![]() Even the gods are eventually humbled into accepting their limits. Similarly, the gods disapprove of Enlil for his prideful decision to flood the earth, and so Enlil grants Utnapishtim and his wife eternal life as penance. He returns to Uruk more humble, accepting his place in the hierarchy of gods and men. As soon as he seems to achieve it, it is stolen away. Gilgamesh, after the death of Enkidu and the failure of his own quest for immortality, comes to realize that he cannot defy the gods by acquiring the secret to everlasting life. We also see in the epic that characters may grow more humble and abandon their pride. Gilgamesh’s pride has brought him great glory in battle, but it also leads to the death of his closest friend. This lesson is similar to one contained in the Bible: that pride comes before the fall. His sexual needs are matched only by his militarism, constantly fighting with and besting all. In short, Gilgamesh' monstrous appetites mean that he has 'taken' (in the biblical sense) all of the young wives and daughters. The punishment for this is Enkidu’s death. Andrew George, in his updated translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh: A New Translation, offers a perspective on this stanza. Though the Bull of Heaven is sent to punish Gilgamesh for hubris, he and Enkidu kill it, showing again that Gilgamesh is too proud to obey the will of the gods. We can interpret all this conflict arising from Gilgamesh’s failure to accept his place, and from Ishtar’s own sense of superiority to mortals. Ishtar lashes out at what she sees as his “hubris” (excessive pride) by threatening to release the dead into the world of the living unless Anu sends the Bull of Heaven to avenge her. When Gilgamesh rejects Ishtar’s offer of marriage, she is insulted that he, a mortal, turns her down, even though he has good reason to: she has treated her past lovers poorly. By the end of the epic, however, Gilgamesh has learned to be more humble, and this “moral” of accepting one’s place in the hierarchy of the universe is one of the story’s main lessons. Likewise, among the gods, Enlil is humbled after ordering mankind destroyed by a flood, because it was not his place to make such a prideful decision. Gilgamesh’s quest is first motivated by pride, and in Enkidu’s death he pays an enormous price. To overstep the bounds of that position is to be proud, something the gods punish harshly, even among themselves. She is a sacred prostitute who plays a significant role in bringing the wild man Enkidu into contact. In The Epic of Gilgamesh, men and gods each have their place in a clearly-defined hierarchy. Shamhat ( Akkadian:, romanized: amat also called Shamkat in the old Babylonian version of Gilgamesh' 1) is a female character who appears in Tablets I and II of the Epic of Gilgamesh and is mentioned in Tablet VII.
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