Given the manner in which I have defined humanism (see previous post), it should come as no surprise that its invention coincided with the invention of literature.
In the Epic of Gilgamesh, first committed to cuneiform writing roughly 4,000 years ago, we encounter both. It is likewise a witness to the Mesopotamian birth of human civilization, i.e., the creation of large urban settlements (circa 3,000 BCE) made possible by the Neolithic or agricultural revolution that occurred among scattered human populations in the great river valleys (Nile, Tigris and Euphrates, Indus and Yellow rivers) roughly 7,000 years before.
In the Gilgamesh epic, we encounter a king (Gilgamesh, two-thirds divine, one-third human) who tyrannizes his subjects until a "wild man" (Enkidu)--something of a throw-back to the cooperative pastoral values of an earlier age--challenges him. The result of this conflict is, remarkably enough, mutual respect and friendship. Afterwards, Gilgamesh and Enkidu hit the road together in search of adventure. In the process, Gilgamesh is forced to endure Enkidu's death and then to contemplate his own--despite his two-thirds divinity. He eventually returns home to Uruk in southern Iraq, deprived of any hope that he might escape death and, presumably, chastened by his experiences.
The narrative pattern of the Gilgamesh epic is the prototype of the epic struggle that is humanism: the struggle, as Wallace Stevens phrased it, to forgo the wishful thinking that inspires leaps into an imagined transcendence in order to discover, instead, "what will suffice."
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