets with chunks
of the epic of gilgamesh are being discovered all the time.
Every new translation is more complete than the previous ones because it has more to work
from.
This is the rare, beautiful case where a lost story was rediscovered and instead of being
half a fragment of a scrap of an oblique reference with absolutely no hope of recovery, it was
literally an entire saga.
We've known about this epic - the oldest known work of literature - for less than two hundred
years.
A combination of luck and skill and some very, very determined archaeologists have given
us back something we could've very easily lost forever.
And part of what makes the Epic of Gilgamesh so interesting is that its own narrative themes
apply to it on a metatextual level.
The Epic of Gilgamesh, a legend that was dead and forgotten for two thousand years, is a
story about death, legacy, and immortality.
So let's talk about it.
The story begins with a glowing attestation of the beautiful and magnificent city of Uruk,
and an equally glowing description of Gilgamesh, a great hero-king, unbelievably huge, powerful
and strong, most likely in large part because he is one-third man, two-thirds god.
However, despite being a great king, Gilgamesh is kind of a terrible person, harassing the
young men of his city in some unspecified way and harassing the young women in a very
specified way.
The gist is that when a young woman gets married she spends her wedding night with Gilgamesh
first and her actual husband second.
This is not a great arrangement for anyone but Gilgamesh, and the women of Uruk are just
about sick of it, so they petition the gods for help.
The gods roll up and deliberate what to do about Gilgamesh being a huge turbotyrant,
and eventually they decide the only logical solution is to create Gilgamesh's equal - someone
who can stand up to him and make him chill out.
The goddess Aruru, creator of humanity, shapes some clay into a massive and powerful wild
man called Enkidu, an absolute and literal beast who spends his days in the wilderness
with the animals causing problems for the local hunters, which means the number of unstoppably
powerful demigods causing problems for innocent locals has changed from one to two.
Good work, team!
The hunters try and figure out what to do about this huge monster-man that keeps wrecking
their traps and freeing their prey, and they settle on the creative solution of calling
in an expert on getting men to behave: the legendary prostitute Shamhat, whose reputation
turns out to be well-earned, because after "engaging" Enkidu for an entire week the man
has somehow learned language, showering, social skills, table-manners, and how to immediately
go at it for another entire week.
In between completing her Tarzan Speerun Any%, Shamhat tells Enkidu about the legendary king
Gilgamesh and he catches wind of Gilgamesh's abuses of power, and immediately resolves
to go and fight him 1v1.
Enkidu and Shamhat head to Uruk and the people marvel at this strange wild man, animalistic
in nature but just as strong and powerful as Gilgamesh himself.
As Gilgamesh makes his way to the newest newlywed in town, Enkidu blocks his path and challenges
him to single combat.
They fight, and while the details of their clash are obscured by damage to the tablet,
when the signal fuzzes back in Gilgamesh and Enkidu stop fighting, kiss, decide to be best
friends for life, and then Gilgamesh introduces Enkidu to his mom, officially setting the
first world record for the Enemies To Lovers trope which has yet to be surpassed.
A couple lines later Gilgamesh decides on a whim that he wants to go kill a big monster,
a terrifying fire-breathing creature by the name of Humbaba, and when Enkidu asks him
why the hell they would do that, Gilgamesh calls him a wuss and goes to do it anyway.
Absolutely nobody can dissuade Gilgamesh from this idea, so the two of them gear up and
head for the Forest of Cedar that Humbaba guards.
On the way Gilgamesh has a series of scary symbolic nightmares, but every time he gets
freaked out Enkidu manages to explain why the scary symbolic nightmare is actually a
good thing.
And I'd love to give you more details about what the dreams were and how they could possibly
be good, but, uh… sorry, tablet busted, who dis.
All that matters is that the boys make it to the Forest of Cedars, catch Humbaba's trail
and square up with him.
Humbaba talks a little smack, Gilgamesh gets nervous, Enkidu affectionately calls him a
wuss and they fight, and with the help of a little divine intervention courtesy of Gilgamesh's
goddess mom, Humbaba is pinned down by wind so Gilgamesh can slay him.
Enkidu briefly worries that killing a monster created by the gods might upset the gods a
little bit, I'm sure that won't come back later.
Or immediately!
When the boys make it back to Uruk with a ton of high-quality cedar wood in tow, Gilgamesh
gets himself cleaned up after his long and arduous journey and is immediately ambushed
by the goddess Ishtar who thinks he's really hot and wants to marry him.
Gilgamesh enumerates a large number of reasons he's not going to do that, in the form of
a list of all of Ishtar's exes that have suffered various horrible fates, and Ishtar gets really
upset and storms back to the heavens in a rage.
