“As soon as Gilgamesh squatted down on his haunches, / sleep like a fog already breathed over him. / Said Uta-napishti to her, to his wife: / ‘See the fellow who so desired life! / Sleep like a fog already breathes over him.” (Epic of Gilgamesh XI. 210- 214) In order to Gilgamesh to achieve immortality, he must be able to transcend the one weakness that makes man human: sleep. Sleep and death are two sides of the same coin in that the body rest and does not “live” and do any actions. The fact that Gilgamesh cannot overcome the need to sleep, the weaker counterpart to death, means he is not worthy of immorality. Sleep is deemed important to the Samarian culture, because when you dream you acquire important information of the future and receive some sort of enlightenment from their past experiences. Death is a perfect sleep. It is a point of which man is constantly reflecting on his life and learning new lessons and acquiring truth; where human consciousness is constantly working. Sleep is an imperfect fulfillment of death in that it is nature's prophecy of the future death. The similarity of sleep and death is also mentioned in Inanna’s Journey to Hell. When describing Dumuzi’s death, he is said that “His sleep is silent, / this sleep of his / it is a silent sleep.” (Inanna’s Journey to Hell pg.161). Dumuzi is entrapped in …show more content…
He is unable to communicate his knowledge since he is described to be “silent”. In sleep and death a man goes to those places in which he has earned for himself