uld overthrow thee, thou wouldest faint
away, thou wouldest weep.'--'Terror will overthrow me, I shall faint
away, I shall weep, but tell it to me.'" And the ghost depicts for him
the sorrows of the abode and the miseries of the shades. Those only
enjoy some happiness who have fallen with arms in their hands, and who
have been solemnly buried after the fight; the manes neglected by their
relatives succumb to hunger and thirst.* "On a sleeping couch he lies,
drinking pure water, he who has been killed in battle. 'Thou hast seen
him?'--'I have seen him; his father and his mother support his head, and
his wife bends over him wailing.' 'But he whose body remains forgotten
in the fields,--thou hast seen him?'--'I have seen him; his soul has no
rest at all in the earth.' 'He whose soul no one cares for,--thou hast
seen him?'--'I have seen him; the dregs of the cup, the remains of a
repast, that which is thrown among the refuse of the street, that is
what he has to nourish him.'" This poem did not proceed in its entirety,
or at one time, from the imagination of a single individual. Each
episode of it answers to some separate legend concerning Gilgames, or
the origin of Uruk the well-protected: the greater part preserves under
a later form an air of extreme antiquity, and, if the events dealt with
have not a precise bearing on the life of a king, they paint in a lively
way the vicissitudes of the life of the people.** These lions, leopards,
or gigantic uruses with which Grilgames and his faithful Eabani carry
on so fierce a warfare, are not, as is sometimes said, mythological
animals.

* Cf. vol. i. pp. 160, 161 of this History for analogous
ideas among the Egyptians as to the condition of the dead
who were neglected by their relatives: the Egyptian double
had to live on the same refuse as the Chaldaean soul.

** G. Smith, identifying Gilgames with Nimrod, believes, on
the other hand, that Nimrod was a real king, who reigned in
Mesopotamia about 2250 B.C.; the poem contains, according to
him, episodes, more or less embellished, in the life of the
sovereign.

Similar monsters, it was believed, appeared from time to time in the
marshes of Chaldaea, and gave proof of their existence to the inhabitants
of neighbouring villages by such ravages as real lions and tigers commit
in India or the Sahara. It was the duty of chiefs on the border lands of
the Euphrates, as on the banks of the N