Gilgamesh

I [Gilgamesh] would conquer in the Cedar Forest.. .. I will set my hand to it... 

Though historically a king of Babylonia, Gilga-mesh has served as a source of legends. The 2000 bc Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, for example, refers to scorpions as the guardians of hell ... 

Do we build a house to last forever The Epic of Gilgamesh Q)... 

Gilgamesh, King of Uruk, sets out on a quest for immortality,... 

The Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest surviving masterpiece of the Sumerian dynasty of ancient Mesopotamia, is at least 1500 years older than Homer. From the dawn of recorded history, its tale of friendship and heroism resonates with the eternal concerns of mankind bereavement, ageing, death, the dream of immortality. These themes recur throughout... 

Heidel, A, 1946. The Gilgamesh Epic and New Testament Parallels. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. 

In this chapter, we will look closely at the many layered and diverse symbolism of the rose beginning with perhaps the earliest Indo-Hittite reference to the rose on Tablet X of the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh. Here the Mesopotamian Noah tells Gilgamesh ... 

Gilgamesh, I will reveal to you a hidden thing, a secret of the Gods I will tell you ... 

A second Gilgamesh and Huwawa story may be counted as a fifth, but for the sake of this discussion the differences between them are not important. 

In Gdlgamesh, Enkidu and the Netherworld, in contrast, Gilgamesh helps Inana when she has problems with a tree - a very special tree. In this story, the action is not presented as a song in the manner of a praise poem, but is set long, long ago, in original times, when the correct and proper order of the world was established. This story, too, is about power, for the tree that Inana saves from a primordial storm is the halub tree - the axis mundi, the tree that connects all planes of... 

But I do not think it is quite that simple. It is Gilgamesh s assistance of Inana s grab for power, his own appropriation of some of that power, and the particular nature of its locus that are the start of the problem. Indeed, the passage where Gilgamesh is described as playing with the objects made from the halub tree seem to indicate that he is mad with power ... 

Gilgamesh ventures are not just territory beyond the ken of Sumer, because kur is the place of the netherworld and this is of ongoing significance in all the Sumerian literature, as will he seen helow. There is a level on which the whole story of Huwawa evokes at the least undertones of dealing with the demons of death, if it is not an actual allegory for it. Huwawa, of course, is not the god of the netherworld, hut that these kinds of parallels would be raised in the mind of the reader/hstener is obvious. 

Although I do not think epic an appopriate label, I will maintain it as a means of distinguishing the compilation of the larger story from its component pieces, especially since all extant versions of the Gilgamesh stories other than the Standard Babylonian, whether in Akkadian or Sumerian, were written down in this period, so to refer to it as the Old Babylonian version is both confusing and erroneous in that they are M Old Babylonian in date. 

---