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The Myth of Gilgamesh and Enkidu: One of the Oldest Stories in the World
By William G. Doty
Copyright © 2011
When students entered the auditorium where I was presenting a colloquium in the Blount Undergraduate Initiative (a special program in Arts and Sciences at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa) recently, they heard contemporary rock: some of David Byrne’s The Forest, inspired by the Sumerian myth-epic of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, staged by Robert Wilson at the New York International Festival of the Arts in 1991.
I might have shown as well a clip from a Star Trek-NE episode, “Darmok,” in which the story is central; or of Gordan McAlpine’s online graphic-novel version of Stephen Mitchell’s 2004 presentation of his new English version of the myth (on strippedbooks.com; 2005). Or I might indicate that my most recent search on “Gilgamesh” on Google led to 1,910,000 hits, or that Saddam Hussein compared himself to Gilgamesh (Damrosch 254).
As odd as it may seem, what may be the world’s oldest recalled story remains quite alive today, as in the twenty-six television programs in animé, Girugamesshu.
Basically we have here a hero quest, or several, as in The Great Gatsby or more recently There Will Be Blood, each portraying submotifs of domination or submission of the lead figure’s people. But there are references as well of friendship and leadership, and the striving for kleos in Greek or fama in Latin—“to make a name for oneself,” one of the most important projects of masculinity in antiquity: Gilgamesh states “I will make a lasting fame,” an emphasized goal in this myth (Mitchell 26 f.)
The richness of this myth is such that we could spend months plumbing its depths. What I restrict myself to here will be
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• the history of transmission (and censorship) of such myths
• the initial nineteenth-century interest in the many Gilgamesh myth fragments, largely motivated by similarities with biblical materials
• psychological aspects of friendship, homosocial aspects; the development of Gilgamesh’s personality
• as in the heroic monomyth sketched by Joseph Campbell, the return to the civitas (civilized urban community) with a boon, when Gilgamesh gives up his quest for immortality for Enkidu and himself, and
• my regular emphasis of the complexity of important mythic materials; and the influences and adaptations of this myth.