Discussion must demonstrate that you have read the material.Please do not post g

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Discussion must demonstrate that you have read the material.Please do not post generic responses that don’t contain any specific references to the material you read, such as “I really enjoyed chapters 1 through 15 of Moby-Dick. It was interesting!” Do not summarize what you watched.
Examples:
Your opinion about the themes and issues discussed in these stories, or ideas about what if anything the author is trying to teach, or what you think is the meaning behind symbols or metaphors you read.
making connections between these works of literature and other works of literature, either modern literature or older literature which might have influenced it. When we talk about ancient literature, a really exciting subject is Comparative Mythology — how and why very similar stories are being told across cultures, even in nations that had no contact with each other!
making connections between the literature and the world at the time it was written or on events that came later.
watch the first 5 minutes of the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOS78ul1_rA
read and answer questions:
The Martial Hero is probably the most popular character in all of literature, from the oral traditions of the Bronze Age to the blockbuster movies of today. (In fact, for fun, you might google the top 10 grossing movies of all time. Most of them have violence as a primary theme and/or use violence to solve their primary problem.) Martial, of course, means relating to battle or the military, which is where we get terms like “martial arts” and “martial law” — it’s all a reference to Mars, the Roman appropriation of the Greek god Ares, the god of war.
Most people don’t like violence, but for whatever reason they like stories about violence. When modern people identify the “hero” of such a story, what they usually mean is a regular person who will confront a danger so that the rest of us don’t have to. In our first unit, we saw that Katniss from the Hunger Games repeated an act of heroism attributed to Theseus long ago: they stepped to the front of the line of people who were about to be sacrificed.
Sometimes a hero will step up to defend us regular folks from a threat we couldn’t possibly handle on our own: a giant, a monster, an alien invasion. In modern context we might call such that person a superhero but for the ancients this character would probably be a god or a demigod.
“Indra fights the Dragon Vritra” is perhaps the earliest, purest form of this sort of hero story. It is a Vedic text, part of the ancient tradition of literature that would eventually become Hinduism. The rivers have dried up. That is a problem human beings absolutely cannot solve for themselves at this point in history. Maybe this refers to a real event, and the residents of ancient India (when people talk about the entity of India in the ancient world, they mean this large chunk of Asia that today is India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, and Nepal) didn’t really understand climate change or other scientific causes so they attributed this to a dragon stealing them. Enter Indra, another male atmospheric god like Zeus, Marduk, and Thor, who uses thunder to defeat the dragon Vritra, and then Vritra’s mom too for good measure. It’s a pretty simple story.
Note that there isn’t much suspense in the version of the story that we read. It’s pretty clear Indra is going to slay the dragon from the beginning. Modern audiences might like to feel a little more threat from the villain, but let’s be honest: when’s the last time you watched an action/ science fiction/ fantasy movie and said to yourself “maybe the terrorists/ aliens/ orcs are going to win”?
But Gilgamesh is not the same kind of hero. Note that at the beginning of the story he is a tyrant, a king who murders and rapes his own people. Even after he befriends Enkidu and the two go off on adventures, he isn’t doing anything we think of as “heroic”. When they go to kill the giant Humbaba, it isn’t because Humbaba is terrorizing people. They just think it’s a feat that will prove how mighty they are. They also want to steal his forest (which sounds like a weird thing to steal unless perhaps it refers to the conquest of forested Lebanon by one of the wood-poor Mesopotamian empires like the Akkadians).
That’s because, to a lot of ancient peoples, “hero” didn’t necessarily mean “good guy”. A hero story, to them, was about a larger than life character who took on enormous challenges and suffered enormous hardship. So you will see some ancient stories in which the “hero” might be kind of terrible and hurt innocent people — they will do amazing things, but often just in their own interests.
Some other notes about the Epic of Gilgamesh: Enkidu is a wild man who hangs out with wild animals, but once he has slept with the harlot, the animals won’t play with him anymore! I think this could be a reference to human beings transitioning from being hunter-gatherers to being settled farmers, which was actually happening all over the Middle East during this story’s time frame. There are almost no hunter-gatherers in the modern world. Pretty much every economy is dependent on farming. And no culture, as far as I know, has ever discovered farming and then said “no thanks” and gone back to hunting and gathering. So as crazy as this sounds, I think the harlot Shamhat represents civilization. Once you’ve tasted it, you can’t go back to being a wild man.
