In search of youth
From Michael Rice
Sir: Your indefatigable correspondent from the ancient world, Peter Jones, has got Gilgamesh slightly wrong (15 May). The king did not go 'down to the underworld to seek immortality' but sailed to Dilmun, the ancient name of the Bahrain Islands, to find the plant of renewed youth growing on the seabed. His ancestor, Ziusudra, the only mortal to be granted eternal life by the gods, resided in Dilmun; he was the protagonist of the myth of the Universal Deluge, which was so shamelessly plagiarised by the redactors of the Book of Genesis, where he is disguised as Noah. Gilgamesh was the king of the Sumerian city of Uruk and, distraught at the anguished death of his beloved Enkiddu, sought Ziusudra's advice on how the descent into old age might be arrested. Ziusudra told him of the rejuvenating plant and Gilgamesh determined to find it and take it back to Uruk, so that the old men of his city might become young again.
Gilgamesh tied weights to his feet, in the manner of the Gulf pearl-divers, and plunged into the sea, found the plant, returned to the surface and then, sadly, lost it to a predatory serpent. This, of course, is why the serpent sloughs its skin.
Michael Rice
Baldock, Hertfordshire
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