Throughout history, stories and epics from long ago and even today have acted as a form of rich culture to depict various characters within each story and attempt to explain occurrences in history such as the Odyssey, Gilgamesh, and The Ramayana. Although each of the heroes depicted in these tales embark on different journeys with different aims at what they hope to achieve, they all display a variety of fundamentals that make them similar to one another. It also becomes transparent that throughout each journey these hero’s must take that each of them also embarks on a transformative journey that many people of today can relate to.
The Epic of Gilgamesh centers in on an ancient king of Uruk in present day Iraq. When we are first introduced to Gilgamesh, the king of Uruk, we see that he is a tyrant ruler that is one-third human, two-thirds divine and is endowed with immense strength. Instead of serving his people, he suppresses them and engages in immoral behaviors fit for a king. These behaviors result in lamentation from the citizens of Uruk and in order to tame Gilgamesh’s wild spirit the gods must create Enkidu, whose purpose in the epic is to help guide
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One of the key desires of Odysseus which he shares with most other heroes in mythology, is the desire to gain glory through his exploits and deeds. At various points through the text, we see the way in which Odysseus rather arrogantly ignores the advice of different characters or does what he thinks is best without thinking about the consequences of his actions and what might happen to both himself, and to his men, as a result. The best example of this is when, at the start of his wanderings, Odysseus was so focused on gaining glory that he deliberately revealed who he was to the Cyclops, and as a result brought down calamity on both himself and his men because of Poseidon's special relationship to the