Five Thousand Years of History and One-Minute Cucumbers

This was originally published as a guest post on https://renardsworld.wordpress.com. For some reason unbeknown to us humble bloggers, the Reblog button disappeared from several blogs, Renard’s and mine included. As a wonderful gracious host and a great blogger, Renard has suggested that I “do it the old-fashioned way” by offering the title and link to my post. Here goes:

A “thorny plant that grows beneath the waves, called How-the-Old-Man-Once-Again-Becomes-a-Young-Man” (Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet IX) bears little resemblance to our common cucumber, yet ancient people who first encountered it in the wild believed in its magical properties. Discovered and cultivated in ancient India about five millennia ago, humble cucumber found its way to Middle Eastern civilizations, as evidenced by its appearance in the Epic of Gilgamesh, King of Uruk, universally considered the oldest surviving work of literature in the world.

Gilgamesh, pretty much a mythical character, was the first super-hero, predating Superman by three thousand years. He didn’t have kryptonite, but was born of a mixed marriage between a man and a goddess and somehow came out as two-thirds god and one-third man – go figure this out! Regardless, he had great power which he abused all over the place, raping any woman who caught his fancy and pressing his subjects into forced labor in order to build magnificent temple towers and impenetrable city walls. Eventually, the cries of his people reached gods who decided that Gilgamesh has grown a bit too large for his britches and needed someone to take him down a notch. So they created a wild guy called Enkidu and sat back to watch a good fight. Lacking television and social media, that was the ancient gods’ only means of entertainment – remember the Trojan war? Same idea.

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