This is the heavily damaged twelfth tablet in the Gilgamesh Epic found in the royal library of Ninevah. It’s content is disconcerting to scholars as the final chapter to the Epic, because so ranked it would seemingly resurrect Enkidu from the dead for a gratuitous and incoherent conclusion; an end to the Epic with Tablet 11, where Gilgamesh returns to Uruk after his wanderings, seems much more fitting and so nicely closes with an epilogic passage that poetically parallels the prologue in Tablet 1.
But this adventure is a traditional Sumerian tale of Gilgamesh and was appended by the Ninevah compiler for some importance, perhaps as further elucidation of the central theme of death, or rather, the meaning of life in the midst of death. I find its color and its archaic lore mysterious and so include it where other renditions omit it. I have rendered it perhaps more poetically and liberally than my other renditions here, so as to evoke its strangeness. We should remember that in traditional oral story telling, tales concatenate “spiritually” related matter, even if they are otherwise illogical. Relation, rather than logic, rules the story. Still, in deference to modern narrative sensibilities, I have opted to place the tale among the series of adventures that precede the death of Enkidu and the final wanderings of Gilgamesh.
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Music excerpt is
“Fra Angelico”
by 20th century composer, Alan Hovnhaness;
the album is
Hovhaness: Symphony Etchmiadzin