Gilgamesh
The Search for Everlasting Life
 

As is made apparent in the Prologue of N.K. Sandars’s version of The Epic of Gilgamesh, the epic poem was originally designed to be read aloud to an audience. One can easily discern such a fact simply by looking at the first six words that open the Epic: "I will proclaim to the world the deeds of Gilgamesh." Though the story was eventually recorded onto stone tablets which were then distributed and translated in many areas of ancient Mesopotamia, such as Babylon and Sumer, it is impossible to believe that any written version of the story is the original. The impossibility lies in the very nature of ancient storytelling. Oral culture relies on more the repetition of general ideas, rather than word for word reiteration. This is why word of mouth transference flourished for as long and as far as it did, before eventually being replaced by concrete texts (which was a response to the majority of the world’s desire for exact data and thought replication).

The key word in the opening sentence of this translation (henceforth referred to as the Epic) is "proclaim." If the original goal was for the story to have been written down, without any regard to how or even if it would be recited, any word that conveys an idea of communication between people would have sufficed. However, the Epic is a poem, and as all decent poets are ideally required to do, each word has been carefully selected in order to give the audience the appropriate feeling about the work they are hearing or reading. Furthermore, it is a spoken poem, and all great speakers know the importance of impacting and attention-grabbing words. Poetry reading orators of the ancient times are no exception, and the realized and embraced the ideas that some words are fundamentally more important and better than others.

When the term "proclaim" is used, it connotes a belief of importance in the words that are being proclaimed. The word instantly makes the audience take note of what the speaker is telling them. While the use of the word "proclaim" is necessary to note, it is the introduction and recognition of the speaker (a trait that is indicative of the orally narrative origin of the Epic) that truly showcases the uniqueness that each version of the Epic provided. The introduction of the first person thrusts the tale into the immediate forefront of the audience’s mind. The narrator (whose name is neither given nor important, so long as there is a person telling the story) makes it known that no one else is telling the story but him/her. It is not a faceless, inhuman entity that is talking, but an actual person. The inclusion of "I" makes this point.

The designation of a first person narrative is crucial in the understanding of why a story such as the Epic is structured in the way it is, that is, with exact or near exact replications of the same exchanges many times over. In the instance of the trapper’s encounter with the newly formed Enkidu, the trapper asks his father what he should do, who bids him to go to Uruk to talk to Gilgamesh, who in turn gives the trapper the same suggestion that the man’s father had (pages 63-64). A second instance occurs after Gilgamesh embarks on his quest for eternal life, after having become hopelessly distraught over the death of Enkidu. Gilgamesh goes into a mountain, inside of which there are "12 leagues of darkness (page 98)." The story tells how Gilgamesh "had gone through one league the darkness became thick around him, for there was no light, he could see nothing ahead and nothing behind him (page 99)." The majority of the page is a reprinting of the same sentence, going through seven full leagues. Only at the eighth is there a change in the word choice, and even then it is slight, adding, "Gilgamesh gave a great cry (page 99)." Thirdly, following the lengthy elegy delivered by Gilgamesh in memory of Enkidu: "[Gilgamesh] touched [Enkidu’s] heart but it did not beat again. When Gilgamesh touched his heart it did not beat (page 95)." One would listen to it, or even one who would simply read it in this translation can feel the emotion in the words, perhaps envisioning the narrator speaking the part much in the same way an actor in a Shakespearean play would enunciate. A final example is Gilgamesh’s own funeral song:

The echoing of the two endings, "will not rise again" and "he will not come again" serves a structural poetic purpose as well as a narrative speaking purpose. By switching the endings of the third line in each stanza, a more poetic feeling is produced, and elegies should serve as poetic monuments to their subjects. The most obvious and the most important reasons for the sentence structure in these examples are one in the same: The Epic was not intended to be read. Poets and other orators had to memorize hundreds of words, and remember hundreds of names, places and events, in addition to remembering into which order they fell. Thusly, the speakers had to devise some way of remembering what it was they were supposed to say when reciting a tale of such immense proportions like the Epic of Gilgamesh. The result was repetition, which, incidentally added to the poetic effect that the works had on the audience. However, it was the growth of immense (both in length and in importance) works such as the Epic of Gilgamesh that brought about a calling for the usurping of oral culture by the new art of written literature.

The Epic presents a peculiar paradox in it’s Prologue. In a single paragraph, the Epic presents the audience with inferences of the importance of both oral and written culture. While the two are linked chronologically, they are usually not brought together as equally important, or at the very least as nearly equal as the Epic shows them to be. It is no coincidence that the first paragraph of the prologue opens with a reference to oral culture, and it is no coincidence that the first paragraph closes with a reference to written culture. Whoever created the Sandars translated tablets of the story was indicating that the story’s most important aspect was that it was originally spoken. However, with time, it was written down and permanently recorded in history, a point which is symbolized with the following phrase: "[Gilgamesh] engraved on a stone the whole story (page 61)." The fact that it is ostensibly the narrator who tells of Gilgamesh writing down the story which he (or she) is about to tell might actually harm the narrator’s goal of being considered a great storyteller by his audience. However, it is a two-sided affair. Stating that it was actually Gilgamesh who wrote the story of the Epic, not the narrator who just thought of the story could have perhaps given the narrator more credibility with his audience.

Regardless of how or why the detail of Gilgamesh writing the story down himself appeared on the translation, it nonetheless serves as a testament to a key point: Writing is forever, it is permanent. A way that the text serves to illustrate the point lies on the very surface: "engraved on a stone (page 61)." In today’s lexicon, the term "written in stone" is synonymous with permanency. Stone, as further illustrated by the narrator in the text (who talks of walls and of the city’s temple which are all made of stone) is also permanent. Even after an untold time after the days of Gilgamesh, though one could easily surmise that scores of years have passed, the great monuments of Uruk still stand. So too does Gilgamesh’s tale. It is through the combined efforts of the storytellers and the scribes that the story of Gilgamesh has survived, though his body has long since deteriorated.

The motive for Gilgamesh’s desire to have his story preserved for the ages is evident to any human who shares the desire: Fear. Fear is what drives Gilgamesh and men like him to go to such great lengths to preserve their mortality. Gilgamesh is horribly affected by the death of Enkidu, not only because he was taken away from his companion, but also because he was reminded of his own mortality. When Gilgamesh meets Utnapishtim after deciding, because he is afraid of death, he must seek out eternal life, he is told, and several times thereafter (yet another piece of evidence of the oral aspect of the Epic) that he " will never find that life for which [Gilgamesh] is looking." However, it can be argued that Gilgamesh did in fact find what he was looking for, as, even after he failed to obtain the flower of youth, he returned to Uruk and, as told in the Prologue, "engraved on a stone the whole story (page 117)" of his journey. A major factor in defense of the success of his journey for immortality is the fact that he never explicitly states what it is he is looking for. One has to infer that it is immortality in some form, whether or not it is literal mortality or not is unclear. The type of immortality that Gilgamesh wanted to obtain is undefined, so it can be considered that he did indeed achieve immortality because he was able to preserve his story on a stone tablet. Though he would have most likely enjoyed physically lasting forever, having the story of his many journeys serves the purpose just as well, if not better.

Even though literature was founded on the action of word of mouth storytelling, it progressed to a concrete written form in order to satiate the world’s need for a tangible means of preserving a person’s greatest achievements.