She asks her parents, Anu and Antu, if she can borrow the Bull of Heaven and have it
kill Gilgamesh, and makes it clear that her alternative plan is to smash down the gates
of the underworld and raise up the dead so they devour the living.
Rather than dealing with the paperwork of an ancient Mesopotamian zombie apocalypse,
Anu gives her the Bull of Heaven and she unleashes it on an unsuspecting Uruk.
It's an absolute nightmare of a monster, with its very presence boiling the rivers and cracking
the earth, but Enkidu and Gilgamesh manage to defeat it through the cunning strategy
of hitting it really hard.
They sacrifice various parts of the bull to various different gods, throw a party and
go to sleep.
Job well done, boys!
Unfortunately, Enkidu dreams that a council of the gods convenes to discuss how Enkidu
and Gilgamesh can be punished for killing, not one, but two sacred creatures crafted
by the gods.
The gods agree that one of them should die for it, and unfortunately for Enkidu, the
reluctant consensus - even among the gods that like them - is that Gilgamesh is a lot
less disposable than Enkidu.
He wakes up heartbroken, knowing that his death is inevitable - and coming soon to a
civilization near you.
While Gilgamesh tries to petition the gods to spare him, Enkidu privately breaks down
and laments to Shamash the sun god, cursing the hunter and Shamhat that took him away
from his peaceful, ignorant, wild existence and doomed him to a life weakened by civilization
and knowledge, forcing him to forever be lesser than his great friend.
Shamash gently chastises him for cursing the people that gave him his life and his friendship
with Gilgamesh, and Enkidu calms down a little, so to make up for cursing Shamhat, he turns
around and blesses her to be incredibly homewreckingly hot and have a lot of great boning for the
rest of her life.
Despite his little moment of closure, Enkidu's not resting peacefully quite yet.
He has a second dream where a terrifying lion-bird-man attacks him and drags him into the sunless
underworld where he's paraded before a menagerie of death gods.
When he wakes up, he's sick, and his illness worsens over the next twelve days.
On his deathbed Enkidu tells Gilgamesh he feared dying in battle, but he now wishes
he'd at least had the fame and glory of a violent death - a slow, lingering illness
brings him nothing at all.
Enkidu dies, and Gilgamesh is hearbroken.
He commissions a massive statue of Enkidu, drains his treasury to commission sacrifices
for the gods so that they'll favor Enkidu, and ultimately spirals into a full-blown existential
crisis.
In this state Gilgamesh leaves Uruk and sets out for the farthest reaches of the world
in search of a legendary man named Utnapishtim, who along with his wife are the only people
who have ever become immortal.
Gilgamesh makes his way through the wilderness, still quite powerful but now also quite frightened
thanks to his rolling existential crisis, so he's still defeating lions with his bare
hands but now he's sad about it.
He reaches the twin mountain where the sun rises, guarded by two scorpion-men who let
him pass when he tells them he's seeking Utnapishtim.
He travels through the dark, sunless void for twelve double-hours before he finally
emerges into a strange garden of stone and crystal trees at the edge of a vast ocean.
An old goddess directs him to the boatman that can take him to Utnapishtim, a man named
Ur-shanabi currently working in a forest with a large group of strange stone men, but Gilgamesh
interprets her directions as instructions to fight Ur-shanabi and the stone men, which
makes the process of getting to Utnapishtim extra complicated, because the stone men Gilgamesh
smashes to bits are the people who are supposed to be manning the dang boat.
Ur-shanabi and Gilgamesh end up having to man it themselves, including a rather perilous
section where they need to pole the boat through a band of deadly water and improvise a sail
out of their own clothes.
But Gilgamesh finally lands unscathed on the far shore and meets Utnapishtim, who is very
unimpressed with him.
Gilgamesh asks Utnapishtim how he acquired immortality, and Utnapishtim tells him the
tale…
A long, long time ago, Utnapishtim lived in the great city of Shuruppak, when one night
the god Ea came to him in a dream and told him to forsake his house, abandon his wealth
and build an enormous boat, filling it with everything needed for life to survive.
Ea does not elaborate why this is necessary but helpfully provides him with a cover story
for this apparent madness - if anybody asks, Utnapishtim has somehow incurred the wrath
of the god Enlil, a notoriously volatile god of wind and storms, and so Utnapishtim has
to go live in Ea's oceanic realm.
Ea also says that he can tell the others that soon Shuruppak will experience a rain of plenty,
a shower of bread-cakes and a torrent of wheat.
Ea's suspicious caginess and oddly meteorological metaphors clearly alarm Utnapishtim, because
he obeys without question, emptying his treasury and sacrificing his livestock to ensure his
workmen are very richly compensated for building the massive ark as quickly and as well as
possible.
