Archetype In The Epic Of Gilgamesh

1183 Words3 Pages

Kayla Sullivan
Reilly
English IV
1 October 2017

The Journey of Gilgamesh In our world today, we are lucky to know thousands and thousands of languages and their cultures. The first language ever recorded is Sumerian. This time period consists of 3300 to 3000 BC. During this time, records are purely logographic with not much dialectal content. Different cultures have many very different archetypes that clearly show what their their literature follows, and in Sumerian culture, the major archetype is the hero’s journey and its different stages. The Sumerians believed in their fair share of gods and supernatural forces and that reflects in their pieces of literature.In The Epic of Gilgamesh, which was translated by N.K. Sandars and based on Sumerian culture, the Sumerian hero Gilgamesh overcomes many stages of a hero’s journey when he begins his long quest to find immortality. Gilgamesh …show more content…

Enkidu and Urshanabi serve as the threshold guardians by showing he needs to get past them and earn their trust throughout the story. Then, Shamash provides supernatural aid by helping him pass major obstacles. Gilgamesh enters the unexplored land when he goes into the cedar forest to destroy Humbaba and when he searches for the plant Utnapishtim told him about, and he faces a challenge when Utnapishtim tells him he must stay awake for six nights and seven days in order to become immortal. Finally, Gilgamesh undergoes his transformation when he decides he will give the plant to his people before himself, and once he returns to Uruk, he is proud of his city and passes his story on to others. Overall, Gilgamesh goes through all of the stages of the Sumerian archetype of a hero’s journey and is therefore considered an epic hero in Sumerian

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