There is a great leap between the gods as they are recognized by anthropologists concerning pre-literate peoples, where the gods are like spirits of nature anthropomorphized into being people because the wind or the ocean or the trees have spirits of their own and so act like free will or are places mysterious enough so as to think of them as having special and conscious like qualities, as is the case with mountains or rivers., and those gods or God who happen later. What is to be done with man made creatures rather than with the facts and forces of nature once people have evolved that far into cities? What are those gods like? The Greeks are too late so as to assess that transition. Their gods are immortal and they have superpowers but are subject to normal or extreme family relations and their feelings and so are like superhero movies who have frailties and so fit into everyday soap operas. Even “Gilgamesh” portrays the spats between the gods as resulting in the flood and the making of an ark to withstand the flood. It is only Abraham who stands out as a figure, what we might call a modern figure, who conceives of God as different in nature from other gods in that it is invisible rather than of a place or time and that is subject to morality, even if God remains as a largely quiet figure who sometimes lashes out or bothers to say something profound, God not at all an ordinarily to be understood person. A way to understand that period between spirits and God can be revealed in “Gilgamesh” itself by looking at what are the social structures that have already been obtained by that level of civilization and those that have not yet been accomplished. The effort is not to find new things in the epic as it is to see what is obvious about what things are still same and what things have profoundly altered, what are the greater parameters of social life before they became what was already familiar in Greek and Hebraic life.and literature.
Gilgamesh is a powerful and heroic figure who has no supernatural powers. He is strong, handsome, and has impressive hair, and is large. These qualities may suggest either that he has any well developed feature and a great many or most of them rather than have a particular amazing feature as is the case with Greek gods and present day superheroes. That would be in keeping with the medieval notion that God was the best of anything that might be, all of them together, or else that these particular qualities were especially worthy, perhaps because luxurious locks were to be prized, as is the case with Samson. Another feature noted is that Gilgamesh is always ravishing the women and that their husbands complain and that is why another creature is created to contain him. This suggests that the relation of men to women is as old as “Gilgamesh” in that men pursue women and that women are often not happy about that and that there has to be a way for society to control male lust if for no other reason then that husbands will get annoyed at not having a monopoly of their wife's favors. There was unrest in Pitcarin’s Island because there weren’t enough women to spread around for all the sailors in the HMS Bounty, and perhaps the end of women being subject to arbitrarily inflicted men was not until “Don Giovani'' or perhaps still not quite yet.
A quality of Mesopatamian life of not so long standing is that Gilgamesh, the hero, has built his citadel a glorious thing, full of bricks, and marveled as a recent accomplishment, a human structure made for the ages and contrary to the spirit whereby building cities, such as in Babel, seems an affront to God and nature. Rather, Gilgamesh thinks this building as a credit to himself, made in recent time but for a long future duration, akin to observing the Empire State Building, with perhaps Al Smith as its creator, and so politicians, if they raise up very high can become the names for bridges and tunnels and roads and dams, and Presidents and Senators known for their fame, while most politicians do not get very high up the greasy pole and earn such an accolade that was granted to Gilgamesh, most politicians to be reviled rather than famed or just disappear once their office is unseated, with neither a poem nor an invention to have as their credit, only to have temporarily had a moment of office. At any event, there is nothing metaphysical about gods or leaders of there being a name given to an edifice,.
The great creation myth in Gilgamesh is not the one of his creation even though his birth was silent in that it was not accompanied by pain, which is amazing enough, but somehow there had to be a start that preceded progeny. Adam and Eve were, after all, made by God. The real creation was the one that created the one who would contest Gilgamesh and he was created to be like the animals, eating with them at the waterside and comfortable with the other animals. What made him transform himself from a feral individual to a civilized one was the fact that he had sex with a harlot, one for sex rather than for love or some other attribute of his humanity. That was because he was opened up to reason because of this, something that goes along with the other pleasures that are made possible by civilization, which means to do things that are not required by necessity, such as getting food and shelter. That surplus of time to engage in leisure shows the superiority of civilization over nature. The important thing, moreover, is that this transition is also not metaphysical. It just happens with sexual intercourse, which is ordinary rather than a special kind of event, recognized as special in its signifigence, in turning people civilized, rather than an outside intervention, and so adopting the linguistic usage of treating a usual event as a metaphor for the miraculous rather than a violation of nature. So the linguistic apparatus for religious understanding, which still remains, as when people say, sort of, that they speak with God or that God speaks back to them, is always understood as needing a gloss to understand what has actually happened, which is that it is a manner of speaking, and that goes very far back, rather than the product of modern interpretations of what goes on in religion.
