Hero Of Tale Of Two Cities

[Peppin Kishore]

Themyth known today as the Epic of Gilgamesh was considered in ancient times to be one of the great masterpieces of cuneiform literature. Copies of parts of the story have been found in Israel, Syria, and Turkey, and references to the hero are attested in Greek and Roman literature.

The tale revolves around a legendary hero named Gilgamesh (Bilgames in Sumerian), who was said to be the king of the Sumerian city of Uruk. His father is identified as Lugalbanda, king of Uruk, and his mother is the wise cow goddess Ninsun. No contemporary information is known about Gilgamesh, who, if he was in fact an historical person, would have lived around 2700 B.C. Nor is there any preserved early third-millennium version of the poem. During the twenty-first century B.C., Shulgi, ruler of the Sumerian city of Ur, was a patron of the literary arts. He sponsored a revival of older literature and established academies of scholars at his capital Ur and at the holy city of Nippur. Shulgi claimed Lugalbanda as his father and Gilgamesh as his brother.

Although little of the courtly literature of the Shulgi academies survives, and Sumerian ceased to be a spoken language soon after the end of his dynasty, Sumerian literature continued to be studied in the scribal schools of the following Old Babylonian period. Five Sumerian stories about Gilgamesh were copied in these schools. These tales, which were not part of an epic cycle, were originally oral narratives sung at the royal court of the Third Dynasty of Ur.

What each must seek in his life never was on land or sea. It is something out of his own unique potentiality for experience, something that never has been and never could have been experienced by anyone else.

I tell people to watch for these kinds of hero stories in their own businesses and lives and retell them to build trust and connection with stakeholders. Those stories are all around us, and not just in the movies.

Sports gave us a powerful example this week as LeBron James led the Cleveland Cavaliers to an NBA Championship, over the Golden State Warriors, who had the most wins in a season in NBA history. The previous year, the Warriors defeated the Cavaliers in the NBA finals.

Nearby Cleveland in Northeast Ohio, a young basketball prodigy is born to a 16-year-old single mother in 1984. He grows up in dire conditions, but his talent is recognized early and he is protected from losing his way.

Over the next seven years, LeBron fought to bring home a championship to Northeast Ohio, setting massive records for scoring and every other aspect of the game. Unfortunately, as hard as he fought, James and those surrounding him were never able to win the ultimate prize.

James and the Cavaliers are down 3-1 in the finals. No NBA team had ever come back to win in that position, and this was against the team with the most wins in an NBA season. James kept himself and his team confident and calm.

Beloved Audience!

It was the best of times, it was the worst of time, it was the age of barbarism, the epoch of belief.And unto this, a child was born by the name of An-War. Neither son of a king nor a god, fate had still chosen a unique path for the child.

Let a humble chronicler tell thee of his saga .....

On 10th of September 2015, a storyteller visited players' cities and offered to tell a story of a mighty hero named An-War. Everybody who listened to the full tale and managed to complete all the 10 quests of the quest line, received an exclusive reward - a new residential building:

Speaker's Corner with an additional effect of an attack boost that increases the strength of all units when attacking.

Gilgamesh is the semi-mythic King of Uruk best known as the hero of The Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 2150-1400 BCE) the great Babylonian poem that predates Homer's Iliad and Odyssey by 1500 years and, therefore, stands as the oldest piece of epic world literature. Gilgamesh features in several Sumerian poems but is world-famous from the Mesopotamian epic.

Historical evidence for Gilgamesh's existence is found in inscriptions crediting him with the building of the great walls of Uruk (modern-day Warka, Iraq) which, in the story, are the tablets upon which he first records his quest for the meaning of life. He is also referenced in the Sumerian King List (c. 2100 BCE) and is mentioned by known historical figures of his time such as King Enmebaragesi of Kish (c. 2700 BCE), besides the legends which grew up around his reign.

The quest for the meaning of life, explored by writers and philosophers from antiquity up to the present day, is first fully explored in the Gilgamesh epic as the hero-king leaves the comfort of his city following the death of his best friend, Enkidu, to find the mystical figure Utnapishtim and eternal life. Gilgamesh's fear of death is actually a fear of meaninglessness, and although he fails to win immortality, the quest itself gives his life meaning.

Gilgamesh's father is said to have been the priest-king Lugalbanda (who is featured in two Sumerian poems concerning his magical abilities which predate Gilgamesh) and his mother the goddess Ninsun (also known as Ninsumun, the Holy Mother and Great Queen). Accordingly, Gilgamesh was a demigod who was said to have lived an exceptionally long life (the Sumerian King List records his reign as 126 years) and to be possessed of super-human strength.

