Across the Waters of Death: Gilgamesh and the Search for Eternal Life

Enkidu is dead. The great companionship — the one that gave Gilgamesh's violence meaning, the one that civilized the wild man and humanized the king — is over. Gilgamesh sits beside the body for seven days, refusing to allow burial, staring into his friend's face until a maggot falls from the nose.

Then the king of Uruk, conqueror of the Bull of Heaven, slayer of Humbaba, the man who two-thirds divine — falls apart.

He puts on animal skins. He wanders into the wilderness. The thing he sees in Enkidu's face is not just grief but arithmetic: Enkidu was mortal and died; Gilgamesh is also mortal. He has never thought clearly about this before. He has lived so much in his body's power that death has been theoretical. Now it is the only thought he has.

He travels to the mountains where the sun sets. Twin scorpion-beings guard the pass — creatures from the edge of mythology whose gaze means death. Gilgamesh stands before them and something in his face, two-thirds divine and one-third terrified, makes them step aside. He walks through twelve leagues of darkness, the tunnel through which the sun travels beneath the earth, and comes out the other side into a garden where the trees bear jewels instead of fruit.

He finds Siduri the tavern-keeper at the shore of the sea. She tells him what Mesopotamian wisdom will repeat across many texts: the life you seek you will never find. The gods kept immortality for themselves. Fill your belly. Be merry. Hold the child who holds your hand. Let your wife delight in your embrace. This is the work of mankind.

Gilgamesh does not accept this. He finds Urshanabi the boatman. He crosses the Waters of Death — using punting poles, one after another, so that his hands never touch the deadly water.

On the other side lives Utnapishtim, the only mortal ever granted eternal life — who will tell him the story of a great flood, and a plant at the bottom of the sea, and a serpent — and who will send him home empty-handed and alive.