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10Well, of course he falls asleep right away (“So Gilgamesh sat down against a wall to begin the test. The moment he sat down, sleep swirled over him, like a fog;” M 191), and every day Utnapishtim’s wife places a loaf of the bread of the day by his head to demonstrate his weakness. However, the wife has compassion, and urges her husband to give him “something for his journey home.” That something was the knowledge of a healing herb growing deep down in the ocean, “this marvelous plant, the antidote to the fear of death.”
11After 400 miles trek—everything, every measure in this myth, is gargantuan!—Gilgamesh is worn out, hot, and miserable, but lo! A pond of cool water appears. Gilgamesh strips off his clothes and bathes; but when he’s in the water, a snake “smelled [the plant’s] fragrance and stealthily it crawled up and carried the plant away.” And since myths love to pad their narratives with etiologies—why such and such is called such and such, how a certain place is named Gordo or Tuscaloosa—we are told that as the serpent disappeared, it cast off its skin, a kind of serpentine immortality.
12Another four hundred miles and they stopped to eat, at a thousand they pitched their camp, and now Gilgamesh looks admiringly at the famous walls of Uruk he had constructed: “This is the wall of Uruk, which no city on earth can equal. See how its ramparts gleam like copper in the sun. Climb the stone staircase, more ancient than the mind can imagine, approach the Eanna Temple, sacred to Ishtar, a temple that no king has equaled in size or beauty, walk on the wall of Uruk [6 miles long, by the way—it was not conquered until 1000 years later, by the Assyrian Sargon of Akkad], follow its course around the city, inspect its mighty foundations, examine its brickwork, how masterfully it is built, observe the land it encloses: the palm trees, the gardens, the orchards, the glorious palaces and temples, the shops and marketplaces, the houses, the public spheres.”
13Those who have read the mythic account will remember that these are nearly the same words that appear in its Prologue: see the shining ramparts, walk on the wall…etc. And now we realize we’ve been within a story within a story: We are told that we should find the cornerstone and under it we’ll find a copper box that is marked with the name of Gilgamesh. “Unlock it. Open the lid. Take out the tablet of precious lapis lazuli. Read how Gilgamesh suffered all and accomplished all.”
As I indicated previously, this is probably the oldest story in the Western world, although it was lost to consciousness for over 2000 years. It dates back almost four thousand years Before the Present—to oral materials about a real, historical king ~2750 BCE. The recovery was part of nineteenth-century interest in the new science of archaeology, especially in what is now named Iraq (formerly Persia), mostly attempts to “prove” that biblical events such as the Garden of Eden, the Flood and Ark, could be “verified scientifically”: the beginning of modernist worship of the hard sciences, the claim that “if physical evidence can be found, it must be true”—even though we realize now that physical evidence can demonstrate any number of meanings according to original or contemporary contexts.
Remember that there are flood myths in every part of the planet; the stories of the flood so important because few Americans know little more of the Tanach/Old Testament than Genesis—so the Noachic flood, or the suggestion that there might have been a historical Garden was considered important to “prove” that biblical stories were actually historical, when of course their primary intention was theological and inspirational--historicism was only valued several thousands of years later. Such is true as well for the accounts of the biblical “sheriffs” (known biblically as Judges)—figures who were both wise persons and shamans, i.e., psychically active deciders/leaders such as our era has found in Martin Luther King, Jr. or the Kennedy brothers.
The main texts we have derive from Ashurbanipal’s library—late seventh century BCE, preserved in Iraq’s dry climate for centuries. The sun-dried mud/adobe tablets were often broken up, however, so that we have a raft of fragments from many different sources, and no single “authoritative” manuscript—as is the case for most biblical manuscripts from antiquity; any biblical book, if studied carefully, manifests a number of different fragments, or sources from various politically and theologically oriented traditions/schools.