The deepest evolution or benchmark stipulated in “Gilgamesh'' is the work itself: the invention or the discovery of a story. This work recounts, as from the past, events that are significant and that intertwine with one another so as to provide a story, which means the familiar beginning middle and end, as well as accompanying atmosphere and circumstances and admixing narrative with dialogue, so as to look at a life from the point of view of the protagonist, full of feelings and observations, sometimes looking at internal feelings and ideas shown in their actions and reports of feelings and inferred about feelings, as well as conflicts brought into large of the impact of people on society. This is what is known later in the Greek epics and the “Genesis” stories. It is a recounting of events that are worth recording for what they say of life rather than to record great events for their own sake, such as the triumph of a great victory or the death of a king.
In the Mesopatamian precursors of “Gilgamesh”, such as the story of Sargon, a telling had shown kings to arise, including this person who was outstanding because he arose out of deprivation rather than wealth and even included a story of a child hidden by the natural mother among the bulrushes, a story taken up in “Exodus” to show a poor son can become, by tricks, a great man because he was raised amidst royalty and therefore assumed to have a more majestic and intrusive character rather than just one of the other peons or slaves that would never break away from thei early burdens. But the story of Sargon is much more primitive than the one about Gilgamesh . The deepest evolution or benchmark stipulated in “Gilgamesh'' is something itself: the invention or the discovery of a story. This work recounts, as from the past, events that are significant and that intertwine with one another so as to provide a story, which means the familiar beginning middle and end, as well as accompanying atmosphere and circumstances and admixing narrative with dialogue, so as to look at a life from the point of view of the protagonist, full of feelings and observations, sometimes looking at internal feelings and ideas shown in their actions and reports of feelings and inferred about feelings, as well as conflicts brought into large of the impact of people on society. This is what is known later in the Greek epics and the “Genesis'' stories. It is a recounting of events that are worth recording for what they say of life rather than to record great events for their own sake, such as the triumph of a great victory or the death of a king. Indeed, “Gilgamesh” goes so far into the art of the epic that the themes and topics within the story evolve, early on how sex is the beginning of civilization, but later on how death conquers all and is irreversible, is a beginning and an end of things and also another message that does not rely or earn or warrant the supernatural. “Gilgamesh”, however, does not become as advanced as the Greek epics of a thousand years later, where there are full blown characters, each with their own quirks and side stories, woven together into a vivid portrait of the way of life at the times as well as its particular themes about fate and choice, or the connected short stories that are redacted even later, in the Sixth Century B. C., when Genesis provides so incisively into character and situation while tied together by the theme of exile and return as it foreshadowed the Babylonian Exile, a theme ever recurrent in Jewish history.
One is tempted to think that a comparison between pre-literate cultures, “Gilgamesh”, and then Greek and Hebrew epics would allow for how the art of story progressed. It might be that there was a process of differentiation whereby a single cell, essential story, had differentiated into all of the complex stories so that Thomas Mann is derived from Joseph and what came even before. We can suggest that Aristotle is onto the essential story. Harnack took that turn when thinking that the evolution of the Church was the unfolding into its features of the single seminal idea of God related to history.Another alternative is that later iterations of story are developed by the accretion of foreign additions to some simplified story, so that the novel adds the lives of private people to hee lives of heroes found in epics and drama, just as religiously inspired figures add supernaturalism to the heroes to be found earlier on, as in “Gilgamesh”. But I am ill equipped to do the comprehensive comparison required to answer that question.
What I can say is something more limited, which is that “Gilgamesh” has its own view of the elements that go into human history. In general, and apart from “Gilgamesh”, there are things that are permanent, such as those entailed by interaction. Then there are things which are historical and so last for a while. Simmel made that distinction. But there is also another category which we can think of as those things that are pretty permanent, that last for very long periods of time and therefore seem part of human nature. “Gilgamesh” shows these three different things. Death and sex are permanent and cities are built by people and so are historical. But pretty permanent are religion and, I would add, social class, seeming permanent but created. Thoughts worth pondering.