What should I do, and where should I go?
A thief has taken hold of my flesh!
For there in my bed‑chamber Death does abide,
and wherever I turn, there too will be Death.
— Gilgamesh, Tablet XI
Men have always had but one death.
For some it is as weighty as Mount Tai.
For others as light as a goose‑feather.
The difference lies in what they make of it.
— Sima Qian, Shiji
Long before the Hebrew Bible thundered its warnings of divine wrath, before the Matsya heralded a new Yuga, before Athens wrote its tragedies or Confucius laid down rites, there stood Gilgamesh — part man, part god, and fully mortal. The Epic of Gilgamesh is not simply the oldest surviving written story in human history, it is the oldest surviving confession. It is a king’s admission that all his power, cruelty, beauty, and conquest are nothing before the slow certainty of death. Gilgamesh begins as a tyrant of Uruk (Sumeria), a man who built walls high enough to insult the sky, who used men as tools and women as prizes. To curb his pride, the gods create a wild man named Enkidu — a creature of the wild, hairy and free, closer to beast than to king. Enkidu is meant to oppose Gilgamesh and check his strength. They meet and they fight. But then, to the Heaven's surprise, they become friends. They become companions bound by mutual awe and respect. It was a friendship forged in combat and sealed in affection. Their love was so profound that when Enkidu dies, cursed by the gods for killing the Bull of Heaven, Gilgamesh breaks. The king wanders the earth, barefoot and half-mad, asking strangers if death can be undone. He journeys beyond mountains and oceans to find Utnapishtim, the immortal survivor of the Great Flood. This is a figure whose tale first appears in the Eridu Genesis, one of the earliest Mesopotamian flood myths, where divine wrath, boat-building, and divine reward eerily prefigure later Biblical narratives. Gilgamesh reaches him not with armies, but with questions: “Must I die too? Must I become clay?”
What he receives is not a cure, but a lesson. Death is not the enemy. The fear of forgetting is. In the end, Gilgamesh returns home not with his loved one or possessing the immortality he wished to subdue, but with the grand realisation of impermanence. This is why Gilgamesh's legacy, although mythical, still endures. His story not only became the archetype of literary heroism, it also acted as a reminder to one of the most important and inevitable aspects of human life.
Learning to let go.
But some kings do not return. Some kings, upon glimpsing death, do not seek wisdom. They seek conquest over the afterlife itself. In another cradle of civilization, thousands of years later, a boy-king named Ying Zheng would rise through blood and fire to do what Gilgamesh never could, or perhaps even planned to do. He fused languages, weights, laws, and legacies. He buried entire philosophies. He burned histories that competed with his own. He carved roads into the land like scars across a body. But once All Under Heaven bowed to his command, he turned his gaze from the borders of the empire to the edge of existence itself. Qin Shi Huangdi, the self-anointed First Emperor, would begin a campaign not against kingdoms, but against time. He sent alchemists across the sea to find islands of immortality, consulted Daoist sages on the elixirs of life, performed rituals on sacred mountains to plead for divine favor. He consumed mercury as medicine, fearing the rot of age more than the memory of massacre. His empire was no longer enough. Like Gilgamesh, he had stood at the summit of human power and seen that it did not protect him. But unlike Gilgamesh, he refused to believe that his journey would end. He left us not his wisdom, but a mausoleum so vast, so sealed, and so silent, that even two thousand years later, we are still outside its gate.
Born in 259 BCE into the ruling house of the Qin State, Ying Zheng rose to power at the age of thirteen and became king in a landscape shattered by centuries of war. The Zhou dynasty had collapsed into irrelevance, and the Warring States — seven powerful, brutal kingdoms — devoured one another in endless campaigns of survival. Qin, situated on the empire's western edge, had long cultivated a militarized and highly centralized bureaucracy, driven by Legalist principles that emphasized order, obedience, and ruthlessness. With the chancellor Lu Buwei managing affairs in his youth, and later the coldly efficient Li Si shaping policy, Ying Zheng embarked on a conquest not merely of territory, but of identity. Between 230 and 221 BCE, he annihilated the six rival states — Han, Zhao, Yan, Wei, Chu, and Qi — through methodical warfare, espionage, and political manipulation. When the dust settled, he stood alone as the first man to unify the Chinese heartland under one sovereign rule. But he did not crown himself a king. He created a new title: Huangdi — a word play intended to establish a complex template so that he could connect himself to the legendary figures of the past. His reforms were sweeping. He abolished hereditary feudal titles, redrew administrative divisions, imposed uniform systems of currency, weights, scripts, and laws. Roads were expanded, canals dug, and border walls were linked at the Northwestern frontier, possibly to repel the Xiongnu attacks. Everything was measured, catalogued, and made legible to the state. The old world was not simply defeated. It was conquered, so that a new, standardized China could rise in its place. Qin Shi Huangdi ruled with iron certainty, and for a time, he seemed to have achieved the impossible.
