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Gilgamesh Creation Story Essay

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Creation stories have profound effects on humans. Mesopotamia’s “The Gilgamesh Epic”, Egypt’s “Hymn to the Nile-Documents”, and Mesoamerica’s Mayan and Aztec creation stories demonstrate significant relationships within society, whether that is between humans and nature or humans and the “god(s).”
Mesopotamia was the first primordial, and an influential cradle of civilization with prominent relationships between humans and nature and humans and their gods. Discovered near the Tigris-Euphrates Rivers around the time of the Lower Paleolithic period (3,500-1,500 B.C.E.), Mesopotamia was one of the most developed civilization of its time. However, how does “The Gilgamesh Epic” relate and impact Mesopotamian society between humans and nature and …show more content…

Most importantly, the story exemplifies the fearful relationship the Aztecs’ had between nature and their gods, and how they associated nature with their gods. The story begins with the dual gods, Ometecuhtli/Omecihuatl. Ometecuhtli/Omecihuatl was both male/female, evil/good, and chaos/order. This dual deity was able to have children, and its children represented the four directions: Xipe Totec (north), Huizilopochtli (south), Tezcatlipoca (west), and Quetzalcoatl (east) – general knowledge of direction. They created Cipactli, but then tore apart their creation. “They used chunks of its body to create various elements of our world — mountains, forests, plains and rivers.” ("Home." Austin Briggs.), thus, the universe was created. To support this newly created universe, five suns had to be created along with it. A new sun is created when one of the gods is offered as a sacrifice when the world is destroyed (five different worlds and five suns have existed since the beginning/hence: belief in rebirth). The fifth and final sun is the sun that supports the world we now live in. The Aztecs’ applied their knowledge of the four seasons with the four suns that were created and destroyed (represents the calandar, life is finite, fearfulness towards nature and deities, and association that nature is multiple gods). The Aztecs’ knowledge of finite life and the destructive natural forces of the world made the Aztecs’ believe that the natural balance of the world relied upon their shoulders – keep nature happy, you keep the gods happy. Another civilization living nearby and roughly within the same time period with the belief that nature is

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