by Bruce Thompson.
The second oldest of my four sons was diagnosed with leukemia when he was nine and a half years old. Childhood leukemia (acute lymphocytic leukemia, or ALL) is considered one of the most curable of cancers, but Brendon was not to be one of the lucky ones. His treatment, over four and a half years, involved two courses of chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant. Each seemed successful in its turn, but each finally failed. The cancer had infiltrated his central nervous system where the drugs could not reach. In the end, there was nothing we could do but wait for the inevitable. He died just after his fourteenth birthday following an evening spent visiting with his friends. He was one of the bravest children it is possible to imagine, and wise beyond his years. He never felt bitter that his life had been cut unreasonable short. His view was that no one has been promised some given number of years. The question is not how many years you live, but what you do with the years you have. Fourteen years is a lifetime to a person who is only fourteen years old.
During the four and a half years that we were fighting Brendon’s leukemia I developed an obsessive interest in the Epic of Gilgamesh. Different people cope with grief differently. My way of coping with grief is to write poetry. I consider poetry to be almost a bad habit. I would give it up as unbecomingly self-indulgent, but I have discovered that if I am not writing poetry, I tend to drink too much. My doctor assures me that villanelles are better for my health than vodka, so I allow myself to write a poem from time to time. Usually sonnets are enough to cope with the minor disappointment with which life is fraught, but when Brendon was diagnosed with leukemia, I knew I would need something more. Only an epic so profound and so universal that it would cry out to all humanity would do.
If you are a nerd of the right sort, you remember the episode of Star Trek: Next Generation in which Captain Picard is attempting to communicate with an alien species whose language is based on references to their own epic literature. Once he understands this, Picard tells the alien captain a brief, but moving version of the story of Gilgamesh. Why Gilgamesh? Why not Homer, or Shakespeare? No. Picard has wisely chosen a story so ancient that it speaks for all of humanity. So, I decided to write my own version of the Epic of Gilgamesh.
The Epic of Gilgamesh is, of course, a poem about death. I knew Brendon would ask me questions about death once he understood that he was dying. I needed to have answers. Christians have a rich mythology of death. They have interesting stories peopled with colorful characters. These stories convey, with vivid imagery, how a Christian should feel about death and dying. Not all Christians take these stories literally, but even those who do not, find the stories to be “true” in their essential character. According to the stories, the universe is ultimately under the jurisdiction of a just, merciful, and loving force; and human souls occupy a privileged place in that universe. When we die, we go to a better place.
I am not a Christian. I do not believe the Christian stories about death and, given my skepticism, I did not expect my son to believe them either. When I say that I do not believe the Christian stories, I do not mean that I cannot take them literally; I mean that I do not find them to be true even in their essential character. Like many secular humanists, I find the universe to be awesome and beautiful, but I have seen no evidence that it is just and merciful, nor that humans have a privileged status in the cosmic order of things. The pain we suffer is not part of a grand and benevolent plan. It is just pain. I was afraid that when my son began to ask questions about death, I would have no meaningful stories to tell. Gilgamesh, therefore, offered a reasonable refuge. Gilgamesh also faces death without the comfortable safety net of Christian belief. He comes from a time so young that he seems almost free of preconceptions. He faces death with a kind of naked innocence, as if for the first time. That was the story I needed to hear!
Let me quickly summarize the story. King Gilgamesh of Uruk is part man and part god. He is so energetic and forceful that he is exhausting his people. At last they call out to the gods to give them some relief. The gods create Enkidu, another man so energetic and forceful that he is a match for Gilgamesh. They fight. The battle lasts all night long; but, in the end Gilgamesh prevails. However, rather than killing Enkidu, he spares Enkidu because he admires his courage and strength. The two heroes become inseparable friends.