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| Territorial extent of the Qin Empire C. 210 BC |
However, what followed the unification was not peace. It was a relentless remaking of China in the image of its emperor. Qin Shi Huangdi sought to restructure society itself. The ancient aristocracies of the defeated states were uprooted, their noble houses dismantled, and their elites forcibly relocated to the imperial capital of Xianyang, where they could be monitored, contained, and controlled. The empire was divided into over thirty commanderies, each administered by officials appointed directly by the central government. The emperor’s bureaucracy, rooted in Legalist doctrine, was merciless in principle and mechanized in execution. Punishment was codified, rewards were quantified, and loyalty was demanded in exchange for the right to exist. Even language itself was refashioned. Local scripts were replaced with a standardized Small Seal script, ensuring not only that decrees could be uniformly read, but that they would be uniformly obeyed. Roads were carved into the landscape to serve imperial movement, military campaigns, and economic circulation. The most ambitious of these — the Straight Road — ran over 600 kilometres from Xianyang to the northern frontier, designed for the swift movement of armies and imperial couriers. Across the northern borderlands, as mentioned earlier, a series of regional walls built by previous states were now interconnected under imperial directive. It was a colossal undertaking that would centuries later be mythologized as the origin of the Great Wall of China. But this wall, like the empire itself, was constructed not merely by labor, but by human cost.
The State consumed its people as raw material, and the Emperor consumed the State.
Yet even as Qin Shi Huangdi reshaped China into an extension of his will, another force began reshaping him. The awareness that even a man who built everything to protect his authority could not preserve himself. Having reached the apex of terrestrial power, the emperor turned his gaze toward his own fragility. Sima Qian, the eminent historian of the Shiji (Records of the Grand Historian), records that by the later years of his reign, Qin Shi Huangdi had grown increasingly obsessed with the pursuit of immortality. He summoned the Fangshi (Daoist magicians and alchemists) to court, hoping they could reveal the locations of the legendary Isles of the Immortals (Penglai, Fangzhang, and Yingzhou) said to float in the Eastern Sea. Among these seekers was Xu Fu, a court sorcerer entrusted with two expeditions (in 219 and 210 BCE), reportedly accompanied by hundreds of craftsmen, scholars, and young boys and girls, but never to return. Later folklore would elevate Xu Fu as the mythical founder of Japanese civilization, but within the empire, his silence only fed the emperor’s desperation.
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| Xu Fu's expedition; Utagawa Kuniyoshi |
Meanwhile, within China’s own borders, the emperor’s alchemists offered another path. Chemical elixirs and tinctures laced with rare minerals. The most dangerous of them was mercury sulfide (cinnabar), which was believed to transmute the body and extend life. Ironically, modern studies, including biochemical analysis of soil samples around Mount Li (Lishan) near present-day Xi’an in Shaanxi province show that high levels of mercury contamination exist near the unexcavated burial site, practically confirming both the ancient sources and the emperor’s eventual fate. Even sacred mountains, long revered in Daoist cosmology as sites of spiritual ascent, became stages for the emperor’s rituals. He performed grand ceremonies at Mount Tai, Mount Zhifu, and Mount Song, issuing stone inscriptions and sacrifices to Heaven in hopes of being recognized not as a mortal ruler, but as one chosen to escape the cycle of life and death. These acts were not empty pageantry. They marked a ruler shifting from political consolidation to metaphysical rebellion. Archaeologist Duan Qingbo, who led the excavation team at the Emperor's burial mound in the early 2000s, confirmed that the Qin mausoleum was constructed as a kind of underworld palace, mimicking the imperial capital in subterranean form. A reflection not of death, but of perpetual reign beyond it.
