Aten and Gilgamesh, Essay Example

. . . like as the bird of darkness, I have descended to the house of darkness, the dwelling of the goddess Irkalla.

—The Epic of Gilgamesh.

O sole god, like whom there is no other! Thou didst create the world according to thy desire . . .

—The Great Hymn to the Aten

Almost a thousand miles and a thousand years separate the Nile and the God of Aten from the Tigris-Euphrates and its earlier demigod, Gilgamesh. By comparison, that’s nearly the distance from Paris to Rome. And looking that far back from the present, the Vikings were first attempting a North American settlement. My two quotes take on a big task.

There is nothing in the first one to make you think that Gilgamesh is about religion in the way we think of it. To me it sounds like yet another heroic tale like Jason and the Argonauts, or labors of Hercules, or Beowulf. Actually in writing this I did think that Gilgamesh sounded like Beowulf in a way. I’m not the only one: a Google search reveals lots of entries on that subject. But what I think Gilgamesh reveals is a culture not ready yet for national unification. That makes sense because Mesopotamia was mainly a system of city-states at the time. There is no way a politically unified kingdom could tolerate warring gods and their x-rated stories. Even Rome finally couldn’t. But those tales really say something about the people of those cultures: they were great storytellers. You have to give them that.

I don’t know if Egypt ever produced any kind of great stories like Gilgamesh, but some say that The Great Hymn to the Aten may be another version of Psalm 104 in the Bible. Right or wrong, my second quote denies any competitors to the all-powerful single God, a new Sun God. There is no need to fall victim to gods like Irkalla anymore. It is a prayer fit for an increasingly centralized form of religion and government, even if it assumed that the god-battles had all been won. They hadn’t. Aten was dug up dead by foreign archeologists, not the native descendents of pharaohs and sun kings. So was Gilgamesh. That’s something both cultures have in common.