the deluge
The Deluge tablet of the Gilgamesh epic |
“You, the wisest and bravest of the gods,
how did it happen that you so recklessly sent the Great Flood to destroy mankind?”
The Epic of Gilgamesh
Sin-liqe-unninni (version) circa 1300 B. C.
The oldest story has once again become the newest story, in the waning days of a year that has been relentlessly epic in its carnage. Cyclical tragedies of obliterating scale have always been part of the human condition and are in fact responsible for many key historical bifurcation points, but 2004 seemed to hit a new benchmark in human suffering. It was as if the Riders of the Apocalypse had once again been unleashed to thunder across the blood-soaked dust of a withering world, leaving Darfur, The Democratic Republic of Congo and Fallujah in their wake. Weakened and fractured by the relentless pounding of the great war horses’ hooves, the earth’s crust heaves, sending vast waves to suck tens of thousands of innocents into the roiling blue oblivion of a suddenly angered sea.
To try to comprehend the incomprehensible, humanity turns to its ancient texts. The most ancient of all is the almost 4,000 year-old Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, which Stephen Mitchell has exquisitely revivified in his Gilgamesh – A New English Version. Gilgamesh, on which large parts of so many ‘upstart’ later works such as the Bible and the Iliad were based, comes to us from a series of clay tablets that were lost for almost two thousand years, until serendipitously rediscovered in 1853, buried under the ancient ruins of Nineveh in what is now Iraq.
Mitchell describes the epic’s hero Gilgamesh as:
an antihero, a superman (a superpower one might say) who doesn’t know the difference between strength and arrogance. By preemptively attacking a monster, he brings on himself a disaster that can only be overcome by an agonizing journey, a quest that results in wisdom by proving its own futility.
Suddenly terrified of death, Gilgamesh travels to the underworld to seek out Utnapishtim, the sole survivor of The Great Flood, who alone among men has achieved immortality.
“Must I die too?” he asks Utnapishtim
Utnapishtim replies:
“But man’s life *is* short, at any moment it can be snapped, like a reed in a canebrake.
The handsome young man, the lovely young woman- in their prime, death comes and drags them away. Though no one has seen death’s face or heard deaths’s voice, suddenly, savagely death destroys us, all of us, old or young. And yet we build houses, make contracts, brothers divide their inheritance, conflicts occur- as though this human life lasted forever. The river rises, flows over its banks and carries us all away like mayflies floating downstream: They stare at the sun, then all at once there is nothing.”
Incredibly, Utnapishtim had been tipped off to the Great Flood by the gods, who exhorted him to build a reed ship and to “gather and take aboard the ship examples of every living creature.”
This week’s horrific earthquake/tsunami disaster with its unprecedentedly immense loss of human life was made all the more disturbingly Gilgameshian by the revelation that for some reason, there appeared to be no recorded animal deaths in the tsunami zone, despite the fact that areas with abundant wildlife such as Sri Lanka’s Yala National Park had been inundated, and the surrounding human population decimated.
“The strange thing is we haven’t recorded any dead animals,”
H.D. Ratnayake, deputy director of the Sri Lankan Wildlife Department, told Reuters.
“No elephants are dead, not even a dead hare or rabbit,” he added.
“I think animals can sense disaster. They have a sixth sense. They know when things are happening.”
Perhaps the wily Untnapishtim had carried them off on his reed ship.
For the rest of us, as for Gilgamesh, there is still no escape.
