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133 King Lists, 126 years which, reduced by a factor of six, would have really been only twenty-one), his aging began to bother him and he was seized with the issues of Life and Death. Appealing to his godfather Utu/Shamash, he said: In my city man dies; oppressed is my heart. Man perishes; heavy is my heart. . . Man, the tallest, cannot stretch to heaven; Man, the widest, cannot cover the earth. " "I peered over the wall, saw the dead bodies," Gilgamesh said to Shamash, referring perhaps to a cemetery. "Will I too ‘peer over the wall,’ will I too be fated thus?" But his godfather's answer was not reassuring. "When the gods cre- ated Mankind," Shamash responded, "death for Mankind they allotted; life they retained in their own keeping." There- fore, Shamash advised, live day by day, enjoy life while you can—"Let full be thy belly, make thou merry day and night! On each day make thou a feast of rejoicing, day and night dance thou and play!" Though the god's admonition concluded with the advice that Gilgamesh let his spouse "delight in thy bosom," Gil- gamesh read into the words of Shamash a different meaning. "Make merry day and night," he was told in reply to his concerns about aging and looming death; and he took it as a hint that "joyful sex" would keep him young. He thus made it a habit of roaming the streets of Uruk by night, and when he came upon a just-married couple, he demanded the right to have the first sex with the bride. As the people's outcry reached the gods, "the gods _hear- kened to the plaint" and decided to create an artificial man who would be a match for Gilgamesh, wrestling him to ex- haustion and distracting him from his sexual escapades. Given the task, Ninmah, using the "essence" of several gods and guided by Enki, created in the steppe a "savage man" with copper sinews. He was called ENKI.DU—"Enki's Crea- ture"—and given by Enki "wisdom and broad understand- ing" in addition to immense strength. A cylinder seal, now in the British Museum, depicts Enkidu and his creators, as In Search of Immortality