Running Head: Portrayal of the Gods
Portrayal of the Gods
Name
Student ID
Course
Date
Introduction
Gilgamesh was an historical king of Uruk in Babylonia, on the River Euphrates in modern Iraq. It revolves around the relationship between Gilgamesh, who has become distracted and disheartened by his rule, and a friend, Enkidu, who is half-wild and who undertakes dangerous quests with him.
In the epic of Gilgamesh and in the lives of the Mesopotamian the gods where portrayed as self-serving arrogant beings. These beings created the human race as slaves for the gods and so a human in the view of an early Mesopotamian had better do what the gods said if they wanted to live a happy life. We see gods that that do not really care about the lives of the Mesopotamian. The Mesopotamian could not depend on the safety of a strong government. The lack of a strong government was caused by many different factors and one of the main factors that brought about a weak government in the land of the Mesopotamia, was the lack of a reliable food source. The unreliable food source was due to the lack of a reliable source of farmland. Moreover, this lack of farmland was due mostly to the ever-changing rivers that surrounded the early civilizations that believed in these harsh gods. These peoples could not depend on a predictable flood pattern from the Tigris or the Euphrates. This fact above all, is the reason that the view of mean uncaring gods came about for the lives of these early people.
One year a village could be right next to the Tigris but in the next year, they’ll be a mile away from the river thus destroying the type of economy that the village had in the previous year. Living with this, the people of the early civilizations blamed this hardship on the gods. These people did not think that the gods were all bad though, but just thought that they did not care about human existence because, as they believed, humans were...