Wanderlust and the quest for immortality: the travels of Gilgamesh

There’s something about standing alone on a beach—wherever it might be, as long as there are waves and the open sea—that makes me think of the end of the world. Perhaps it’s because the sea is always the end of the world (in the literal ‘Land’s End’, ‘Finisterre’ sort of way), or perhaps because its size and endless motion conjure thoughts of eternity, and the end of eternity. Either way, I find myself thinking about how one day, all of it will finally stop, or how one day, much sooner, there may be nobody there to see it. And with these vague ideas of time and mortality washing over me, I also sometimes find myself thinking about Gilgamesh, a terribly flawed hero who goes to the very end of the world in search of a way out, an escape from the trap of mortality: and fails, and goes home.

The Epic of Gilgamesh is the oldest epic poem to have survived in written form, and its hero has a good claim to be one of the first identifiable explorers. A legendary king of the Sumerian city of Uruk on the river Euphrates in modern-day Iraq, his story came together as a single written work nearly four thousand years ago, drawing on separate poems that are even older.

Gilgamesh at the start of the epic is violent, overbearing, lustful and arrogant. It’s perhaps unhelpful to judge him according to the morals of our own time, but his subjects were not keen on his behaviour either: always spoiling for a fight, he gave the men of the city no peace, and the most abhorrent part of his tyranny was a form of institutionalised royal rape, demanding that every bride in the city have sex with him on her wedding night before she lay with her husband. Unsurprisingly, the epic begins with the people of Uruk appealing in despair to the gods, calling on them to ease the burden of their king’s oppressive rule. 

The gods respond by finding Gilgamesh a friend. They create a mighty wild man called Enkidu, who is tamed by the arts of a temple courtesan—herself one of the great athletes of the epic, whose first contact with Enkidu is a week-long marathon of copulation—and brought to the city. Here Enkidu challenges Gilgamesh, defending the honour of one of Uruk’s unfortunate brides, and although Gilgamesh wins the wrestling match, the two opponents become bosom companions and probably—though this is open to interpretation—lovers. Now the adventures begin.

Through dreams interpreted by Enkidu, the gods order Gilgamesh to stop abusing his own people. But his hunger for action is unabated, and he longs for a great deed that will cause his name to live forever:

I have not established my name stamped on brick as my destiny decreed; therefore I will go to the country where the cedar is felled. I will set up my name in the place where the names of famous men are written, and where no man’s name is yet written I will raise a monument to the gods.

And so, in the first of his two great quests, Gilgamesh sets out with Enkidu for a place variously described as the Land of the Cedars or the Country of the Living, undoubtedly intended to represent a real location: either to the east of Uruk, in the mountains of western Iran, or to the west in famous cedar forests of Lebanon. Here the two heroes dare to enter a sacred forest, and begin to fell the cedar trees that lie under the divine protection of the giant Humbaba. Although both of them, in turn, lose their nerve when confronted by Humbaba, they eventually fight him and defeat him with the help of Gilgamesh’s protector, the sun god Shamash. Persuaded by Enkidu to ignore the giant’s pleas for mercy, Gilgamesh kills him, and the pair continue felling the forest, returning home with a raft made from their plundered cedars.

The forest quest has a double motive. On one level, it is about resources, and must reflect a real history of expeditions from Mesopotamia—a fertile land, but one without forests, where the cities were built from bricks of baked mud—to gather a precious commodity from neighbouring lands. Most likely, when local inhabitants resisted, these expeditions turned violent, providing the inspiration for the battle with Humbaba. On another level, though, it is already about Gilgamesh’s quest for immortality, his desire to set himself apart from others. From the mighty walls of his city, he has watched corpses floating down the river, set adrift in a funerary rite, and thought of his own mortality: and it is no coincidence that, once he has felled the cedars, the corpses of the trees, too, are floated down the river. In the killing of the forest, Gilgamesh hopes to escape his own death.

This theme develops further in the later stages of the poem: after further episodes in which Gilgamesh spurns the love of the goddess Ishtar, and slays the Bull of Heaven sent to punish him, the council of the gods passes judgment on the pair of over-mighty mortals, and decrees that Enkidu must sicken and die. Gilgamesh is ravaged, not only by grief for his friend, but also by a renewed terror at the prospect of his own death, and so he sets out on his second great quest, in search of the secret of immortality.

If his first quest was an inland one, rooted in real landscapes, the geography of this second journey, much of which is by sea, becomes vague and hard to pin down, slipping around on a boundary between worlds. Gilgamesh travels to the ends of the earth, where he meets the wise tavern-keeper Siduri, and she tells him how to find Utanapishtim the Faraway, the one mortal who has been granted eternal life. He travels across the ocean and the sea of death to meet Utanapishtim, who gives him the secret of a plant with the power to restore youth; Gilgamesh retrieves it from the sea bed, but loses it on the journey home. At last he returns to Uruk, a little wiser but no less mortal, and he dies.

