btain eternal life among the gods."

In reply, Parnapishtim tells the story of his escape from the common
fate of mankind. The story is a long one and has no connection with the
career of Gilgamesh. It embodies a recollection of a rain-storm that
once visited a city, causing a general destruction, but from which
Parnapishtim and his family miraculously escaped. The main purport of
the tale is not to emphasize this miracle, but the far greater one that,
after having been saved from the catastrophe, Parnapishtim should also
have been granted immortal life. The moral, however, is that the
exception proves the rule. With this tradition of the destruction of a
certain place, there has been combined a nature myth symbolizing the
annual overflow of the Euphrates, and the temporary disappearance of all
land that this inundation brought about, prior to the elaborate canal
system that was developed in the valley. It is the same myth that we
have come across in the creation epic and which, as we have seen, was
instrumental in moulding the advanced cosmological conceptions of the
Babylonians.

In Parnapishtim's tale, the myth is given a more popular form. There is
no attempt made to impart a scholastic interpretation to it. In keeping
with what we have seen to be the general character of the Gilgamesh
epic, the episode introduced at this point embodies popular traditions
and, on the whole, popular conceptions. The spirit of the whole epic is
the same that we find in the Thousand and One Nights or in the Arabian
romance of Antar.

The oriental love of story-telling has produced the Gilgamesh epic and,
like a true story, it grows in length, the oftener it is told. Gilgamesh
is merely a peg upon which various current traditions and myths are
hung. Hence the combination of Gilgamesh's adventures with those of
Eabani, and hence also the association of Gilgamesh with Parnapishtim. A
trace, perhaps, of scholastic influence may be seen in the purport of
Parnapishtim's narrative to prove the hopelessness of man's securing
immortality; and yet, while the theology of the schools may thus have
had some share in giving to the tale of Parnapishtim its present shape,
the problem presented by Gilgamesh's adventures is a popular rather than
a scholastic one. Even to the primitive mind, for whom life rather than
death constitutes the great mystery to be solved, the question would
suggest itself whether death is an absolutely necessary phase throug