Gilgamesh

Gilgamesh

Death in ancient Mesopotamia was something to be dreaded. Nowhere is there mentioned an afterlife condition comparable to our ideas of heaven. Their netherworld, endured by all, must have been the prototype of our idea of hell. It’s a place wherein souls “are bereft of light, clay their food” and “dirt is their drink.” They are ruled over by the harrowing figure of Ereshkigal, forever rending her clothes and clawing her flesh in mourning over her endless miscarriages. These unpleasant descriptions are a natural reaction to the experience of burial, being trapped within the earth where no light can reach and nothing can grow. In Gilgamesh, Enkidu bewails his fate “to sit with the ghosts of the dead.” This envokes claustrophobic imagery of having to crouch for eternity, but it might also be related to the fetal position that bodies take on at the onset of rigor mortis, sometimes causing bodies to sit up. Another consistency among the dead is decomposition. Eventually all bodies are stripped of their distinguishing features. Every man, regardless of his position in society while alive, is eaten away until all that remains are his bones, and then these are ground to dust. This observation can be found in Gilgamesh when Enkidu has his dream of the dead. “On entering the House of Dust, everywhere I looked there were royal crowns gathered in heaps, everywhere I listened, it was the bearer of crowns who in the past had ruled the land, but who now served Anu and Enlil cooked meats, served confections, and poured cooled water from waterskins.” The kings of old are forced, in the netherworld, to serve their masters food and water that they cannot partake of, being dead. The strangest, and perhaps most poetic, descripti...

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...ot sleep for seven nights. The point is that eternal life is eternity without rest. “Look there! The man, the youth, who wanted eternal life! Sleep, like a fog, blew over him.” The relationship between sleep and wakefulness is here seen as a microcosm for death and life. Gilgamesh moans, “In my bedroom Death dwells.” Utanapishtim speculates, “How alike are the sleeping and the dead. The image of death cannot be depicted.” What is meant is that the nature of the afterlife cannot be described, just as the true nature of a dream cannot be described. Whenever we relate dreams to each other, we have the sensation that we are making it up even though we describe it as faithfully as possible, because we are necessarily translating the dream into the language of waking reality. So Gilgamesh must come to understand that the thing he wants to know is ultimately unknowable.