Free Hellenic Immortal by Gene Doucette

drawings, but there were others who came before them. Also, it’s a stretch to call what the Sumerians slapped together an empire or even a civilization with a culture. What they did have was a talent for building things out of stone, a basic written language, and a sincere interest in eradicating all evidence of every other culture they came into contact with. The reason archaeologists haven’t discovered earlier mid-East examples of civilized man—yet—has more to do with Sumerian vindictiveness than that no such prior cultures existed.
    Actually, calling them vindictive isn’t entirely fair, because in most ways they were typical for the time. The Sumerian religion was extremely rudimentary, and followed a common assumption that their lives were manipulated by fickle and ill-tempered gods whose displeasure could be determined through any post hoc analysis of major and minor natural disasters. To ward off these disasters, they spent a whole lot of time trying to keep their gods happy via a number of complex rituals, many involving copious amounts of sex (“the gods wish us to have sex” is the oldest pickup line in the world) and human sacrifice. And whoever happened to be their king was also a god, which simplified the political process quite a lot.
    This wasn’t an unusual way of seeing things. Most of the above also works for the Egyptians, the early Greeks, the Hindus, the African Bushmen tribes and the descendant cultures of the Sumerians, i.e., the Akkadians and the pre-Mosaic Jews, and also probably the American Indian cultures and, for all I know, the prehistoric Chinese and the Australian Aborigines. It is, in short, a nearly universal perspective. Why? I don’t know, but I bet all of it started when somebody looked up.
    A couple of things did set the Sumerians apart. For some reason they looked at the tribes that came before them as an affront to their gods and felt morally justified in eliminating all evidence of them. Also, they retained much of the warrior past that predated their comparatively civilized present, specifically the manner in which a king was declared. They had no kings by birthright, or not at first; instead, the biggest, baddest, most fertile and strongest son of a bitch around was their king, an honor bestowed partly because he could kill anybody who suggested otherwise. The Alpha Male, in other words.
    I did not ingratiate myself into the Sumerian society, for the simple and obvious reason that I’d get my head handed to me if I tried. Admittedly, I was at one time the Alpha Male in my own tribe, but we were starving African hunters. In contrast, the lands of Sumer were agriculturally rich and well farmed, and a steady supply of food will always result in a bigger and stronger warrior class, or at least bigger and stronger than me.
    But I did interact with them from time to time.
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    Very occasionally, I will pop up in the historical record. Most of the time I’m not at all easy to spot, because most of the time I’m just a guy who does a thing and then disappears again into the background behind someone-or-other who’s busy doing something much more important. But there are a couple of rare occasions when I get a starring role. The Epic of Gilgamesh is one of those occasions.
    Don’t go pulling out a copy of it to see if you can spot me because for one thing, it’s a really dull read. It made for a fantastic tale in spoken form—provided one knew the language—but whoever chiseled it down for posterity on those clay tablets they found in Nineveh was a bit of a hack. For another thing, it’s pretty obvious who I am if you can stay awake to the end, so I’ll just tell you. In the story, King Gilgamesh decided upon discovering he was a mortal man and was going to die someday, to go on a great quest to seek out the legendary Ut-Naphishtim, the immortal man. Hello, me.
    As with most stories retold successively for hundreds of years before being recorded for posterity,