Ancient Mesopotamia
It is undeniable that the natural environment of ancient Mesopotamia had a profound effect on the earliest civilizations known to the world. Humankind’s ability to control irrigation waters directly correlates with the rise of mass agriculture. With this mastery of their river environment, early farmers were capable of supporting large urban populations. However, in Mesopotamia the Tigris and Euphrates rivers were both a source of life as well as destruction for early societies. In many ways, the geography of ancient Mesopotamia fostered a sense of catastrophic determinism within the Sumerians, Akkadians, and Babylonians. The scarcity of resources as well as the untamable nature of their deluge environment led these early people to believe their futures veered on a harsh predetermined course. This essay will demonstrate that many prominent sources in ancient literature, law codes, and archaic Sumerian religion reflect the rigorous geographic and natural conditions which caused this deterministic mindset.
The Epic of Gilgamesh, perhaps the most important literary piece of Mesopotamia, displays a world in which even the mightiest of human beings possessed little freedom to control their own fate due to an insurmountable environment. The Epic of Gilgamesh’s plot centers on Gilgamesh’s unavailing struggle to find eternal life. Naturally, he comes close but ultimately fails. A key aspect of Gilgamesh’s endeavor is his quest for wood in a cedar forest guarded
The story of “Gilgamesh” depicts all of the heroic triumphs and heart-breaking pitfalls a heroic narrative should depict to be able to relate to today’s audience. However, “Gilgamesh” was once considered a lost and forgotten piece of literature for thousands of years, so there is a tremendous gap between the time it was created and the time it was translated into language that today’s audience can understand. That gap in history makes several aspects of the story of “Gilgamesh” strange and unfamiliar because what we now know about ancient Middle Eastern cultures and languages is a lot less than what we know about the cultures that prospered after ancient Middle Eastern cultures. Much of the content in the story of
In the period of 2800-2700 B.C.E. Gilgamesh was seen as a god and a warrior to his people, and to them a god is immortal. Little did Gilgamesh know, he wasn’t immortal but the people of Uruk weren’t aware of this they actually believed that Gilgamesh was a divine. I think that Gilgamesh is an important historical hero that influenced the society to have a relationship with gods, view there gods, and on how divinity impacts culture in the Mesopotamian civilization. Throughout this essay I will address the main purposes and analyze the influence of Gilgamesh for his society.
The Epic of Gilgamesh is a moving tale of the friendship between Gilgamesh, the demigod king of Uruk, and the wild man Enkidu. Accepting ones own mortality is the overarching theme of the epic as Gilgamesh and Enkidu find their highest purpose in the pursuit of eternal life. The epic as such is the creation of the Semitic Babylonians and its first fragments belong to the so-called Old Babylonian period, during the dynasty of Hammurabi, in the first half of the second millennium B.C.E. But this first Old Babylonian version is very fragmentary. Fortunately later copies and further elaborations of these fragments were found in the excavations at Nineveh.
The Epic of Gilgamesh is one of the world’s oldest existing stories that were collected in Mesopotamia. It is a story about a heroic king named Gilgamesh, who treated his people in a nasty way. He was a domineering, and cruel leader, feared by many because of his unnatural strength. He forced his people into labor in order to expand his kingdom. The people cried unto the gods and they created Gilgamesh’s equal Enkidu, who they later became friends. Gilgamesh witnessed the death of his close friend Enkidu, and this made him to search for immortality because, he was afraid to die. However, he learnt that, no human was immortal, and that he was destined to die, just like his friend Enkidu.
