We have entered into a struggle that has not a physical, but a metaphysical significance.

Entered “BRONZE AGE MARVEL HERO” as keyword into AI image generator from Midjourney 

Human TLDR: Gilgamesh is king in Uruk. Uruk, an ancient city in the south of Babylonia, now Iraq. He was an imposing giant figure, kingly, heroic, glorious. Gilgamesh was king, but he was a tyrant. He was an autocrat, who had his own way and abused his rights as a king... He's a tyrant, this man, because he's been given power and he uses it absolutely. And the gods listen to the complaints of the town of Uruk and they send a wild man down, who is in every respect the image of Gilgamesh, except that where Gilgamesh is a man of the city.  

Entered “BRONZE AGE MAGICAL FAUN BUDDY” as keyword into AI image generator from Midjourney

Enkidu - and that is his name - is a man of the wild. The poet has to find a way of bringing Enkidu to the city. To meet Gilgamesh so that he can divert his superhuman energies and stop him from abusing his people. And this is done through a sequence of events involving the seduction of Enkidu by a prostitute (Sodomy and Gomorrah). His humanization, turning from an animal into a man and his socialization, first of all, in the shepherd's camp where he learns to eat and drink like a human being and is clothed and then his humanization into society, his socialization in the city itself.   

Entered “PRIMITIVE TYRANT WRESTLING WITH A FAUN AT URUK CITY SQUARE” as keyword into AI image generator from Midjourney

So Enkidu comes to Uruk, the city of Gilgamesh fully intent on teaching Gilgamesh a lesson because he's heard about Gilgamesh's tyranny. And like all instinctive beings, he has a feeling of unfairness. You know, it seems to me that even small children understand the concept of fairness intuitively and Enkidu falls into that category. He meets Gilgamesh determined to stop his abuse, they fight, they struggle. They come to a standstill. Neither is the winner, but they recognize in each other a bosom friend and that is what they become and remain.       

Entered “DAVIDS SLAYING HUMBABA THE FIRE BREATHING OGRE” as keyword into AI image generator from Midjourney

Enkidu and Gilgamesh team up and they leave town to go on an adventure to the Cedar Forest where the ogre Humbaba who guards the Cedar Forest over in Lebanon. Gilgamesh and Enkidu resolve to go there to do him to death and to fell his cedars and bring them back to Uruk. And so they do. And that is their first glorious expert of heroism.  

Entered “BEAUTIFUL BRONZE AGE NECROMANCER GODDESS” as keyword into AI image generator from Midjourney

The second one if when they come back to Uruk after defeating Humbaba and chopping down his cedars. And Ishtar, the goddess of Uruk, is so impressed with the beauty of Gilgamesh that she falls in love with him, if she can fall in love and that is a difficult proposition for a goddess like Ishtar, who is in fact a prostitute. She is attracted by his physique, his manliness, his beauty and she proposes to him that he marry her. And he says "No, no one but a fool would marry a prostitute like you. Look at what's happened to your previous lovers. They've all come unstuck, I will have nothing to do with you".        

Entered “NECROMANCER LOVE GODDESS SCREAMING TO SUMMON ZOMBIES” as keyword into AI image generator from Midjourney

And she, as the goddess of his town Uruk is absolutely insulted by that and runs up to her father in heaven and says "give me father the Bull of Heaven with which to teach Gilgamesh and Enkidu a lesson and if you don't, I shall scream so loud that the dead will arise from the netherworld and eat the living. The first, I think, occasion in human literature where zombies have been brought into play. Well the zombies are something that her father doesn't want walking around the earth. He's rather they stay in the netherworld. And he gives his daughter the Bull of Heaven the constellation Taurus, a fiery bull in the sky (origin of minotaurs).       

Entered “HERCULES FIGHTING MINOTAUR" as keyword into AI image generator from Midjourney

 She brings it down to Uruk where it causes much damage, but in the end of course, Gilgamesh and Enkidu defeat it and slay it. And that is the point of the greatest achievements of this pair. They have slaughtered an ogre in the Cedar Forest and they have slaughtered the Bull of Heaven. But neither is it an unambiguously glorious thing to have done, because the ogre was placed in the Cedar forest to protect the Cedar by the gods and the Bull of Heaven, well, is the Bull of Heaven, also belonging to the gods.   

