�鶹��

Available for over a year

Good Morning. The United States Department of Justice this week formally seized one of the world’s oldest works of literature. It contains part of what is known as the Epic of Gilgamesh from Mesopotamia. The tiny cuneiform tablet is more than three and a half thousand years old. It is now to be returned to Iraq. The biblical scholar Karen Armstrong emphasises that these small clay tablets were hard to decipher and not designed to be read. Rather they “functioned like a musical score for a performer who already knows the piece.” The tablets were a mere prompt for a well known story. The Epic of Gilgamesh relates how Gilgamesh, King of Uruk, encounters Enkidu, a wild man created by the gods, to stop the King oppressing the people. Through vivid storytelling as well as strong character development the examination of the eternal battle between good and evil takes centre stage. Indeed, the story is often regarded as a blueprint for future classical heroic narratives such as Homer’s Iliad. Many of the strong themes of the story later influence both the Hebrew Scriptures and the books of the New Testament. These include a concern for creation, what constitutes leadership and the unjust oppression of the poor. But would Gilgamesh, for sure a hero in his own day, be regarded as a hero today? Probably not. He was a deeply flawed character who behaved in dubious ways in his battle against evil. And the same might be said for many other heroes of classical civilisation as we challenge the assumptions made over generations. The influence of these early Mesopotamian texts on Christianity is most obvious when Jesus turns the traditional notion of heroism on its head. For Christian theology speaks primarily of service to others and of concern for the poor and outcast. The real heroes are often those not seen. The marginalised are to be celebrated and valued: The first will be last and the last will be first. Even to acknowledge this demands a certain kind of bravery. As this tiny abstract of the Gilgamesh story returns home to Iraq, it’s perhaps as good a time as any to pose two basic questions, particularly after all we have just lived through, who are today’s real heroes and why do we admire them so?