This journal article examines 3 versions of the Gilgamesh Epic: the Old Babylonian version; the Eleven-Tablet version; and the Twelve-Tablet version. Though all 3 versions deal with the issues and choices of human beings and also with the inescapable issue of Death, the 3 different versions focus on 3 different aspects of Gilgamesh. The Old Babylonian version is the oldest, probably written during the Old Babylonian Period of 2003-1595 BC, and focuses on the fight of hero vs. man. The Old Babylonian version was circulated in the Near East and underwent many revisions. One of those revisions was the Eleven-Tablet version, which focused on the fight of hero vs. king. The Eleven-Tablet version, written in the later second millennium, adds to the beginning and end of the Epic, plus the Utnapishtim meeting, and shows the Gilgamesh-Ishtar passage that was added in Tablet 6. Another revision of the Epic was the Twelve-Table version, which focused on the fight of hero vs. god. The Twelve-Tablet version adds a translation of the second half of "Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the Netherworld" and changes the nature of the Epic by showing a conflict between Gilgamesh's two identities as god and man, and the rules controlling life in the
The Epic of Gilgamesh not only told a story of the people of a Sumerian Civilization and the battles of their great ruler. The Epic spoke of current environmental and natural issues “It shows an understanding of ecological processes and the consequences of human action on the earth that anticipates current ecological work.”( Perlin 35)
During the years of 3500 BC to 2500 BC, the geography of a land often impacted a civilizations development in great measures. Depending on the resources available or the detriments present due to certain topographical characteristics like rivers or deserts, a civilization could flourish or collapse. By studying the geographic features of growing societies like the Nile, Euphrates, and Tigris Rivers as well as the Mediterranean Sea of Egypt and Mesopotamia, the link between developing cultures and geography will be examined through sources, including Egypt: Ancient Culture, Modern Land edited by Jaromir Malek and Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization by Paul Kriwaczek. To determine the extent
In The Epic of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh’s pursuit for immortality is marked by ignorance and selfish desire. Desire and ignorance, as The Buddha-karita of Asvaghosha suggests, pollutes man’s judgment resulting in his inability to break the cycle of birth and death. At the core of Gilgamesh’s desire resides his inability to accept the inevitability of death, making his rationality behind the pursuit of immortality ignorant and selfish. Implicitly, Gilgamesh’s corrupt desire for immortality conveys that Gilgamesh does not mature as a character.
The impermanence of these structures furthered their deterministic world view by instilling with this ancient society a strong sense of fatalism. Everything they built was bound to be destroyed by their geographic environment. All of their hard work could be taken away in the instance of a flash flood or doomed by harsh desert corrosion. Only a hero king who is “two-thirds god” could bring precious wood into the river valley. 2 In this light, Gilgamesh’s quest for wood offers a small window into the effects of geographic constraints within Mesopotamian society.
The Epic of Gilgamesh has its place as one of the first examples of epic poetry in recorded history. The epic describes the adventures of the demigod-king Gilgamesh who, after the death of his close friend Enkidu, seeks immortality but is ultimately unsuccessful. This story arc is not dissimilar to those found in the epics of the ancient Greeks centuries later. This excerpt from The Epic of Gilgamesh clearly demonstrates Gilgamesh’s reckless lust for pride and fame at all costs.
According to Hammurabi's Law Code and the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Mesopotamian society valued and strong central authority to ensure prosperity through hard work and vigilance, while Egyptian’s emphasis on faith required humility and submission to one’s superiors to create a stable society. Hammurabi’s Law Code reveals the Mesopotamian values of hard work and self-vigilance while advocating a powerful central authority. Historically, Babylon, as well as all of Mesopotamia, needed to build strong and complex irrigation systems along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers for farming, due to their wild and unpredictable nature. Without such canals, the river’s random flooding rendered farming impossible, and the large scale of this project necessitated a strong central authority to monitor food production. The
The story about Gilgamesh is one of the earliest pieces of world literature dating back to the second millennium B.C.E. This story has been evolved gradually over a long span of a millennium, and has been enjoyed by many nations. The Epic of Gilgamesh teaches life lessons that apply to the past and present while revolving around the question of what it means to be human, and to experience the phenomenon of friendship, love, and death.
Perhaps one of the main reasons the Epic of Gilgamesh is so popular and has lasted such a long time, is because it offers insight into the human concerns of people four thousand years ago, many of which are still relevant today. Some of these human concerns found in the book that are still applicable today include: the fear and concerns people have in relation to death, overwhelming desires to be immortal, and the impact a friendship has on a person’s life. It does not take a great deal of insight into The Epic of Gilgamesh for a person to locate these themes in the story, and even less introspection to relate to them.
Mesopotamian men and women viewed themselves as subservient to the gods and believed humans were at the mercy of the god's arbitrary decisions. To counter their insecurity, the Mesopotamians not only developed the arts of divination in order to understand the wishes of their gods, but also relieved some anxiety by establishing codes that regulated their relationships with one another. These law codes became an integral part of Mesopotamian society. Although there were early Sumerian law codes, the best-preserved Mesopotamian collection of law codes was that of Hammurabi (fl.18th century B.C.).
The Epic of Gilgamesh is a poem about a journey of two heroes, Gilgamesh and Enkidu. One might view this poem as a simple story of friendship and mortality, but it is more. It is a story of the discovery of human achievement and creativity. After Gilgamesh returns from his journey with Enkidu, he writes down his story on a stone. I will argue that this act offers evidence of his discovery of human achievement. I will start by exploring why, in Acadian culture, there was no concept of human achievement, creativity, or self-purpose. Then, I will talk about why Gilgamesh’s recognition of mortality, helps lead him to his new discovery of human achievement. I will end with why Gilgamesh writing his story down is so important to the entirety of what this story means.