The Epic of Gilgamesh

The Epic of Gilgamesh is a cycle of poems preserved on 12 incomplete Akkadian-language tablets found at Nineveh in the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal, with the tablets being found in the nineteenth century. The tablets date from the seventh century B.C. The time of the tale is one in which human beings felt close to the gods and believed that the gods intervened in their lives. Gilgamesh is a ruler who is seen as too devoted to war, and the gods hear the lament of the people and send their own created hero, Enkidu, to do battle with Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh defeats Enkidu, after which they are friends. They set out together against Humbaba to do battle. When Gilgamesh refuses the marriage proposal of the goddess of love, Ishtar, she sends a divine bull against him, and he and Enkidu kill it. Enkidu dreams that he must die for his role in killing the bull, and he does die. Gilgamesh seeks a way to see that his friend is granted eternal life and sets out on a journey to meet the one man who survived the Great Flood.

Many of the elements in this epic can be found in other heroic epics, from the journey as a

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y that he will return home and be reunited with his family and people. For many literary heroes, war is a way of life, and these heroes value what would contribute to success in battle--loyalty, strength, honor, and so on. Antigone also takes place in a time of war, but this play was written in a more philosophical age as Sophocles explores the relationship between the gods and their human followers. Antigone is the third play by Sophocles to address some element of the legend of Oedipus, but the three plays are not a formal trilogy as they were written at different times. The essence of the Oedipus myth revolves around personal responsibility in the Greek conception. Even though Oedipus appears to be the victim of a series of circumstances so that what happens to him should be no fault of his own, in the Greek view this is not the case. The structure of the three plays by Sophocles shows that Oedipus should have known even if he did not and that his stubbornness in the face of growing evidence as to his crime leads to his downfall. Antigone appears with her father first in the second of these plays, Oedipus at Colonus, after her father's crime has been revealed. She is very much her father's daughter, offering her loy
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Approximate Word count = 1548
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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