Investigation: The Gilgamesh Connection

Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, has watched his friend Enkidu die and sets out to find eternal life. At the edge of the world he meets Siduri, a woman who keeps a tavern by the sea. In the Old Babylonian version of the story she tells him he will not find the life he seeks: the gods kept life for themselves and gave death to humankind. So, she says, fill your belly, make merry day and night, dance and play, wear clean clothes, wash your head and bathe, cherish the child who holds your hand, let your wife delight in your embrace: this is the lot of humanity.

"Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry heart… Let thy garments be always white; and let thy head lack no ointment. Live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest all the days of the life of thy vanity" (Ecclesiastes 9:7–9).

Which Gilgamesh?

The Epic exists in several forms. The Sumerian poems about Bilgamesh (early 2nd millennium BC copies) are separate episodes. The Old Babylonian epic (c. 18th century BC) survives on a few tablets, including the "Sippar tablet" (also called the Meissner fragment) containing Siduri's speech. The Standard Babylonian epic (the twelve-tablet "He who saw the deep," whose last tablet is a later appendix, attributed to the scholar Sin-leqi-unninni, with the famous 7th-century BC copies from Nineveh) retells the Siduri scene in Tablet X but does not contain her advice to enjoy life. So the closest parallel is in a version more than a thousand years older than Ecclesiastes, and not in the version most widely copied in the 1st millennium BC.

Three explanations

(1) Direct borrowing: unlikely, since no evidence shows the Old Babylonian Siduri speech circulating in the Persian or Hellenistic period. (2) A shared tradition of "enjoy life in view of death" passed down in many forms (Egyptian harpers' songs also urge feasting, fine linen and perfume because life is short; Greek drinking songs say the same). (3) Independent development from common human experience. Most scholars (for example A. R. George; Sironi and Viano, 2022) favor a shared motif, perhaps with an indirect route; certainty is impossible.

The three-ply rope

In the Sumerian Bilgamesh and Huwawa (version A), Gilgamesh encourages Enkidu with sayings to the effect that two together will not perish, a towed boat will not sink, a three-ply rope cannot be cut. Ecclesiastes 4:12 says "a threefold cord is not quickly broken." Again, a proverb probably circulated independently of the poem.

How the site handles the texts

The Gilgamesh passages are paraphrased, not quoted from a copyrighted translation. Exact wording and line numbers must be checked against A. R. George, The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic (2003) before certification (EC-C08). The flood tablet pictured is the Standard Babylonian Tablet XI from Nineveh, not the Siduri tablet.