Were Gilgamesh and Enkidu supposed to be gay lovers? i truly do not know. Gilgamesh talks a lot about his love for Enkidu and even uses the phrase “loved him like a woman”, which sounds like it could mean sexually — but then again at another point in the story Gilgamesh says he loves his battle axe “like a woman”, so that might just be a Sumerian figure of speech. What i can say is that I don’t see any reason they should not have been lovers. Modern people tend to see history as having a long-standing taboo against homosexuality that just in the last few decades has begun to relax. It’s true that some of the world’s most influential religions have condemned homosexuality, but if you go back in time before the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) were predominant, you’ll see a number of cultures where they just didn’t have that taboo. Ancient Greeks were famously OK with homosexuality. It’s often referenced in Egypt and Rome . So I have no reason to think it would have been forbidden or frowned upon or uncommon in Sumeria. What do you think?
I don’t know if this was a note but I love Ishtar in this story! Ishtar, a goddess, offers herself to Gilgamesh and he actually says no, citing a whole list of her other lovers that she got bored of and destroyed. Goddesses are not used to hearing “no” and so she goes stomping off to her daddy, an even mightier god, and demands he unleash a sort of Godzilla sized bull on the city, OR ELSE she will break down the doors to the underworld and start what can only be described as a zombie apocalypse. Don’t ever let anybody tell you that George Romero, director of Night of the Living Dead, invented zombies in the 1960s. They’re clearly described here in ~1500 BC. I am just really tickled by Ishtar, what an entitled bratty princess she is. She reminds me of Veruca Salt from Willy Wonka/Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
You’ll notice that the story told by Utnapashtim is pretty much exactly like the Noah’s Ark story. I told you that sometimes different cultures will tell very similar stories because they share some consciousness or inner set of symbols. This isn’t one of those times. The Sumerians and the Old Testament era Jews were neighbors and probably shared this story.
Like Rustum, Gilgamesh ALMOST brings his friend a cure for inevitable death . this is a very common theme — it might seem that the greatest heroes could defy or outwit Death. These stories almost always end the same. Nobody evades death. Note also that the creature who stole the sacred herb is a snake, once again, associated with evil. Or possibly just with guarding the secret of eternal life! Ancient people might have thought snakes get younger when they shed their skins.
Son Jara/ Sundiata comes from Mali, and although there is still a country on the map called Mali, the story comes from an earlier Mali that was much larger and much wealthier.
A major theme of Son Jara is establishing his true and rightful place as the king of Mali. I’m not sure whether the real life kingdom of Mali saw a lot of conflict over who had the correct parentage and birth order to be the king but I can say that this was a common controversy in some countries in those times. It’s especially difficult to clarify the succession in cases where there are multiple wives of a single king, as there was with King Konate and the Buffalo Woman (Sundiata’s mom. Note that this is one of the few wives or mothers of heroes in all of mythology who is described as ugly!), and each wife would like for her son to be recognized as the heir.
The firstborn son is supposed to be the heir in this case (and most cases) and technically Son Jara wasn’t even the firstborn! Did you catch the mix-up that allowed Son Jara to be named the king although he wasn’t born first? And he has to take on trial by ordeal: a supernatural test which, if the person passes it, is going to reveal some truth more or less unrelated to the task at hand. More familiar examples might include the Sword in the Stone. How the hell is the ability to pull a stone out of a rock (and an anvil, in Mallory’s Le Morte d’Arthur) supposed to reveal who your dad is? Also, sadly, in real life, a lot of people (mostly women) have been put through ridiculous trials by ordeal to prove they were not witches — that last example shows that it isn’t just a story device. Ancient, pre scientific people really did believe you could set some sort of test and through it, fate or God or the gods would reveal the truth. can you describe a trial by ordeal in Son Jara?
Also take note that Son jara/ Sundiata was probably a real person, recent enough (1200s?) that traces of his life can still be seen in history. In a future paper, i’m going to ask you to find the real world basis for a myth, and he might be useful to you then.

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