The Epic of Gilgamesh is certainly not a history. If there was ever a real king named Gilgamesh in Uruk, the tale that has come down to us has left him far behind. Even so, the myth of Gilgamesh is important for our understanding of the human instinct to explore. Myths don’t tell us exactly what happened, but they can tell us how a culture understood itself: and the psychological insights in the Epic more than make up for any vagueness in its geography. For his first quest, Gilgamesh has an economic motive, bringing back the precious timber that his own country does not provide: but this is just the superficial objective that he needs to justify his assault on the forest. His real purpose is a quest for glory: and just as importantly, for his people, the expedition offers a chance to direct his energies outward rather than inward, to send him out marauding in the mountains instead of abusing his power at home.

It’s no coincidence that the Sumerian civilisation, which produced the first material for the Epic, was possibly the world’s first settled, urban society. Gilgamesh ruled over one of the first true cities: and already, he was jaded by city life:

Here in the city man dies oppressed at heart, man perishes with despair in his heart. I have looked over the wall and I see the bodies floating on the river, and that will be my lot also. Indeed I know it is so, for whoever is tallest among men cannot reach the heavens, and the greatest cannot encompass the earth. Therefore … I will go to the country where the cedar is cut.

Unable to accept his own mortality, he lashes out at the people around him, until he hits on the idea of lashing out at the trees instead.

His mother, too, recognises his condition:

O Shamash, why did you give this restless heart to Gilgamesh, my son; why did you give it? You have moved him and now he sets out on a long journey to the Land of Humbaba, to travel an unknown road and fight a strange battle.

Here, then, at the dawn of written literature, we find exploration—if we can call it that—undertaken for the sake of glory, at the urging of a restless heart. And in the birthplace of the urban way of life, we have the implication that the city brings with it a kind of spiritual disease, a dissatisfaction with the simple facts of life and death, and a gnawing hunger for adventure that will send men out, time and time again, into the unknown.

The second quest is driven, even more explicitly, by fear of mortality, and an attempt not only to acquire lasting fame, but actually to live forever. But it’s a futile, wrong-headed quest, and the Gilgamesh who embarks on it is a much more confusing and elusive character than the destructive but rational hero of the battle with Humbaba.

In the first quest, Gilgamesh’s actions were fairly logical: felling cedars in order to obtain a valuable commodity, and killing a forest god in order to be remembered for great deeds. But the Gilgamesh of the second quest is a mess. When he meets Siduri the tavern-keeper he is in such a state that she locks the door at the sight of him, thinking he must be a murderer. After he threatens to smash her door down she offers him wise advice, which, of course, he refuses to hear:

You will never find that life for which you are looking. When the gods created man they allotted to him death, but life they retained in their own keeping. As for you, Gilgamesh, fill your belly with good things; day and night, night and day, dance and be merry, feast and rejoice. Let your clothes be fresh, bathe yourself in water, cherish the little child that holds your hand, and make your wife happy in your embrace; for this too is the lot of man.

Instead, Gilgamesh presses on. When he encounters the ferryman on whom he will rely for the journey to find Utanapishtim, he smashes the mysterious “stone crew” of the ferryman’s boat in a rage that is never explained, placing further obstacles in the path of his already-impossible quest. And when he finally has in his grasp the plant that gives immortality, he loses it through carelessness, and simply gives up and goes home.

Incomplete texts and translation difficulties may be behind some of our confusion, but there’s also a feeling that Gilgamesh is no longer acting rationally: that his whole project is absurd, and rather than exploring with a purpose he just staggers around, lurching between anger and despondency, and behaving nonsensically. We might conclude that a person who can’t come to terms with death as a fundamental part of life is unlikely to be able to do anything else coherently either. The epic may be warning us that it’s one thing to be brave and adventurous, but that wanderlust needs to be anchored somewhere, otherwise we lose our bearings altogether.

It is left to Utanapishtim, the one mortal who (together with his wife) has been freed from death, to explain to Gilgamesh the fruitlessness of his journey.

Utanapishtim said, ‘There is no permanence. Do we build a house to stand for ever, do we seal a contract to hold for all time? Do brothers divide an inheritance to keep for ever, does the flood-time of rivers endure? It is only the nymph of the dragon-fly who sheds her larva and sees the sun in his glory. From the days of old there is no permanence. The sleeping and the dead, how alike they are, they are like a painted death. What is there between the master and the servant when both have fulfilled their doom?’

Eventually Gilgamesh seems, just about, to get the message. He goes home, makes some cryptic comments about how fine the city walls are, and the epic is over. If he has achieved some kind of resolution, though, it’s mostly left to us to imagine what it looked like. And if there is an older and wiser Gilgamesh who has learned his lesson, he’s not the character who sticks in the mind. It’s the messed-up hero, tired and bedraggled at the end of the earth: he's the one I think about when I find myself by the sea, looking out at the waves. Lost and lonely, lashing out at everyone around him while he tries to get his head around a very simple truth.

Sources

The Epic of Gilgamesh: quotations are from the translation by N.K. Sandars (Penguin, 1960). There are more recent translations available, by Andrew George and Sophus Helle, and a poetic version by Jenny Lewis, Gilgamesh Retold (Carcanet, 2018) which is superb.

The interpretation of Gilgamesh’s first quest, combining deforestation, urban anxiety and fear of death, draws on Forests: The Shadow of Civilization by Robert Pogue Harrison (University of Chicago Press, 1992), a brilliant inquiry into the place of forests in our culture and our collective unconscious.

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Images

All photographs by the author.