PO WER B EYO ND CO M PA RE
T he Epic of Gilgamesh BY RIA DUNN ILLUSTRATED BY MICHAEL NEMORIN
T
he Sumerians were the oldest known civilization to ever have existed. It was a civilisation which for a long time its very existence remained a mystery until archaeologists finally revealed that Mesopotamia was once the cradle of a civilization, “Archaeological excavation of the sites of the ancient cities in the Tigris-Euphrates valley has shown that this region […] was inhabited as early as 4000 B.C. by people known as the Sumerians” (Hooke, 1963: 18). This history of the civilisation matched the geographical region of the area irrigated by the Euphrates and the Tigris rivers. Archaeologists found that the wild growing wheat was what enabled the Sumerian population to expand and find its civilisation. This fertility of the region was due to the patterns of rainfall, which were to do with the location of the mountains and down land planes, along with the irritability of the land between the two rivers. The discovery of wheat around 15000 BC, along with the Sumerian’s taming of their water source through the invention of the wheel, led to the cultivation and storage of grain. These accidental geological, geographical factors therefore, allowed the Sumerians the settle down in one place. The Sumerians had developed a way of life that dominated their natural world in order to make it serve their own survival. The emergence of this agricultural civilisation thus presents the transition from a nomadic lifestyle to a sedentary lifestyle. This transition is encapsulated through the journey of Enkidu in The Epic of Gilgamesh, a myth written by the Sumerians around 2500 BCE as, “the story of Enkidu tells of the gradual
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