VII Gilgamesh: The King Who Refused to Die
The Sumerian tale of the first known Search for Immortality concerns a ruler of long long ago, who asked his divine godfather to let him enter the "Land of the Living." Of this unusual ruler, ancient scribes wrote down epic tales. They said of him that Secret things he has seen; What is hidden from Man, he found out. He even brought tidings of the time before the Deluge; He also took the distant journey, wearisome and under difficulties. He returned, and upon a stone column all his toil he engraved. Of that olden Sumerian tale, less than two hundred lines have remained. Yet we know it from its translations into the languages of the peoples who followed the Sumerians in the Near East; Assyrians, Babylonians, Hittites, Hurrians. They all told and retold the tale; and the clay tablets on which these later versions were written down—some intact, some damaged, many fragmented beyond legibility—have enabled many scholars over the better part of a century to piece the tale together. At the core of our knowledge are twelve tablets in the Akkadian language; they were part of the library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh. They were first reported by George Smith, whose job at the British Museum in London was to sort out, match and categorize the tens of thousands of tablets and tablet fragments that arrived at the Museum from Mesopotamia. One day, his eye caught a fragmented text which appeared to relate the story of the Deluge. There was no mistaking: the cuneiform texts, from Assyria, were telling of a king who sought out the hero of the Deluge, and heard from him a first-person account of the event! With understandable excitement, the Museum directors sent George Smith to the archaeological site to search for missing fragments. With luck, 118