In a pre-emptive strike, Gilgamesh and his friend Enkidu attack the monster Humbaba. Only after successive missions have failed - slaying a monster, searching for immortality - does Gilgamesh finally turn his gaze on himself. In the act of pursuing them, the so-called civiliser is humbled. Seemingly universal truths - goodness, enlightenment - fail to be applicable abroad. The story is one of increasing disillusionment. Never critical of his own faltering rule, Gilgamesh turns his eye elsewhere. Gilgamesh is certain of his ordained right to police things abroad. King Gilgamesh is a superman leader of the first superpower, ruling the greatest city on earth. Mitchell's long introduction to Gilgamesh addresses the myth's unique 'relevance to today's world', an epic which speaks about the present. Both Homer and Tolstoy mourn the passing of a historical world: the Iliad captures the last of the titans, while War and Peace laments a lost aristocracy. Now, Stephen Mitchell's retelling of the world's earliest recorded epic reveals uncanny contemporary parallels. Earlier this year we watched East and West fight to the death in Troy. The timeliness of republishing the Gilgamesh epic, the original clash between good and evil set in ancient Iraq, as 'two civilisations' presently collide over the same ground, is acute. This version of Gilgamesh shows imperialism to be the oldest story on earth.
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