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History, politics and culture are inextricably connected, as the epics of Gilgamesh and the Iliad demonstrate. The latter reveals a world before and after the destruction of civilization: destruction leading to the rise of democracy and slavery. The former, which inspired the other, under totally different circumstances – kingship, stability, bureaucracy - reveals both the absence of freedom and of slaves. The attitude towards death in the two epics is conditioned by the political circumstances. Gilgamesh abhors death; Achilles welcomes it. Achilles lives at a time of anarchy, when death appears heroic, grand; Gilgamesh represents the opposite state of affairs, when death appears as the end of all earthly relationships. Achilles hopes to become eternal, through fame, by dying; Gilgamesh has no illusions about the emptiness of fame.
The Epic of Gilgamesh
The Epic of Gilgamesh, inferring from the number of copies discovered in the Levant, enjoyed the status of a bestseller. And it would not be stretching a commercial analogy overmuch to suggest a parallel between the piracy on the Mediterranean and the influence of the epic on Homer. In both the odyssey of Gilgamesh and the Odyssey, the representation of the joys of this-worldliness in an attempt to suspend the hero’s journey to the netherworld devolves, respectively, on the divine bargirl, Siduri, lodged as inn-keeper amidst the garden of the sun-god near the ocean, and Circe and Calypso on their mythical isles. Both in the Gilgamesh epic and the Iliad, friends die their surrogate deaths for the heroes, Patroclus for Achilles, Enkidu for Gilgamesh, both to return and report on the nothingness of death.
The analogies, however, dramatise the disanalogies. Gilgamesh’s monomaniacal quest for immortality cursorily dismisses the sanity of Siduri’s advice, while Odysseus’ uncompromising humanity spurns a goddess’s gift of eternal life. The death of Patroclus has the opposite effect on Achilles as that of Enkidu on Gilgamesh: the one shuns, the other chooses, his friend’s fate, to avenge it.
Without doubt, such difference in outlook, subsisting with so much similarity in execution, gives pause to thought, and occasion for reflection. Prima facie, the ineluctable conclusion stares the querying mind –the West is essentially secular, the East quintessentially other-worldly. The phenomenon thus compartmentalised, the tired mind rests from further labour. Henceforth, all subsequent surprises cease to be so, going into one of two boxes: the Greek, heroic and the Mesopotamian, pathetic view of life.
Thus, even minds belonging to such as Thorkild Jacobsen asseverate: “The Epic of Gilgamesh does not come to an harmonious end; the emotions which rage in it are not assuaged; nor is there, as in tragedy, any sense of catharsis, any fundamental acceptance of the inevitable.” (Italics not original.)
And H.D.F. Kitto’s acquires greater catholicity by moving further east: “There can be no romantic protest – for how can we protest against the first law of our being? – nor resigned acceptance – such as we find, for example, among the Chinese, to whom the individual is only an ancestor in the making, one crop of leaves on one tree in the forest. There is instead this passionate tension which is a spirit of tragedy.” (Italics supplied.)
These observations are condensed into modern aphorisms by Edith Hamilton. “A tomb in Egypt and a theatre in Greece. The one comes to the mind as naturally as the other.” And, so as not to overlook a large chunk of the orient, she stuffs India into the Grecian urn with: “As in Egypt, the priests saw their opportunity”. One recognizes here the intellectual luggage of our latter-day psyche.
And last but not least, the Encyclopaedia Britannica pontificates: “The Mesopotamian mind never tires of expressing man’s deep regret at not being immortal through stories about ancient heroes who, despite their superhuman strength and wisdom, and their intimacy with gods, failed to escape from death. A decisively different idea, however, is fundamental to the Greek heroic view of life”. (Emphasis added.)
And politics provides the theory explaining the secular-religious split between East and West. Tyranny and hierocracy contrast with democracy, freedom from both kings and priests.
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