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| Inside of the Mausoleum with the Emperor's Tomb in the centre (Artistic interpretation) |
However, the dead still chose to speak. A few years prior, in 1974, local farmers digging a well in the nearby village of Lintong had uncovered what would become one of the most breathtaking archaeological finds of the 20th century. The Terracotta Army. Since then, more than 8,000 life-sized warriors, along with horses, chariots, acrobats, officials, musicians, and court attendants, have been unearthed from three main pits, all arranged in military formation, facing east, as if eternally guarding their emperor’s afterlife realm from the direction whence his enemies once came. No two faces are exactly alike. Their armor, hairstyles, and ranks vary, reflecting a deep realism crafted by imperial artisans. Some scholars believe that each statue may have been modeled on a real soldier, turning individual lives into clay sentinels. Later excavations also revealed bronze waterfowl gardens, replica stables, and massive architecture, all meant to mirror the emperor’s capital, Xianyang, above. The sheer scale of the site, spread across more than 56 square kilometers, testifies to the emperor’s desire not merely to be remembered, but to rule in perpetuity, beneath layers of silence and soil. But unlike the pyramids of Egypt, this tomb has no open corridors or any historical boasts carved into stone. It is sealed, still waiting to be rediscovered, as if time itself were being held hostage beneath Mount Li.
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| Terracotta Army Source: Wikimedia Commons (Copyright) |
It is tempting to read Qin Shi Huangdi as the historical fulfillment of Gilgamesh, a flesh-and-blood echo of a mythic scream. Both were sovereigns who ruled with iron wills and feverish egos, who subjugated others not merely for security but for the permanence of legacy. Both began as tyrants. Gilgamesh, taking sons from their fathers and brides from their grooms, and Qin, sending scholars to death and books to flame. And both, at the height of their power, were forced to confront the same truth. Even emperors must become clay. But it is at this point, when myth and history appear to converge, that their paths begin to diverge in profound and tragic ways. Gilgamesh’s journey after Enkidu’s death is one of grief and transformation. He does not attempt to defy the gods, but to understand them. His quest is undertaken in anguish, not in arrogance. He seeks Utnapishtim not as a master of fate, but as a witness to it, as his survival of the Flood serves to remind men that immortality, if at all it existed, was an accident. In contrast, Qin Shi Huang's pursuit of eternity was bureaucratized, militarized, and most importantly, materialized. He dispatched expeditions, demanded elixirs, ordered rituals, and finally built a world underground to mimic the one he feared leaving behind. Where Gilgamesh found wisdom, the Emperor tried to conjure the impossible.
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| Unearthed Bronze Horse Chariot Source: Terracotta Warriors Museum, Xi'an, China |
The most striking difference lies not in the scale of their fear, but in the nature of their response. Gilgamesh returned to Uruk changed. He was not triumphant, but enlightened. His final gesture is to invite the reader to behold the walls he once built in vanity, now understood as a symbol of human effort against oblivion. He does not ask to be worshipped. He asks to be remembered rightly. In contrast, Qin Shi Huangdi chose not to return at all. He built a tomb so impenetrable that even modern archaeologists, with satellites, radar, and drills, have chosen to leave it sealed (for the time being). His Terracotta Army does not teach morals or virtues. It simply guards. His rivers of mercury do not nourish. They poison. Where Gilgamesh accepted that he could not hold onto life, Ying Zheng tried to hold it by its throat.
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| Tablet V of the Epic of Gilgamesh, C. 2003-1595 BCE The Sulaymaniyah Museum, Iraq |
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The life-sized replica of Utnapishtim's Ark, created and water-tested by a team led by Irving Finkel at the backwaters of Alappuzha, Kerala Source: Telegraph India |
In other words, the first unified Chinese State was built to serve one man’s fear, not its people’s future. Thus, to nobody's surprise, his empire collapsed within four years of his death, consumed by rebellion and fire. It is clear that Gilgamesh, born in the mythic mist of Mesopotamia, has no mausoleum even in the liberal crevices of his legend. But his words endure. His grief echoes. His journey teaches. But the Yellow Emperor, who tried to make memory a material force, remains a mystery even to his descendants. The man who once declared himself the beginning of all dynasties now rests beneath a hill, as if the earth itself is reluctant to finish his story. He was the most powerful man his world had ever seen, and yet he left behind nothing that speaks for his expected benevolence as an emperor. Except, of course, the tale of a mad man who decided to conquer death. Perhaps the truest form of immortality is not found in a sealed chamber or a guarded empire, but in the humility to know that legacy is something one can only hope to deserve.
Further reading:
1. The Arc before Noah; Irving Finkel
2. Gilgamesh: Stephen Mitchell
3. The Hero With a Thousand Faces; Joseph Campbell
- A classic, of course, but still one of the best introductions to anybody interested in comparative mythology with a focus on the Hero's journey.
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