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Eternal Life In The Epic Of Gilgamesh

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The Epic of Gilgamesh talks about King Gilgamesh. In the beginning he was not a great leader and so Enkidu was sent to him to help him. Which he did a great job with, and Gilgamesh and Enkidu became best friends (Lecture). Then later on Enkidu is about to die and Gilgamesh does not understand how to deal with this, and so he goes on a quest to find eternal life. He stumbles upon Siduri, a female tavern keeper, who tells him to be happy in the moment and stop his search. Gilgamesh however is not satisfied with what she tells him and he continues his search. After being on his journey for a long time and hitting different obstacles he finally reaches Utnapishtim, a former mortal whom the gods gave eternal life to. Utnapishtim tells Gilgamesh how he got his eternal life. He then tells Gilgamesh that eternal life is not his destiny, but instead it was to be a great ruler (Epic pg 18-22). This epic held great historical evidence to the Sumerians because of their religion. They knew not to wish for the eternal life because that was only meant for the gods they worshiped. Instead they should be enjoying their day to day life and living the best they can because that is what matters, and because in the …show more content…

Sumer was a city in Mesopotamia, meaning that the land is between two rivers. The two rivers are the Tigris and the Euphrates (Lecture). The land could have been easily flooded by the two rivers. Also, there are always people afraid of death and seek out something they like more. Even if the epic as a whole may not be real there are certainly parts of it that could be. Also, stories always get aggregated when passed down from generation to generation. That means that this story could have happened, but it was not as drastic as the epic of Gilgamesh. This story had a greater meaning to the Sumerians and they did not care if it was all facts, it was more about what they took from

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