In this conclusion of the Epic Gilgamesh has wandered from his home, his wife, his children, his people, has given up his kingdom and power, all that was a comfort and a pleasure, all that meant life to him, because of the death of his brother Enkidu. More than his loss, his inconsolable grief for that lose, it was the realization of his own death that distressed him. He seeks escape. He knows the legend of Ut-napishtim, whose name literally means, “he who lives long.” He seeks him out at the end of the world, through the sacred (and forbidden) passage of the sun, the god who has been his special savior, as the Epic has told us. From Ut-napishtim he hopes to find answers or perhaps the way to avoid dying, just as he had. In the conclusion you are about to hear, he will be told the story of how Ut-napishtim came to his state of undying. He is segregated from man, so he tells, because this generation of men to which Gilgamesh belongs is a new incarnation; he is the sole survivor of an ancient race whom the gods determined to destroy by a world-wide flood.
When this ancient text was first translated in a musty storeroom of the British Museum, to where the tablets of the ancient library had been brought after their discovery in Iraq some twenty-five years earlier, the young scholar, George Smith, became so excited, it is said, that he took off his clothes and began to dance about.
For some the finding reinforced the inauthenticity of the Biblical text, demonstrating that the Jews had expropriated a clearly pagan story for their own, reinforcing the secular notion that historical religions develop, as culture generally does, by the influences and cross-currents of social interaction. What we have here in Genesis is nothing more than an exchange of ideas and stories.
However, for others, the discovery of this text seemed an affirmation of the Bible, coming as it did so closely on the heels of Darwin’s heretical assertion of evolution in defiance of God’s Creation as stated in the book of Genesis. Here was proof, it seemed to many, of the truth of sacred text. Here, also the text of Genesis, is the tale of Noah and the Flood, corroborated by a pagan source, no less.
Today the controversy has subsided to debates of evangelical truth or scientific fact. If a matter of religious conviction, fact must be subserved by belief. If a matter of science, some argue that the Deluge is really psychological; it expresses a vital natural anxiety; it dramatically illustrates the notion of annihilation of self, precisely what Gilgamesh feared about death. Psychologists will interpret the myths of Deluge, as they might dreams of a deluge, as spiritual crisis. But in another approach by science, some archaeologists, in the tradition of Schliemann who claimed to dig up artifacts of the Iliad in ancient rubble, keep looking for an historical event, a real Deluge that happened and is recalled more or less in these ancient texts.
In one version of this science it is proposed that the Deluge occurred about 5600 BCE when the Black Sea was suddenly formed because of a catastrophic flood through a narrow breach between that great basin and the Mediterranean ocean pouring into it. The Black Sea (and its neighbor the Caspian sea) had been large but diminishing pools of fresh water from glacial melt, when the dam of ice between them and the Mediterranean broke at what is today the Dardanelles. According to the researchers reporting their findings in 1997, "Ten cubic miles of water poured through each day, two hundred times what flows over Niagara Falls ... The Bosporus flume roared and surged at full spate for at least three hundred days." The event flooded 60,000 sq. mi. of land as it greatly expanded the Black Sea shoreline to the north and west, and thus could have wiped out hundreds of prosperous human settlements, even whole cities.
As dramatic as this hypothesis is, however, subsequent scientific consideration has tempered and disputed it. Today the factual truth of the Deluge remains uncertain.
We come back therefore to interpretation. As we suggested for the notion of God, take these as a matter of authority, or as a matter of psychology, or as a matter of mystery. As you wish.
This then is the conclusion of the Epic….
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Music excerpt is “Machu Pichu” from the album
The Forest by
David Byrne