Entered “GODS SENTENCING YOU TO DEATH IN A DREAM" as keyword into AI image generator from Midjourney

And while they are having a banquet in the palace after these events, the gods are in council and Enkidu lies down to sleep and he witnesses the council in a dream. And the gods determine that because these two heroes have behaved badly, overstepped the mark, one of them shall die. And the one that shall die shall be Enkidu. And so Enkidu falls sick and after a long illness in which he is partly raving and having dreams of the netherworld, he dies. Now Enkidu was Gilgamesh's lover. They loved each other ( Chapter 1, Tablet 1: "You loved him and embraced him as a wife").  And the death of Enkidu beings about a huge change in Gilgamesh. He has lost the human he loved most in all the world. And this drives him crazy, not just because he has lost his friend, but also because he suddenly understands that death is real. And he fears for himself.        

Entered “SPOOKY PHANTASM IN THE NETHERWORLD” as keyword into AI image generator from Midjourney

 What grows in him is a horror of death, because he knows that he too, like Enkidu, will die. And he is driven to go on a mad quest to the ends of the earth to seek the secret of immortality. Because he knows that far away somewhere beyond the ends of the earth, there still lives an ancestor of his who was once king in Sumer. A different city, not Uruk, but not far away. But who still lives thousands of years later and is in fact immortal. And Gilgamesh reasons that if there is one human who become immortal, perhaps he could do that as well and get what he wants. An evasion of his own death.    

Entered “OLD MAN SITTING ON A TINY BOAT WITH MANY ANIMALS STRUGGLIN” as keyword into AI image generator from Midjourney

And so he sets out for the ends of the Earth. And in the end he gets there. He's taken across the waters of death into the presence of Utnapishtim, his ancestor, who lives immortal beyond the end of the world with his wife. And Utnapishtim explains to him the fact of his own immortality. The fact that this immortality was given to him by the gods, because they didn't know what else to do with him when Utnapishtim survived the great flood long ago in human history, when the gods resolve to wipe out mankind. And nearly succeeded, except that one among their number told Utnapishtim to build an ark. Get all his family aboard, all the seeds of living things. Yes it's the story of Noah. It's the Babylonian original. Utnapishtim tells this story to Gilgamesh and says "I'm immortal because the gods didn't know what to do after that with me, so they put me on this island far away and gave me immortality like them. But that's not going to happen for you. You can't become immortal as I have, because it was a one-off solution to a one-off event. 

Entered “BRONZE AGE DICTATOR SLEEPING ON COUCH WITH MOUTH OPEN AND FOOD ON THE TABLE” as keyword into AI image generator from Midjourney

But why don't you try to stay awake for a week? Just to show - just to demonstrate whether you're even ready to conquer death. See whether you can conquer sleep. Gilgamesh, who has been traveling for months and months without having a wink of sleep says, of course I can do that and immediately falls asleep. And it's demonstrated to him by the fact that he hasn't eaten for seven days, the food that's been put for him that he has slept for a week. And he is distraught and he realizes then, he begins to realize that he's not going to become immortal anytime soon. In fact, not at all.  So Utnapishtim sends him on his way home, having failed in his quest for immortality, but tells him where he can get some kind of compensation. Not immortality, but a plant that when he eats it will make him young again. A plant of rejuvenation.           

Entered “SNAKE SMOKING WEED" as keyword into AI image generator from Midjourney

And Gilgamesh dives to the bottom of the ocean, plucks the plant, but he doesn't trust what he's been told. He's very human, this Gilgamesh, as we'll find out. And he says "I'll put this in my belt and take it home to Uruk and when I get there I'll try it out on a young man. If the young man gets young again, then I'll know it works and I'll take some myself". So he goes home and on the way, just before getting to Uruk, there's a nice pool. And he's tired and dirty and hot. And so he puts his things by the side of the pool and goes in for a dip. One of the things he puts besides the pool is the plant of rejuvenation. And the snake, sniffing the fine scent of the plant, wiggles out from where he'd been hiding, picks up the plant of rejuvenation in it's mouth and wiggles away again. And as it wiggles away, it sheds its skin. And at that point, Gilgamesh knows two things. He knows, first of all, that what Utnapishtim had told him about the properties of this plant was true. But he also knows that he himself having had this plant in his hands has now lost it for good and failed completely. And with that, he goes home. And that's the end of the story.