Roy Datanielson in Medium:
Longevity and eternal youth have frequently been sought after down through the ages, and efforts to keep from dying and fight off age have a long and interesting history.
“Six days and seven nights I mourned over him, and I would not allow him to be buried until a maggot fell out of his nose. I was terrified. I began to fear death, and so roam the wilderness.”
-Gilgamesh
Written in Stone
History is the story of humanity’s quest for immortality. And anyone who examine it closely enough in a serious attempt to find the cultural roots and philosophical antecedents of modern immortalism, shall discover that mankind’s seemingly endless quest to conquer death has been expressed several times down through the ages. In fact, the earliest attested record of a mortal man’s pursuit of immortality can actually be found in what is considered to be the first great work of literature ever made: ‘The Epic of Gilgamesh’, an Akkadian poem about Gilgamesh, or Bilgamesh, a Sumerian king who reigned in the ancient Mesopotamian city of Uruk, somewhere between 2800 and 2500 BC. The epic most likely existed in oral form long before it was written down on stone tablets around 2200 BC, and the main character of the story, Gilgamesh, is widely considered by scholars to be the historical 5th king of Uruk.
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