Utnapishtim loads up the boat with his family, some workmen and artisans, and a whole bunch
of animals.
On the day Ea warned him of he seals the hatch - and the rain begins to fall.
A deluge unlike any other drowns the city and drives the gods up into Anu's realm, most
of them grieving the destruction and the death of humanity.
After seven days the rain finally stops and Utnapishtim cracks the hatch to survey the
terrain.
The outlook is not good.
There's ocean as far as the eye can see, and only the highest mountain peaks are visible
as tiny, barren islands.
He grounds the ship on one of them and starts sending out birds to look for livable land,
and after two failures he releases a raven that flies far enough to see the waters receding.
Utnapishtim makes a sacrifice to the gods, and being basically the only human alive and
currently praying, all the gods turn up - including Enlil, who the other gods are none too pleased
with, because it turns out Enlil is the one who came up with this dumb flood plan himself
to try and "fix overpopulation" and somehow convinced the other gods to be sworn to secrecy
about it.
Enlil is furious that Utnapishtim survived, but Ea calls him a dingus for orchestrating
this whole unnecessarily dramatic debacle and Enlil calms down.
He takes Utnapishtim and his wife and declares that they are now immortal like the gods,
and decrees that they'll live far from the rest of the world, at the source of all rivers.
So Utnapishtim and his wife are whisked away to this beautiful and alien land, and that
brings them to today.
Since Gilgamesh doesn't have the option of surviving a cataclysmic flood and convening
every god in the world to talk about it, he's not entirely sure what he's supposed to take
from this, so Utnapishtim tells him if he wants to conquer death he's going to have
to start by conquering sleep.
He challenges Gilgamesh to stay awake for seven nights, which Gilgamesh declares to
be child's play before immediately passing out.
When he's eventually nudged awake he insists it was only a brief doze - only to see that
Utnapishtim's wife has helpfully baked him a fresh loaf of bread for every day he was
asleep.
There are seven of them in total, five of which have become completely inedible.
This is very disheartening for Gilgamesh, and while Utnapishtim won't give him a do-over,
he takes pity on the poor guy and cheers him up with a nice hot bath and a makeover to
get all the depression gunk off him.
He also kicks out his boatman, presumably so nobody else winds up on his front lawn
with delusions of grandeur.
As Gilgamesh and the boatman go to leave, Utnapishtim gives Gilgamesh one more option
to stave off the reaper - a rare plant found under the ocean that restores the youth to
anyone who eats it.
Gilgamesh immediately dives in and finds it, and plans to bring it back to Uruk and test
it on some random old guy before downing it himself - but then he leaves it unattended
and a snake eats it.
Womp womp.
With Gilgamesh's pursuit of immortality officially completely pointless and with no way back
to Utnapishtim or the plant, he despondently returns to Uruk, and the story ends the way
it began - with a description of the wonder and majesty of this great city, far greater
than the life of any one man.
There is something incredibly poignant about reading this story almost five thousand years
after its historical setting.
If the historical Gilgamesh who ruled Uruk sometime between 2900 and 2350 BCE truly suffered
the Memento Mori crisis that his fictional counterpart did, then it's a strange form
of immortality he's found himself in - one, like Utnapishtim, granted by no action of
his own, but by the choices of a group he had no power over.
The people of Uruk told his stories for a thousand years after his death before they
were codified in the tablets we have now - a distant, abstracted immortality very far away
from the world of the living.
Gilgamesh could not have an immortal life, but when he gazes on Uruk and sings its praises
in the final lines of the tablet, he hints at the immortality he will inadvertently achieve.
He was terrified of death, but when he stopped running from it and returned to the city he
lived to protect and rule, he became a king worth immortalizing, worth telling stories
about for two thousand years, stories worth recovering and translating two thousand years
after that.
Immortality is memory and legacy and history.
It isn't outrunning death, it's outlasting it.
Storytelling may not be the most important thing humanity's ever done, but it is how
we share the gift of immortality with the people and stories that we love.
And in a very real way, it's an honor to carry that on.
but while we're talking retellings, look, I couldn't give less of a sh*t about the Fate
franchise, but it drives me up the f*ckin wall that this is their design for Gilgamesh.
THIS?
This… gold-plated broomstick??
TWO-THIRDS GOD WITH A SIX CUBIT STRIDE???
You're telling me it's not THIS beefy muscle-man?!
You're telling me that is supposed to be Alexander The GREAT?
Who did all his best work before he was 25?!
It's a rare treat for the Fate franchise to have designs that… even…
come close to making sense, but THESE designs would ACTUALLY kinda work if you just SWITCHED
them!
And instead they did THIS!
And I hate it!
I hate it so much!
I can't believe they'd do this to me!!
[Hurt - NIN]