The Epic of Gilgamesh is a cautionary tale
And the Flood myth too
The Book:
Gilgamesh: A New Translation of the Ancient Epic
Translated by Sophus Helle
Yale University Press
2022
The Talk:
Sophus Helle’s 2022 translation of Gilgamesh isn’t just a new translation, it’s an expanded version of the Babylonian epic. The text we have is missing passages, but new fragments are being found all the time. A whole section has been added since 2014, and a new scene was added in 2018.
Interestingly, we have far more ancient cuneiform than Latin. Helle writes in the introduction:
Around half a million cuneiform texts have been excavated, a larger corpus than Classical Latin, though many remain unread and unpublished, as the world has only a few hundred scholars with the expertise needed to decipher them. Even more tablets remain in the ground, awaiting excavation.
According to Helle, some scholars are optimistic that all the missing fragments will eventually be found and that one day we will have the epic poem in full. But for now what we have is already remarkable: A short epic tale, freighted with ambiguous literary, religious, and political meaning.
Gilgamesh the Terrible
Gilgamesh, King of the city of Uruk, is literally the “big man.” He is an 18-foot-tall giant with a ten-foot stride; two-thirds god, one-third human. But although he is the hero of the story, he is a terrible force of nature as a young ruler:
He darkened the youth of Uruk with despair;
Gilgamesh let no son go home to his father.Day and night, he stormed around in fury,
King Gilgamesh, leader of the many.
This is how he tended to the Sheepfold of Uruk!
Gilgamesh let no daughter go home to her mother.
Gilgamesh consumes his subjects, and they pray to the gods for relief from Gilgamesh’s abuse. As the story progresses, Gilgamesh hardly improves. He is powerful and handsome and charming, but he lacks prudence, subtlety, and finesse (the things royal advisors, the authors and readers of the story, would have likely prided themselves on).
Helle points out in interpretive essays at the end of the book that Gilgamesh seems to violate all the expectations of what a good king should do:
He tries to sleep with a newly wed wife (royal “first night rights”), something that was forbidden in Babylon.
He rejects and mocks the goddess Ishtar.
He disregards bad omens.
He doesn’t listen to the elders of the city who tell him not to go on a war campaign.
He goes on campaign when he is supposed to lead the New Year festival in the city.
Instead of showing mercy toward his vanquished foe, Humbaba, he murders him, leading to ruin in the long-term.
By telling a story about a king behaving badly from thousands of years ago, the advisors and counselors who made up the literary community of the epic could talk indirectly about how kings should and should not act. It’s also a way to teach each other how they should respond to such behavior by a king.
Taste the rainbow
To the original readers of the epic, Gilgamesh was an ancient legendary figure from a far distant era—4,000 years in the past. In the second half of the story, Gilgamesh travels on a very long journey to meet Uta-napishti, a legendary figure from Gilgamesh’s distant past—25,000 years before the king of Uruk—who had been given the gift of immortality along with his wife. In a way, it’s a time travel story, in which Gilgamesh meets with the oldest knowable person in Babylonian history, almost like going to meet Adam and Eve.
The reason why Uta-napishti is the oldest knowable person is that Mesopotamian history begins with the Flood myth. Everything prior to the Flood has been washed away like, Helle points out, water on a clay tablet. All records were erased in the Flood, so the Flood marks the absolute beginning of recorded civilization.
In the Babylonian Flood myth, the ruler of the gods, Enlil, without consultation from his council, attempts to wipe out humanity in a flood. The other gods are forced to swear an oath that they will not warn the humans of the coming disaster.
Ea, the wisest of the gods, communicates to one of devotees, Uta-napishti, through a wall, using cryptic riddles that hint of the danger to come. By this covert means, Ea is able to save humanity without breaking his oath. Uta-napishti builds a wooden box or boat, loads it with animals, and survives the flood, sending out birds periodically to discover when the waters have receded enough to return to the land.
I watched the weather; it was quiet,
but all the people had turned to clay.
Uta-napishti’s salvation is good for the gods, too. According to Babylonian religion, the gods would starve without sacrifices from humans, and so Enlil’s tyrannical actions would’ve brought suffering on the gods themselves. When Uta-napishti exits the boat and lights a sacrifice, the gods swarm to it “like flies.”
The goddess Belet-ili places a rainbow in the sky “to remind me of these days—I must never forget!” She continues:
“Now let the gods all come to the sacrifice.
Only Enlil is not welcome at the sacrifice,
because he caused the Flood, acting without counsel,
consigning my people to the slaughter.”
Ea, the model court counselor, used all his wit and cunning to save the kingdom of the gods, under the shadow of the tyrannical Enlil. The lesson of the Flood is that kings who act rashly and do not consult with their advisors come to ruin and catastrophe, but also that, when a king acts wantonly and thoughtlessly, advisors must steer the ship of state with all the wisdom they can muster. (Additionally, by listening carefully to ambiguous omens from the gods, advisors could foresee destruction and prepare accordingly, like Uta-napishti.)
Rainbows, then, serve as an eternal reminder of the disaster brought about by Enlil’s tyranny and the salvation brought about by wise Ea and devout Uta-napishti. In my opinion, the rainbow sacrificial feast is both the climax of the Flood story and of the Gilgamesh story, in which heaven and earth meet together in perfect harmony and signify the ideal relationship of gods and humanity.
The trouble with tyrants
Helle describes Gilgamesh as “one of the most famous stories of the cunieform world.” It was the story students would copy over and over to learn how to write. (That’s why we have so many copies.) The Flood myth too was central to their culture and religion; since the Flood, they believed, gods no longer communicated directly with humans but sent messages through omens and signs, like Ea did with Uta-napishti. Both these stories, one nested within the other, also “served an important ideological purpose.” Helle writes:
Kings are portrayed as necessary leaders but also as dangerous hotheads whose whims must be reined in by their advisers.
Gilgamesh does many “epic” and “heroic” things, but because he doesn’t listen to others, his wins are often empty, ironic, or ultimately defeats. In the same way, the chief god Enlil almost destroys the prosperity of the gods by wiping out humanity. This is described as a secret story that Gilgamesh brings back from the edge of the universe, from the very dawn of history—and the secret is this: The Flood was a huge divine mistake, brought on by a tyrannical ruler who did not listen to his council.
The disaster would have been even worse if Ea, counselor of the gods, had not warned Uta-napishti and saved humanity. We have every reason to believe that Assyrian scholars would have picked up on the moral: kingship was all well and good, but it could turn catastrophic without the counsel of wise men. Gilgamesh explained why their job mattered.
People can change
Just as Uta-napishti barely survives the Flood, there is one small, almost invisible sliver of hope in the Gilgamesh epic. The text implies in a couple brief places, and it was believed in the years after its writing, that the epic of Gilgamesh was written by Gilgamesh himself. When read this way, all the troubles and horrible things recorded in the epic take on a new light. Gilgamesh, at the end of his life and reign, is giving a confessional account of his mistakes and errors.
Like the Once-ler at the end of The Lorax, Gilgamesh tells the tale of his own folly, and leaves the reader with a seed of a hope. Unless. By sharing his own faults, he shows his capacity to become self-aware, self-reflective, and wise—even if it takes a lifetime to learn. In the end, Gilgamesh fails to achieve immortality, but returns with something of great value to share, the Flood myth in the text itself, which contains the essential wisdom leaders need to lead well and avoid disaster.
Related:
How to survive in ancient Egypt
The Tao Te Ching is a political document
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