They decide to challenge the forest monster Humbaba. The battle does not go well, but, with the help of Shamash, the god of the Sun, they defeat Humbaba and return home in triumph. Gilgamesh is so glorious in his triumph that even Ishtar (the goddess of love and beauty) falls in love with him. She tries to seduce him, but he spurns her. This makes her so angry that she calls upon the Bull of Heaven to punish Gilgamesh. To her dismay, Gilgamesh and Enkidu together defeat even the Bull of Heaven and throw a dismembered haunch of the bull into her face! The defeat of the Bull of Heaven so offends the gods that they decide either Gilgamesh or Enkidu must die. Enlil, the king of the gods, arbitrarily decides that it shall be Enkidu.
So, Enkidu dies. Gilgamesh is devastated by the loss. He becomes painfully aware of his own mortality and realized that he also must eventually die. He decides to go on a journey to find the secret of immortality. He fails in this quest.
I believe the journey of Gilgamesh was a real journey, although I doubt that he went alone. I expect he took an expedition of warriors with him, as any sensible king would do. But the poem has left us with clues that fit together too neatly to suppose that the journey was just a fantasy. Some king actually made this journey, and there is no reason to suppose that it was not Gilgamesh, or rather, Bilgames, the historical Sumerian king on whom the legends of Gilgamesh are based.
Clue #1. The original poem tells us that the purpose of the quest was to find Utnapishtim, the one man who, according to legend, had been made immortal by the gods. He reportedly lived at “the source of all rivers.” Hence, the journey probably began by following the Euphrates River to find its source somewhere to the west. If Gilgamesh left during the summer, and journeyed toward the setting sun, the Euphrates River would take him west-north-west, directly toward the summer sunset. Following a river would have been practical, to ensure that the expedition had a source of water. Game would also have been plentiful.
Clue #2. The first notable adventure on the journey was that Gilgamesh encountered a pride of lions. We think of lions as endangered, restricted to wildlife preserves in central Africa. But lions were common in the ancient Mediterranean world, even as recently as the Roman period. They were especially common in Mesopotamia, which was then, not a desert, but a veldt-like grassland: an ideal habitat for lions. As a result of this encounter, Gilgamesh became associated with lions. He is usually depicted holding a (disproportionately small) lion, as if it were a pet kitten. The encounter with the lions confirms that Gilgamesh (and his expedition) were following the Euphrates River. Lions were especially common along riverbanks. The river supplied them with water, and it attracted the game that they needed to hunt.
Clue #3. The next significant encounter in the poem is with the “scorpion people” who guard the entrance to the Mashu Mountains. Gilgamesh does not attempt to fight with them, but, after some pleading, he gets their permission to pass into the mountains. The Euphrates River flows out of the Taurus mountains in what is now southern Turkey. During the time of the Assyrians, and probably much earlier, that region was home to the Urartu tribes, fierce warriors who revered scorpions as a tribal totem. Their descendants (the Kurds) still live in that region, and still use scorpion motifs in their weaving to this day. Their weaving includes many other motifs, but scorpions are especially popular. The Kurds regard the scorpion as a symbol of good luck. The Kurds today are Muslims, and Islam discourages the making of representational images. Hence the scorpion motif in Kurdish weaving is very stylized. But once you learn to recognize it, you can see it everywhere.
Clue #4. The Mashu (or twin) Mountains are described in the poem as a pair of peaks so tall that they hold up the sky. The mountain that best fits this description is Mount Ararat. Mount Ararat, in eastern Turkey, is not a single mountain, but two volcanic cones known as Greater Ararat and Little Ararat. They stand side by side, and, despite the name, Little Ararat is impressively tall. They are clearly “twins.” They are so much taller than the surrounding landscape that they do, indeed, seem to hold up the sky. Moreover, the southern tributaries to the Euphrates River lead directly to the foot of Mt. Ararat, so Gilgamesh would have encountered them, if that is the route he took. Unfortunately, the twin peaks do not stand at the entrance to the Taurus Mountains, where we would assume Gilgamesh was at this point in his journey. They are hundreds of miles to the east, although they are still within the territory controlled by the Urartu tribes.
