The summer of 2010 brought a great tragedy to the country where my ancestors are from. The floods in Pakistan began following monsoon rains. Statistics say that nearly 20 million or one-eighth of the population has been displaced and millions of homes have been destroyed. Not to mention all the carnage and chaos that is occurring on the streets. There is famine, crops are damaged, and all supplies are pretty much of no use. Roads, bridges, electricity; all these luxuries are non-existent in Pakistan due to this flood.
When I was reading Gilgamesh and I got to the part, “For six days and six nights the winds blew, torrent and tempest and flood overwhelmed the world, tempest and flood raged together like warring hosts;” (A, 93) I immediately thought of the flood in Pakistan. Both floods caused damage that is beyond imaginable and also happen to be in a similar region. For a natural disaster to set a country back, especially a country that was already stricken with poverty, and corruption, it really is heartbreaking. In the New York Times, the article states, “Six weeks after the floods began, as rivers continued to devour villages and farmland in the southern province of Sindh, aid workers warned of a triple threat: loss of crops, loss of seed for the next planting season and loss of a daily income.”
In Gilgamesh they said the, “surface of the sea stretched as flat as a roof-top.” (A. 93) By looking at pictures of the flood in Pakistan you can really see what this quote is talking about.
If you can imagine, how somebody feels when they do not know where they will be sleeping at night, or what they will be eating, or where there children are, you can imagine how the people of Pakistan feel, and I can assume that the few that survived the flood in Gilgamesh also felt the same way.
-Sajjad Ali
Certainly the image of the flood in the Epic of Gilgamesh brings images of the recent situation in Pakistan to mind. You write “I can assume that the few that survived the flood in Gilgamesh also felt the same way” — but what does the epic tell us about the lone survivors of the flood it describes, and what happened to them?
In the epic, Utnapishtim says, ” I sat down and I wept, the tears streamed down my face, for on every side was the waste of water.” A. 93 So I guess you can imagine how they felt. I think they felt helpless and shocked. To see your whole world and everything you know, absolutely destroyed, I could not even imagine.