Gilgamesh is widely accepted as the historical 5th king of Uruk who reigned in the 26th century BCE. His influence is thought to have been so profound that myths of his divine status grew up around his deeds and finally culminated in the tales that inform The Epic of Gilgamesh. Later Mesopotamian kings would invoke his name and associate his lineage with their own. Most famously, Shulgi of Ur (r. 2029-1982 BCE), considered the greatest king of the Ur III Period (2047-1750 BCE) in Mesopotamia, claimed Lugalbanda and Ninsun as his parents and Gilgamesh as his brother to elevate his standing among his subjects.

Known as Bilgames in Sumerian, Gilgames in Akkadian, and Gilgamos in Greek, his name may mean "the kinsman is a hero" or, according to scholar Stephen Mitchell, "The Old Man is a Young Man" (10). He is sometimes associated with the shepherd-god Dumuzi (Tammuz), an early dying and reviving god figure, legendary king of Uruk, and consort of Inanna/Ishtar, best known in the modern era from the Sumerian poem The Descent of Inanna. Dumuzi was seduced by Inanna/Ishtar and suffered for it by having to spend half the year in the underworld while Gilgamesh rejects her but also suffers through the loss of his friend.

The Epic of Gilgamesh did likewise as it is informed by tales, no doubt originally passed down orally, and finally written down 700-1000 years after the historical king's reign. The author of the version Layard found was the Babylonian writer Shin-Leqi-Unninni (wrote 1300-1000 BCE) who was thought to be the world's first author known by name until the discovery of the works of the poet-priestess Enheduanna (l. 2285-2250 BCE), daughter of Sargon of Akkad (r. 2334-2279 BCE). Shin-Leqi-Unninni drew upon Sumerian sources to create his story and probably had a significant number to work from as Gilgamesh had been a popular hero for centuries by the time the epic was created.

In the Sumerian tale of Inanna and the Huluppu Tree (c. 2900 BCE), for example, Gilgamesh appears as her loyal brother who comes to her aid. Inanna (the Sumerian goddess of love and war) plants a tree in her garden with the hope of one day making a chair and bed from it. The tree becomes infested, however, by a snake at its roots, a female demon (lilitu) in its center, and an Anzu bird in its branches. No matter what, Inanna cannot rid herself of the pests and so appeals to her brother, Utu-Shamash, god of the sun, for help.

Utu refuses, and so she turns to Gilgamesh, who comes, heavily armed, and kills the snake. The demon and Anzu bird then flee, and Gilgamesh, after taking the branches for himself, presents the trunk to Inanna to build her bed and chair from. This is thought to be the first appearance of Gilgamesh in heroic poetry, and the fact that he rescues a powerful goddess from a difficult situation shows the high regard in which he was held even early on.

These tales represent him as a great hero, and the historical king was eventually accorded completely divine status as a god. He was regularly depicted as the brother of Inanna, one of the most popular goddesses in all of Mesopotamia. Prayers found inscribed on clay tablets address Gilgamesh in the afterlife as a judge in the Underworld comparable in wisdom to the famous Greek afterlife judges, Rhadamanthus, Minos, and Aeacus.

In the poem Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the Netherworld (which draws on earlier myths including Inanna and the Huluppu Tree), Gilgamesh is given a firsthand account of the afterlife by Enkidu, who has returned from Ereshkigal's dark realm where he went to retrieve his friend's lost items. Depending on different interpretations, Enkidu may be a ghost who delivers this vision, making Gilgamesh the only living being to know what waits beyond death or, if Enkidu is understood to have survived his trip to the underworld, only one of two, not counting the divine Dumuzi.

The cuneiform tablets of the work discovered by Layard in 1849, and translated and published by George Smith in 1876, make up the standard version of the tale. Any modern translation relies on these eleven tablets but sometimes a twelfth is added relating Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the Netherworld. This story is usually omitted, however, as Enkidu dies in Tablet 7 of the standard version, and his appearance in Tablet 12, as a servant and not Gilgamesh's friend, makes no sense.

When Tablet 12 is included in a translation, it is sometimes justified by the translator/editor claiming that Enkidu is a ghost who has returned from the land of the dead to tell Gilgamesh what he has seen. This interpretation is not supported by the text of the poem, however, in which Gilgamesh twice appeals to the gods for Enkidu's release from the underworld, saying he has not died but is being detained unlawfully. Most modern translators, therefore, rightly choose to leave Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the Netherworld where it belongs: as a separate work composed long before the standard version of the epic, dated to the time of Shin-Leqi-Unninni.

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