The Epic of Gilgamesh Death

Meet Gilgamesh: he lives fast and hard, and doesn't care if he dies trying. Enkidu has been warning his friend not to go on a quest to fight the monster Humbaba; Enkidu fears that Gilgamesh will be walking into certain death. But Gilgamesh points out that death is already certain—for human beings, anyhow. Given that we're all going to die anyway, Gilgamesh reasons, the next best thing is to accomplish great deeds so that your name will live on in people's memory. Is Gilgamesh right? Would it be enough if the people of Uruk remembered Gilgamesh as the one who battled Humbaba? Would there be an epic about him if he had died in that battle?

Don't you just hate it when people tell you their dreams? Here, Enkidu describes his frightening dream about being captured by a lion-headed eagle and taken down to the underworld. But unlike our dream about blow-up dolphins (seriously), this dream probably has a grain of truth for Gilgamesh. And it's not pretty: the underworld isn't much better than complete non-existence, and quite possibly worse. If you were living in the ancient Sumerian society of Gilgamesh, how would you react to knowing that the underworld was like this? Does this picture of what waits for us after death explain some of the attitudes toward life and death expressed by characters in the epic?

Shamash says this to Enkidu, who's just been cursing (1) the trapper who first found him at the watering hole, and (2) Shamhat, the temple-prostitute, who first initiated him into the ways of human beings. Sure, we can see why Enkidu might feel like lashing out. But he's wrong. If it weren't for the trapper and Shamhat, he never would have made friends with Gilgamesh. One of the plusses of this friendship is he'll now have elaborate ceremonies to commemorate him after he dies, and Gilgamesh will defile his own body in memory of his friend. Aw, now isn't that sweet?

Here, Enkidu is still going on about his spooky dream. This time, the emphasis isn't so much on how the underworld totally stinks, as much as on the fact that absolutely everybody has to go there. When the most powerful people on earth are reduced to the role of table servants in the underworld … well, that's a powerful message about the equalizing power of death.

Even though Gilgamesh's words are about how Enkidu is dead, it still doesn't seem like he totally accepts this fact—he is still talking to a dead guy, after all. This becomes even more clear at the end of this passage, when Gilgamesh touches Enkidu's heart—as though he were trying to see if, by some miracle, Enkidu wasn't actually dead. Ancient Sumerians: they're just like us.

Is someone cutting onions nearby? This is Gilgamesh mourning Enkidu, obvs, and boy does it bring a tear to our eye. Does the fact that Gilgamesh is calling on animals and plants to lament his friend undercut his argument that being remembered after you die makes dying OK? After all, if Gilgamesh is calling on the entire universe to lament Enkidu, doesn't that suggest that it isn't enough for ordinary people to lament him?

This is major, Shmoopers: Gilgamesh is actually changing. For starters, he's shifting from lamenting his friend to lamenting for himself, because he will have to die too someday. This also shows a shift from his attitude near the beginning of the poem (see the first quotation from this section), when he seemed to think that death really wasn't a big deal. But accepting death is the last thing on Gilgamesh's mind at this point. Instead, he is determined to do something about it: he will go see Utanapishtim, the one human being who received immortality. Does Gilgamesh's decision to go see Utanapishtim make sense, or is it just another way of refusing to accept the inevitable?

This is Gilgamesh filling in Siduri, the tavern-keeper in the underworld. What's cool here is the complicated interweaving of feelings of grief over his friend and grief for himself—plus, check out that gritty realism. Maggots!

Utanapishtim is trying—and failing—to satisfy Gilgamesh's curiosity about death. Basically, it's impossible to know what death is, and human life is incredibly brief, so you've just got to deal. But Gilgamesh isn't listening—not yet.

If you've ever watched the legendary HBO crime series The Wire, you may be familiar with the practice known as "juking the stats." This is when the bosses at police force decide that they've had it with high crime rates, and tell all the division commanders to bring the numbers down. So what happens if the division commanders can't deliver? They monkey with the statistics, that's what. Robberies get reclassified as petty larcenies, fights get reclassified as loitering, and on down the list until—presto!—the statistics say that crime is down. And evidently, it's an old technique. Here, Enlil, the king of the gods, had wanted to destroy the entire human species with the Flood. But now the Flood is over, and two human beings have survived. So what does Enlil do? He jukes the stats, that's what. By reclassifying Utanapishtim and his wife as immortal, and hence not human beings, he gets to preserve his perfect record.