My letter to the editor from 5 February 2008 (3rd continuation):

Schrott is to be agreed when he draws the bow to the Gilgamesh epic: There, too, it is about the end of an age. It is the age of the constellation Taurus, the Heavenly Bull, which Gilgamesh kills in the middle of the epic (Table VI).

The Gilgamesh epic was written around 2000 B.C. and depicts the transition from the Taurus Age to the Aries Age. From here the arch stretches beyond Homer to the Christian myth.

At the end of the Aries Age Christ dies as a Passover lamb (1 Corinthians 5:7), his successors, the “fishermen” around Peter, proclaim a new age with the fish (Pisces) as symbol. Again the astronomically observed change of the spring constellation is processed in the myth.

In literary terms, Homer himself became the measure of all things. The author of the oldest Christian literary writing, the Gospel of Mark, can escape the literary convention of his time as little as the Roman Virgil and designs his Gospel as a small epic poem after the great model of the Iliad.

The Iliad of Homer cannot be understood without the older Gilgamesh epic. Likewise, the Gospel of Mark cannot be understood without the Iliad of Homer.