Comparing The Odyssey And The Epic Of Gilgamesh

Literature has the power to influence society in the time it is written and distributed, and can continue to influence other societies centuries later. For stories to endure the test of time they must be written down and preserved. The Epic of Gilgamesh is one of the oldest pieces of epic literature. It was recorded more than one thousand, five hundred years before Homer wrote The Odyssey and The Iliad. The Epic of Gilgamesh was recorded on clay tablets sometime between 2150 BCE and 1400 BCE, it chronicles some of the adventures of King Gilgamesh.[1] The modern iterations of the The Epic of Gilgamesh take the bulk of their material from a twelve clay tablets discovered by the Assyriologist Hormuzd Rassam during the excavation of Ninevah in

There is emphasis on the importance of civic harmony and friendship. King Gilgamesh terrorizes his subjects in the town Uruk. Seeing that, the goddess who created Gilgamesh creates Enkidu, first an adversary and later a friend for Gilgamesh. Through their travels and shared struggles the two form a bond that civilizes them both. Another major theme throughout the story is the unknown nature of death, fear of death, and the search for immortality. These themes are common in modern works of literature as well. Though modern works may not draw directly from the Sumerian epic, it is interesting to see that humanity’s fascination with death has stayed rather constant over the millennia.[5] More interesting still is that the character of Gilgamesh sought eternal life by trying to overcome various obstacles and challenges, and in the end he failed. But stories and poems about Gilgamesh were passed down until they were eventually recorded on clay tablets, lost for thousands of years, and finally discovered by a team of archaeologists. Now The Epic of Gilgamesh is studied in schools all over the world, perhaps giving Gilgamesh the immortality he always

He goes on to describe the similarities between the two stories. The significance does not necessarily lie only in the details of the stories; though there are striking similarities in characters and plot points. The real significance lies in the construction of the stories. The Epic of Gilgamesh formed over many years from a number of separate stories and poems that were written down together on clay tablets to form one cohesive epic story. The construction of a number of small adventures into one epic story can also be seen in The Odyssey, though not necessarily collated from different sources. Gesseth describes more similarities between The Epic of Gilgamesh and other works based on folklore like Faust by Goethe and Oedipus Rex by Sophocles. "It is a truism, of course, that writer use traditional material to create form. But their arrangement and selection of this material, the pattern and employment of it often reveal, almost in schematic form, their comment upon the past and their times...Folklore and myth supply the incidents and story-structure; by manipulating these the author on a higher level conveys his thought" (4). The Epic of Gilgamesh is an amalgam of poems, stories, and myths collected from Sumerian tradition. The fact that the original author of the twelve clay