I speculate that the Gilgamesh expedition did reach Mt. Ararat; but, when they ran out of river, they decided they were traveling in the wrong direction and turned back. In later retellings of the story, the details were condensed. For the sake of poetic economy, the Mashu Mountains were relocated to the entrance to the Zagros Mountains. It makes for a better story.
Clue #5. In any case, having been granted access to the mountainous region by the “scorpion people,” the poem tells us that Gilgamesh next entered the “path of the Sun,” a long, dark cavern beneath the Earth. The Sun uses this cavern to journey from the place where it sets in the west to the garden in the east where it rises on the following morning. The Anatolian forests of the time were so dense that they blocked out the light of the Sun. Anyone who has read Tolkien’s The Hobbit will remember the long, dark journey through the forest of Mirkwood, which Tolkien describes as much like journeying through a tunnel. Classical descriptions of the forests of Anatolia probably provided the classical source for Tolkien’s Mirkwood. In an old European fairy tale, The Man Who Wanted to Live Forever, the hero, Bodkin (who is unmistakably a fairy tale descendent of Gilgamesh) journeys through a forest in search of someone who can tell him how to live forever. According to the story, “the dark green of the trees closed around him so that he felt as though the road led for many miles through a dark green tunnel.” Ryan and Pitman (Noah’s Flood, 1998, 241-242), who also try to sew together a historical journey for Gilgamesh, also speculate that the Anatolian forests were the basis for the “path of the Sun.”
Clue #6. According to the poem, the tunnel takes Gilgamesh to the garden of Shamash, where the trees are made of stone and bear fruit of precious gems. This is, in my opinion, the most telling clue that we are on the right path. I believe that the desire to travel west drove Gilgamesh to take tributaries of the Euphrates River that fed in from the west. This would eventually have stranded the expedition high in the mountains of central Anatolia. Assuming Gilgamesh had become lost in the Anatolian highlands, he would eventually have found himself at the headwaters of the Kizil Irmak, the longest river in modern Turkey. He would then have followed the Kizil Irmak downstream into Cappadocia.
In Cappadocia, near the modern village of Aktepe, is a geological feature known as the Valley of Fairy Chimneys. Nowadays this is a popular tourist destination. In this valley, a hard layer of volcanic lava was deposited over softer rock. As the valley eroded, caps of hard lava protected the softer rock beneath. The result is a cluster of weird geological formations in which narrow pillars of rose-colored rock support broad caps of darker lava. It looks, for all the world, like a garden of trees made of stone! I believe the Valley of Fairy Chimneys is Shamash’s garden. All that is missing are the fruit of precious gems, but that is a detail that any poet with half an imagination would have thought to add.
Clue #7. Next the poem tells us that Gilgamesh arrived at the home of Siduri, the goddess of fruit and winemaker to the gods. Following the Kizil Irmak, Gilgamesh would eventually have reached the southern shore of the Black Sea. The climate there is temperate and moist—ideal for growing fruit. The original cherry trees were grown in this region. Indeed, all stone fruit seem to have evolved from trees that originated in this region. Grapes are grown there to this day.
Clue #8. Gilgamesh came to the home of Urshanabi, the boatman who could take him to his goal, the home of Utnapishtim. However, according to the poem, before he found Urshanabi he encountered beings described as “things of stone.” For reasons that are not clear—the tablets are so broken that it is difficult to make out the meaning—Gilgamesh drew his sword and destroyed them. This apparently was a mistake. When he encounters Urshanabi, the boatman complains that Gilgamesh has made the crossing to Utnapishtim more difficult because the “things of stone” have been destroyed. What could this possibly mean?
