Developments in medicine such as the miracle of penicillin and organ transplantation transformed lives. His quest was personal but his motivations were similar to those that have shaped modern medicine: the quest to prolong life and conquer death. In his quest for immortality, Gilgamesh walked paths no one had trod before, walking alongside the sun and across the Waters of Death. Through him, Gilgamesh hoped he would learn how to conquer death. The fear of death drove him to leave the kingdom of Uruk and search for Uta-napishti, a revered ancestor and the only man who had been given immortality by the gods.

Enkidu’s tragic death first made Gilgamesh aware of the certainty that he too would die some day. Then the gods sent a friend called Enkidu, who became Gilgamesh’s inseparable friend and companion. At the start of the epic, he was an arrogant tyrant who instead of serving his people caused suffering. Gilgamesh was a powerful king one part mortal, three parts divine. Reading the epic, I was struck by the parallels and contrasts between modern medicine’s attitudes to aging and mortality, and Gilgamesh’s quest to defeat death and live forever. 3Īt a seemingly unbridgeable distance of four thousand years, this epic story still holds relevance because its themes are about unchanging aspects of the human condition: the fear of aging and death, the wish for immortality, and the need to understand the meaning of human existence. 2 Fragments of the epic are still being discovered, and the work of translating and interpreting its verses continues. Assyrian king Ashurbanipal in Nineveh, led to their being deciphered and translated by a long line of scholars. The rediscovery of these tablets after eighteen centuries, in the library of the seventh century B.C. The enduring power of its themes kept it alive in common imagination and oral folklore, and a thousand years later, novices in scribe school were still painstakingly copying its verses onto what are known today as the Babylonian tablets.

The first known versions of the epic of Gilgamesh were recorded even earlier, when Sumerian scribes carved the story of the legendary Mesopotamian king on tablets four thousand years ago. “O Uta-napishti, what should I do and where should I go?” Gilgamesh’s plaintive cry still rings out, three thousand years after it was captured in wedge-shaped cuneiform script on tablets of clay. From The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Standard Version, Tablet XI 1 “O Uta-napishti, what should I do and where should I go?įor there in my bed-chamber Death does abide,Īnd wherever turn, there too will be Death.” (Assyrian palace relief on display in the Louvre)

The warrior king Gilgamesh grasping a lion in his left hand, and a snake in his right. Gilgamesh and medicine’s quest to conquer death May 16, 2019

Destiny conquer the day quest