Lecture VIII. The Myths And Epics. 407
question which forms the burden of the twelfth and last book of
the Epic. Gilgames wanders from temple to temple, asking the
god of each if the earth has seized hold of Ea-bani, and if so,
what is his fate below. But the gods are silent; they give neither
answer nor sign. At last, however, he reaches the shrine of [443]
Nergal, the god of the dead, and Nergal causes the earth to open
and the spirit of Ea-bani to ascend out of it like a cloud of dust.
And then the answer is given. He who has friends to care for him
will“lie on a couch and drink pure water”; the hero too—
“who is slain in battle, as you and I have seen,
his father and his mother support his head,
and his wife [weeps] over him.
But he whose body lies forsaken in the field, as thou and I
have seen,
his ghost rests not in the earth.
He whose ghost has none to care for him, as thou and I have
seen,
the garbage of the pot, the refuse of food,
which is thrown into the street, must he devour.”With this dreary and materialistic picture of the other world
the Epic comes to an end. It is a curious contrast to the life in the
fields of Alu to which the Egyptian worshipper of Osiris looked
forward; and there is little need to wonder that the mind and
religious cult of the Babylonian should have been centred in the
present life. The Hades in which he was called upon to believe
was more dreary even than the Hades of the Homeric Greeks.
The Epic of Gilgames forces two questions upon our attention,
both of which have been often discussed. The one is the relation
of the story of the Deluge contained in it to the Biblical narrative
of the Flood, the other is the relation of Gilgames himself to
the Greek Hêraklês. From the outset it has been perceived that
the connection between the Babylonian and Hebrew stories is
very close, and that the Babylonian is the older of the two. The