The Old Man is Young
the Epic of Gilgamesh
The following is a rewrite of an old college paper of mine for a Folklore and Mythology class:
Throughout history, myth has been a tool for carifying the relationship between the individual and society around them. In the Mesopotamian world, the evolution of regional mythology reflected the development of local societies as they grew from smaller rural communities into large and dynamic empires. Key elements within these reflections include representations of the relationship between humans and nature, local and regional cultures, and between the individual and the broader society they inhabit.
In the Epic of Gilgamesh, we see a revolutionary new way Mesopotamian society expressed this relationship as centered on the individual. The Epic connotes a relationship wherein the individual is at once a participant in the co-cretion of their social element. This mythological phenomenon reflects the transition, in Axial age social philosophy, to an increasingly individualistic mode of cultural life. Mesopotamian society was just at this time moving from an era in which communities determined their communal life and death at the knife’s-edge margins of annual crop production. What lay ahead was the beginning of societal diversification into new social roles and specializations. This would give rise to the forces of caste and class, which have shaped much of history.
The Epic of Gilgamesh begins as a story of a lone and un-heroic king seeking to find himself through challenging his limits. After overcoming every obstacle he can find, Gilgamesh continues undaunted until he learns that he has limitations. Gilgamesh is then forced to question even his own limits to know what these limits are and what they mean to him. Finally, upon learning these lessons, Gilgamesh walks away from his ordeals, wiser and more individuated by them. It isn’t until he has peeled away from his layers of certainty that Gilgamesh is enabled to face a society where he must set his limits as far as the laws of nature will allow him.
Contrast this with much of earlier mesopotamian myth, in which we see a battle between man and nature demonstrated through natural elements represented by the gods and man who is forced to serve them to survive. In this model, the pantheon of deities vied for power and recognition as various communities began to develop and thrive, leaving man at the mercy of the gods and their whimsy. This model served its purpose well in a rural culture of disconnected city and township localities, but as society would evolve, so too would the representation of society in myth.
In the deluge myths, we see an emphasis placed on the reciprocal relationship between man and the authorities above him. In this more advanced version of the previous model, man is pitted not merely against the forces of nature but against a hierarchy that has been set in place between gods and men. Obedience to this hierarchy is viewed as imperative so that all may survive. If a man becomes a burden to the gods as to nature around him, he will be destroyed through the forces of nature. Likewise, if the gods and nature act too cruelly toward man, no one will be left to manage their creation. It is a tenuous balance.
As the locus of social and cultural prosperity would shifted from the local level to national and regional levels through trade and collective defense, this relationship was reflected in myth. In the Enuma Elish, the rise of one Babylon out of the many forces alternately of nature and local society gave birth to the national deity of Marduk to reign supreme over all. This representation of the one from the many also finds its shadow in the relationship of the individual to the society in which they found themselves. The individual came into society out of the many who have come before and became the relative perfection of that society as it would continue to renew itself and prosper into the future. Marduk represented one nation and one individual born from the many to conquer the new. Eventually, this, too, would not be an adequate model to represent the complexities of the relationship between the individual and society.
In the Epic of Gilgamesh, we see a marked change in how this relationship is represented. The individual is no longer just a mere product of society, serving to continue society for society’s sake. In Gilgamesh, the individual, who has his external needs met by the strength and might of the city around them, must now find a way to individuate himself from the mass of people around them so that they may find their distinct purpose. The unchallenged Gilgamesh is a tyrannical ruler who not only takes liberties with his power but also takes these liberties for granted. He is devoid of purpose and seeks to fulfill that longing within himself to find a more significant challenge.
Enkidu, similarly, finds himself free of responsibility and unchallenged in the wilderness. He can roam free and live off the land for life’s sake. His liberties are unbounded short of the degree to which the forces of nature will limit him. When Gilgamesh hears of the existence of a person with such a commonality in freedom, he finds in Enkidu a potential challenge. Shamhat, a priestess of Ishtar and representative of alternately the origin of culture and life as they pertain to Babylonian society, is the perfect individual to civilize Enkidu. As a Priestess of Ishtar, she has been steeped in the culture of her society in a way that few others of few positions can relate to. As a woman, she represents the place from which every individual within the community came and upon whom the burden is laid to continue the progeneration of community.
When Enkidu is brought back to Uruk, his life of unmitigated freedom gives him no previous reference point to the hierarchy of civilization. As such, he must test his place within a society in the caste systems in which he feels no sense of obligation to fit. Accordingly, he challenges the king, aspiring to nothing less than a place equal to this new society’s highest class of status. This is the perfect challenge for Gilgamesh. In it, Gilgamesh finds their wills to be equally indomitable. But Gilgamesh is restless. More restless than Enkidu, who is unconstrained by the limts imposed by centuries of preceding culture and aculturation. Nevertheless, through becoming civilized and aculturated, Enkidu has given up the very very source of his wild freedom. He has traded his freedom for stability only to find less of either.
