Volkan Nuri Çoker—HUM 111

The Likeness of Death: is there Wisdom in Gilgamesh?

It seems fitting that one of the oldest remaining works of world literature opens with a

promise to uncover some long-buried ancient wisdom. The Epic of Gilgamesh begins with

praise for a man the narrator describes as almost superhuman, who “saw what was secret,

discovered what was hidden, / he brought back a tale of before the Deluge” (Gilgamesh, 1; I

7-8).1 We expect to hear this secret divulged, but are we ready to hear it? Are we ready to

listen carefully to what the poem says, or will we just be satisfied with the first appearance of

something that seems “deep,” even if it should turn out to be rather banal? Gilgamesh is, as

the poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, “the epic of the fear of death” (xiii), but it is much more

than that. Through the device of verbal repetition with variation, the poem opens a perspective

on human mortality that cannot be reduced to the banality that everyone dies. Rather, the

poem explores the specifically human experience of death: an indirect and social experience

that relies on a world of shared meanings, including literature itself.

After many grueling adventures, the wisdom the poem promised us arrives at the end

of Tablet X, when Gilgamesh meets Utanapishti, the only mortal man who has become

immortal in confrontation with the gods. After asking Gilgamesh what he has achieved in his

hard and perilous journey in search of immortality, Utanapishti imparts this lesson:

No one at all sees Death,

No one at all sees the face [of Death,]

No one at all [hears] the voice of Death,

Death so savage, who hacks men down.

1
All citations refer to: The Epic of Gilgamesh, trans. and ed. Robert George, London:
Penguin, 1999. Listed are page, tablet, and line number.
 Ever do we build our households,

ever do we make our nests,

ever do brothers divide their inheritance,

ever do feuds arise in the land.

Ever the river has risen and brought us the flood,

the mayfly floating upon the water.

On the face of the sun its countenance gazes,

then all of a sudden nothing is there! (86-7; X 304-15)

The passage consists of three sections, each with its own message. The first section expresses

a general idea about the human relationship with death. The second section records typical

communal activities—founding families and households, dividing or fighting over inherited

property when an older family member dies—with the repeated phrase “ever do,” which

marks these activities as customary and continuing across time. Finally, the last section

delivers an extended metaphor of the brevity of human life, relating the human being to a

mayfly: a tiny insect that lives only for a day on the surface of a river.

How do we know that this mayfly represents human experience? Here the passage’s

verbal repetition with variation is decisive. Because the third section begins with the word

“Ever,” we understand the activity of the mayfly to be the last in the series of activities that

Utanapishti recounts in the middle section. By introducing image of the mayfly with “Ever,”

Utanapishti provides a bridge between his account of typical human actions and the

experience of the mayfly looking at the sun just before dying. Like the mayfly, we look up at

the sun, in the midst of life, and very soon afterward, we are no more.

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 This passage expresses that life is short and that death comes without warning. Yet the

most interesting thing that the passage tells us about our human experience of death is really

that we do not experience it. We do not see death coming, fight with it or submit to it; by the

time death arrives, it is already too late: “all of a sudden nothing is there.” This line brings us

back to the first section, in which Utanapishti says that no one can see Death’s face or hear

Death’s voice. In this section as well, repetition with variation plays an important role in

establishing the meaning. It would not be enough to say that “no one at all sees death,”

because then Death (with a capital D!) could just be a person who is invisible. Only with the

combination of face + voice do we have a full picture of a person, a personification of death.

This is precisely what none of us can experience: Death as another person, someone whom we

can see and speak to, someone who calls and then comes to get us, someone we can fight.

There is only one line in this section that does not repeat the formula beginning with

“No one…” It is this line: “Death so savage, who hacks men down.” Utanapishti contradicts

himself here. He personifies death, even though he has been telling Gilgamesh that such

personifications are false. He says it again a little later on: “…never was drawn the likeness of

Death, / never in the land did the dead great a man” (87; X 317-8). Anthropomorphic images

of death are false; death does not have a face or a voice. Why, then, does Utanapishti himself

imagine death in human form? Is he trying to speak a language that Gilgamesh will

understand, if only for one line? Or is it just hard for any of us to talk about death without

resorting to humanoid images, even though we know their limitations?

Throughout the epic, Gilgamesh has assumed that he can solve any problem by

fighting with it man-to-man. He cannot do this with death. The problem is not just that death

is too powerful, or even that it comes without calling. The problem is that no one experiences

death at all as an individual. There is nothing to experience, because once death is present, the

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individual is absent, like the mayfly. Humans are like mayflies insofar as neither creature can

experience its own death. Yet in another respect, people are not like mayflies.

Unlike the mayfly, people are creatures of language who live in societies. Even our

earliest memories involve other people. Other people do not only shape our behavior, but they

also give us the words we later use to express ourselves, and these words contain meanings

that others have put there. We participate from very early in our lives in a world of shared

meanings. For this reason, we can form an awareness of things that lie beyond our individual

experience. Death is one of these things. We cannot see death come for us, but we can see

others die, and talk to each other afterward about what this means.

We only experience death interpersonally, and wherever two people come together—

even when one of them is dead or dying—that world of shared meanings is also present.

When Enkidu dies, Gilgamesh thinks he can leave his culture behind and fight against death

man-to-man, as he did with Humbaba, the bull of heaven, and even “the Stone [Ones, who

crewed] the boat” (79; X 102). In the presence of Utanapishti, Gilgamesh realizes that he

cannot confront this problem in this way. Though he was expecting to make Utanapishti fight,

he instead asks him to tell his story: the “tale from before the Deluge” that the narrator

promised us at the beginning (1; I 8). Through this story, we learn along with Gilgamesh

about Utanapishti’s own struggle with death. Uniquely, Utanapishti succeeds in that struggle,

but not in direct, man-to-man combat. He succeeds only through a complex intrigue involving

a split in the society of the gods, and deviant—even deceptive—speech in his public role as

king. His is not a model that Gilgamesh, or anyone, can follow.

Where, then, can wisdom be found in this poem? The poem’s last words, which are

also the last words of its hero, give us a clue. After failing to obtain physical immortality,

Gilgamesh returns to Uruk with Urshanabi, to whom he introduces his city:

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 ‘O Ur-shanabi, climb Uruk’s wall and walk back and forth!

Survey its foundations, examine the brickwork!

Were its bricks not fired in an oven?

Did the Seven Sages not lay its foundations?

‘A square mile is city, a square mile date grove, a square mile is

clay-pit, half a square mile the temple of Ishtar:

three square miles and half is Uruk’s expanse.’ (99; XI 323-9).

Gilgamesh plays the role of Ur-shanabi’s tour-guide, just as the narrator did for us at the

beginning of the epic, introducing Uruk to the reader with these same words (I 18-24). The

perspective on Uruk that the poem presents at the beginning has become Gilgamesh’s own

perspective. It is an admiring perspective, but also one that suggests a certain distance, or

objectivity. The last three lines are matter-of-fact, saying no more than what one might find

on a map. Though the pride he takes in his city is evident from the first verse paragraph,

nowhere does he say that it is simply his city. He does not say that he built it, even though the

narrator says something like that at the beginning of the poem. The only people Gilgamesh

directly credits here for the construction of the city are the mythical Seven Sages. Gilgamesh

may perhaps consider the city his lasting legacy, but the emphasis in these last words is really

not on him at all. Rather, Gilgamesh comes home to identify with his city as the place that

gives his life its defining meaning. In so doing, he suggests a shift of perspective on what we

have already read: what if the city, not Gilgamesh, has been the hero of the poem all along?