“Who is like Gilgamesh? What other king
Has inspired such awe? Who else can say,
I alone rule, supreme among mankind?
The goddess Aruru, mother of creation
Had designed his body, had made him the strongest
Of men – huge, handsome, radiant, perfect.”
Gilgamesh , the oldest story on earth was written ,in ancient Mesopotamia in second millennium BC and predates the Iliad by at least thousand years. Its hero Gilgamesh was a historical king of the city Uruk (modern Iraq) and had an intimate friend Enkidu.Enkidu was a naked, wild man who was civilized through the erotic arts of the temple priestess Shamhat .With Enkidu Gilgamesh battles many monsters and when he dies he is inconsolable and sets out in search of someone who can tell him how to escape death. A brilliant tale of self-discovery Gilgamesh has been compared to the great epics but was lost to civilization for over two thousand years. The eleven clay tablets in which the story was inscribed in cuneiform was discovered in 1850 in the ruins of Nineveh. The great poet Rilke wrote in 1916 “Gilgamesh is stupendous” .He considered it to be a masterpiece in world literature.
Mitchell’s translation is superb and easy to read
“Humans are born, they live .then they die
------------------------
But until the end comes enjoy your life,
Spend it in happiness, not despair'"
“…….Suddenly ,savagely death
Destroys us, all of us, old or young
And yet we build house, make contacts, brothers
Divide their inheritance, conflicts occur
As though this human life lasted forever”
Gilgamesh’s despair after the death of Enkidu and his travails have been likened to Buddha’s renunciation and search for truth. The poetry is haunting and the feelings expressed by the poet are eternal.
"I cannot bear what happened to my friend.......
My beloved friend has turned into clay----
And won't I too lie down in the dirt
like him and never rise again"
Mitchell writes a detailed and fascinating introduction to this composition where he describes the historical and cultural context of this epic. The story of the discovery and decipherment of the clay tablets is itself a great tale. A young English traveller Austen Henry Layard found tens of thousands of clay tablets buried in what was left of the library of the last great Assyrian king Ashurbanipal. Twenty five thousand of these treasures were taken away to England .In 1872 George Smith a curator in the British Museum first realized that a great story was written on the tablets. Probably such discoveries reflected the brighter side of imperialism and redeemed to an extent the various looting expeditions of the imperialists.
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