Sindbad occasionally interrupts with a short tale of his own or a question. Most of the conversation is conducted by Utnapishtim, eager to tell his story. This mingling of myths suggest they should not be viewed as separate entities but as different iterations of a continuous, cohesive whole.
Eventually, each myth is told in its entirety, but its episodes are scattered throughout and have to be pieced together at the end of the narrative. Episodes from these and other myths appear intermittently, looping in and out of each other’s stories. Included is the story of warring gods, the defeat of Tiamat, and the ascendance of Marduk in the Enuma Elish, also known as The Babylonian Creation the friendship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu, the flood story, and Utnapishtim’s immortality in the Epic of Gilgamesh and Ishtar/Inanna’s possession of the mes, her marriage, and her descent into the underworld in The Hymn to Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth. Utnapishtim weaves together episodes of different myths from Mesopotamia. Hungry for company and eager to tell his stories, Utnapishtim takes advantage of Sindbad as his captive audience. A shipwrecked Sindbad turns up on the island of Dilmun where Utnapishtim and his wife have lived for thousands of years ever since they were granted eternal life by the gods. The narrative unfolds in the form of a conversation between Utnapishtim and Sindbad the Sailor. The Tablet of Destinies by Roberto Calasso, translated from the Italian by Tim Parks, is a slim volume that delves into myths from Mesopotamia.
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