An old man stands on the shore, watching the boat approach. The
old man wonders what happened to the Stone Things and who the stranger
is standing next to Urshanabi. When they get out of the boat, the
old man asks Gilgamesh to identify himself. Gilgamesh tells him
what he told Siduri and Urshanabi—about his grief for Enkidu, his
fear that the same fate awaits him, and his desperation to avoid
it if possible. The old man asks Gilgamesh why he grieves about
mortality—nothing lives forever. The old man says the gods established
that men would suffer death, and that when the gods give life, they
also decide the day of death. He says that death is our certain
destiny, even if we don’t know when it will happen.
Analysis
Siduri the veiled barmaid is a traditional figure in Mesopotamian mythology
and poetry, and in the Hurrian language her name means “young woman.”
The goddess of wine-making and beer brewing, she is usually considered
a manifestation of Ishtar. Her warmth and kindness to Gilgamesh
throughout this episode are notable, since he treated Ishtar with
such contempt in Uruk.
Scholars have failed to explain what the Stone Things
or the Urnu-snakes are or why Gilgamesh destroys them. A fragmentary verse
suggests that Gilgamesh also attacked a winged creature, who might
have been Urshanabi himself. A later fragment of verse suggests
that those Stone Things were magical images of some sort, and some
scholars have speculated that they were lodestones, a type of mineral
that possesses polarity. The tablets are frustratingly incomplete
on this matter, and no other versions to flesh them out have been
found yet. Thousands of clay tablets recovered from Mesopotamian
digs over the years are still awaiting translation, and thousands
more remain beneath the ground. The Italian Assyriologist Giovanni
Pettinato recently discovered and translated a never-before-seen
account of Gilgamesh’s death. Perhaps someone will discover a solution
to the mystery of the Urnu-snakes and the Stone Things too.
None of the three characters Gilgamesh meets in this tablet
recognize him when they see him, and they all give him the same
advice, which emphasizes that he should stop his quest for immortality. Each
of them takes note of Gilgamesh’s unkempt appearance, listens patiently
as he describes his terror of death, and reminds him that death
is certain and life is all we have. Even Utnapishtim, who is himself
immortal, advises Gilgamesh against pursuing his search for immortality,
which suggests that Utnapishtim, in all his knowledge, has an idea
about the value of life that Gilgamesh has not yet discovered. Utnapishtim
has foiled death, but he will not help Gilgamesh to do the same.
Utnapishtim says that Gilgamesh inherited his father’s mortality
and, like everything else in the mortal world, he is subject to
death. Gilgamesh must continue to live as a mortal and accept death
as part of life’s natural and inevitable cycle.
