ABSTRACT
While Gilgamesh was by all accounts a genuine historical figure, as we already addressed, the exigencies of oral transmission through time led to his being sculpted as somebody more than human; as a figure with totemic energy and might. The same applies to the antagonists that he and other epical heroes like him are forced to combat. In the case of Gilgamesh, there’s Humbaba, the monstrous, terrorizing giant who reigns over the Cedar Forest. In Beowulf, there’s Grendel, the monstrous giant who terrorizes the Danes’ mead hall. Homeric epic provides us the one-eyed, monstrous, terrorizing Cyclops, whom Odysseus has to outwit. In Mongolian epic, meanwhile, it’s a many-headed ogre known as the manggus that the heroes must often battle and rout. Or, consider the anthropomorphic trickster figures who inhabit the oral stories of so many cultures—Ashanti, Cree, Chinese, Irish, Jewish, Welsh, Yoruba, and more (some even say the Odyssey is a stitched-together composite of trickster tales). And what of the Hindu Ramayana’s evil King Ravana, with his ten sprouting heads? Or, in antithesis to Ravana as a “negative character” (in keeping here with masala film-speak), what of the devoted and enterprisingly trickster-like monkey-god Hanuman? We ought also to draw attention to that Bull of Heaven which, at the behest of the goddess Ishtar, is cast down to destroy Gilgamesh’s subjects and their crops.