Ryan and Pitman (Noah’s Flood, 1998, 243-244) speculate that Gilgamesh has now reached the Bosporus, the narrow channel that connects the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara. This strait is legendary for its swift and dangerous currents. In fact, as Ryan and Pitman explain, currents in the Bosporus run in opposing directions. A swift surface current runs from north to south, carrying relatively warm river runoff from the Black Sea into the Sea of Marmara. Under this current is a current of colder, heavier water flowing north into the Black Sea. Until the invention of motorized vessels, boatmen trying to navigate the Bosporus would lower rocks from their boats into the lower current. The force of the lower current upon the rocks would counteract the swift flow of the upper current, keeping the boat from being swept away. Not realizing the existence of the lower current, ancient boatmen must have thought of their rocks as alive, and able to pull the boat against the current. The loss of such stones would have made a crossing of the Bosporus impossible.
Clue #9. In the poem, Gilgamesh prevails upon Urshanabi to attempt a crossing even without the “things of stone.” The boatman agrees, but he tells Gilgamesh that he must cut three hundred punting poles. They will attempt a crossing to the home of Utnapishtim by punting across the “deadly waters,” using each pole to make only a single thrust. This suggests that they avoided the Bosporus, but that they attempted a crossing of the Black Sea itself. Away from the treacherous currents of the Bosporus, the stones would not be needed, and the bottom of the Black Sea around the mouth of the Bosporus is relatively shallow. But, like the Bosporus, the waters of the Black Sea are layered. The upper layer, fed by streams and rain, is relatively clean and fresh. It supports a variety of fish. The deeper water is cold, salty, and devoid of oxygen. It is the abode only of anaerobic bacteria, which produces toxic hydrogen sulfide gas. Occasionally, an up-welling of gas from the lower layer has been known to engulf entire fishing boats, killing all on board. These are deadly waters. Punting through shallow waters should be relatively safe, provided the punting poles do not disturb the lower water, but one would want to be excessively careful.
Clue #10. So, if I am right, the end of the journey puts Gilgamesh somewhere in Thrace, the region of Europe on the western coast of the Black Sea. One last clue suggest that this is correct. Gilgamesh is disappointed that Utnapishtim cannot provide him with the secret to immortality; but, Utnapishtim does offer Gilgamesh a consolation prize: an herb that can restore youth, and stave off death temporarily. If this refers to a real herb, the likeliest herb, in my opinion, is colchicum, or autumn crocus. Even in ancient times the Black Sea region was known for this herb. It is named after Colchis, a region at the extreme eastern end of the Black Sea, the destination of Jason and the Argonauts. It is used to treat gout, a disease that typically afflicts the elderly; so, it might reasonably be described as “youth-restoring.” Colchicum can still be found throughout the Black Sea region. Unfortunately, the herb in the poem is described as aquatic. Gilgamesh must dive into the water to find it. Colchicum is not aquatic, so it is not a slam-dunk that colchicum is the herb described in the poem. But I think it is suggestively close.
On the journey home, a snake steals the youth-restoring herb, so Gilgamesh returns home empty-handed. He has not discovered the secret of immortality, nor even how to temporarily restore youth. Even so, Gilgamesh returns home wiser than he was when he left. He has learned to accept death.
My son Brendon loved wildlife and he loved the outdoors. During his last summer, when we knew no further treatments were possible, we took him on an epic journey. He went camping in Wyoming, saw a rodeo is South Dakota, took a trail ride through Yellowstone Park, went fishing in Oregon, and took a boat ride on Crater Lake, where the water is so pure that fish cannot survive because there is nothing to eat. He saw the Golden Gate Bridge, the canyon lands of Utah, the Grand Canyon, and (on the way back home) Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. On that trip Brendon traveled through almost all the states west of the Mississippi, visited ten national parks, crossed all five American deserts, most of the major mountain ranges, and explored the two most extensive cave systems in North America. Like Gilgamesh, he went to the edge of the Earth and back.
One of my sons, who was five years old when Brendon died, is excited about the possibility that modern science might someday defeat the biological processes that cause aging and death—a project sometimes called “The Gilgamesh Project.” I have pointed out to him that, while I have no objection to his achieving immortality, it isn’t the most important thing. A person who lives a thousand years, but wastes that time, is no better off than someone who lives only fourteen years but makes the most of it.