Gilgamesh-36

Another example of ancient literature that has persisted through time. However, this one introduced a theme that affected more than just literature, the quest for immortality.

Immortal, a strange word to try and wrap your mind around. Never aging, never dying, living forever, how can any mortal being comphrehend the implications of that? We mortals can't, and that's what makes the idea so intriging. That intrigue has persisted throughout history, in lliterature as well as other subjects.

Most notably, the pursuit of life everlasting has left it's mark on science. Alchemy, the practice of attempting to take one thing and transmute it into another. Most people believe the main objective that alchemists pursued was the ability to turn lead into gold. Ignoring the fact that succesfully doing so would make gold essentially worthless, the actual goal of alchemy was a little less materialistic.

Alchemy was researched in the hope of creating the Philosopher's stone, a substance that could, in theory, provide immortality to whomever possesed it. Alchemists never succeeded in this endevor of course, if they had we'd be studying alchemy, not physics and biology and the like. However this shows how the pursuit of immortality shaped the world as we know it

Today alchemy is generally written off as superstitious nonsense, and those who used to practice it are thought to be insane, ignorant, or just plain dumb. In reality though, alchemists were at the cutting edge of science at the time, they essentially invented the scientific process we use today in modern science. Without that where would science be today? Take that idea a bit further, without the science we have today where would we be technolgically? Then ask, without our technology where would WE be today?

 So in a sense every bit of scientific knowledge we have today stems from alchemy, which stems from the pursuit of eternal life, which is first demonstrated in writing in Gilgamesh. I've gone through one subject so far, and this immortality thing has already taken a central role in the development of the modern world. What would we be able to conclude if we did a solid investigation of how this theme affected history? Surely some rich and powerful people got the idea that they'd like to live forever, perhaps those people ruled nations and invaded other nations to gain the knowledge of immortality they thought was there. That speculation has no actual research behind it, but I bet you can see how that could be a very realistic scenario.

The pursuit of immortality isn't quite finished with humanity yet. Just yesterday I looked in on a TV show that was talking about discoveries scientists have made that may be setting us down the path to eternal life. The part I saw described a discovery that I had learned about in a podcast quite a while back (I'm guessing about half a year.) that had progressed quite beyond what I had heard off back then. Before the discovery had only been applied to simple creatures such as worms, in this show they had applied it to mice, quite a step up from worms in biological complexity. So humans are still driven by the pursuit of life unending, we're just a lot more advanced in our methods of pursuing it.

Gilgamesh is the oldest written epic poem in existance, and is the first story based on this concept we have found in writing. In light of this, it is impossible to argue that this story is unimportant.


On a completely unrelated note, alchemists might have been on to something with that transmutation concept. Everything is made up of the same atoms, which all fall into the same periodic table of elements. So you could, in theory, take the atoms of one thing, deconstruct them into their base form of protons and electrons and the like, and then subsequently reconstruct them into anything else of equal mass. You certainly can't do it with fancy circles and arcane writings on the floor of a basement with no modern technology or science, but with science and technology the way it is... Well it's a lot more realistic than it sounds. To think of the implications of being able to transmute substances into other substances, nonrenewable resources like oil could be supplemented with renewable resources transmuted into them. Economies could be stableized with secret addition of transmuted gold to the nation's treasury. It's an interesting thought to say the least.

Well now that I have gone off on a tangent and explained in detail how this classic has persisted through time I think it would be a good idea to wrap up this post. So until next time, goodbye!