Gilgamesh And Mesopotamia Research Paper

Valued qualities of Kings in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia

5000 years ago, as people discovered or invented more and more tools, agriculture replaced hunting and gathering became the main path food comes from. Because of the higher productivity agriculture has and agriculture’s need of settlement, people settled down from then on and cities came into being at that time, which happened at Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt at first. As the population grew up in these cities, people met with the need of better organizing. As a result, leaders were needed for the first time. What made leaders different from others? Here I’m going to share the three main valued qualities in my opinion, which are superhuman characters or controlling over religion, ability to organize a civilized, stable
Superhuman character is obviously one of the important valued qualities. Gilgamesh Tale provides us a nice example. “He was wise, he saw mysteries and knew secret things, and he brought us a tale of days before the flood.” “When the gods created Gilgamesh they gave him a perfect body. Shamash the glorious sin endowed him with beauty, Adad the god of storm endowed him with courage, the great gods made his beauty perfect, surpassing all others, terrifying like a great wild bull. Two thirds they made him god and one third man.”(Reilly 45) Gilgamesh was unusually strong for his people, people were afraid of him, so they obeyed his command. Tales are usually believed fake nowadays; at least we cannot prove any of them real, but tales were made up for honor. When someone was so strong that his power is out of the imagining range of the public or did something so good like predict the coming of flood, ancient people would honor him as the leader as well as wrote a tale for him. With these proves I believe it is not difficult to find out that superhuman characters or control over religion for these kings is a valued