Gilgamesh Read online

  Gilgamesh

  Gilgamesh

  A New Verse Rendering by

  Stanley Lombardo

  Introduction by

  Gary Beckman

  Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.

  Indianapolis/Cambridge

  Copyright © 2019 by Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.

  All rights reserved

  Printed in the United States of America

  22 21 20 19 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

  For further information, please address

  Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.

  P.O. Box 44937

  Indianapolis, Indiana 46244-0937

  www.hackettpublishing.com

  Cover design by Brian Rak

  Interior design by Laura Clark

  Composition by Aptara, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Lombardo, Stanley, 1943– translator. | Beckman, Gary M., writer of introduction.

  Title: Gilgamesh / translated by Stanley Lombardo ; introduction by Gary Beckman.

  Other titles: Gilgamesh. English.

  Description: Indianapolis : Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., [2019] | Includes bibliographical references.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018036034 | ISBN 9781624667732 (cloth) | ISBN 9781624667725 (pbk.)

  Subjects: LCSH: Epic poetry, Assyro-Babylonian.

  Classification: LCC PJ3771.G5 E5 2019 | DDC 892/.1—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018036034

  ePub3 ISBN: 978-1-62466-793-0

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  {v} Contents

  The page numbers in curly braces {} correspond to the print edition of this title.

  Introduction

  About This Edition

  Timeline

  The Epic of Gilgamesh

  TABLET I: The Creation of Enkidu

  TABLET II: Gilgamesh Befriends Enkidu

  TABLET III: Preparations for the Journey

  TABLET IV: Journey to the Cedar Forest

  TABLET V: The Fight with Humbaba

  TABLET VI: The Bull of Heaven

  TABLET VII: The Death of Enkidu

  TABLET VIII: Enkidu’s Funeral

  TABLET IX: The Quest for Immortality

  TABLET X: Shiduri’s Tavern

  TABLET XI: Utanapishtim and the Flood

  Glossary of Deities, Persons, and Places

  Suggestions for Further Reading

  Appendix: Correspondences between Pages of This Edition and Lines of the Original Text

  Titles of Related Interest Available from Hackett Publishing

  {vii} Introduction

  The hero Gilgamesh was well known throughout the Near East during the first millennium BCE. In addition to the copies of his adventures included in the libraries of Assyrian and Babylonian scholars and kings, many prosperous men proudly carried personal (cylinder) seals depicting the battle of Gilgamesh and his faithful companion Enkidu with the monstrous Bull of Heaven. Outside of his Mesopotamian homeland, references to Gilgamesh appear in the Aramaic-language Book of Giants preserved among the Dead Sea Scrolls of Qumran in Palestine (second century BCE) and a bit later in the tract On the Nature of Animals by the Greek writer Aelian (second century CE). Nonetheless, with the eclipse of the Mesopotamian literary tradition by that of Greece and Rome, completed by the first century of the Common Era, Gilgamesh had largely been forgotten until the rediscovery of the cultures of ancient Assyria and Babylonia less than 200 years ago.

  The Rediscovery of Mesopotamia and Its Culture

  The mid-nineteenth century CE witnessed the beginnings of a new stage of the rivalry between France and England to establish expansive empires and to extend their political and cultural influence throughout the world. In the declining Ottoman Empire, which in this period still included Mesopotamia (modern Iraq and northern Syria), the pioneers of European imperialism were the British and French diplomats stationed in the Sultan’s provincial capitals. Among these men were the French consul Paul-Émile Botta (1802–1870), who served in Mosul (in the north of today’s Iraq). In addition to his regular duties, Botta began to investigate the nearby artificial mounds (“tells”) that turned out to contain the ruins of the capital cities of ancient Assyria. From 1842 to 1844 he dug at Khorsabad, uncovering the remains of ancient Dur-Sharrukin, “Fortress of Sargon,” the royal city of Sargon II (722–705 BCE), a ruler of Assyria mentioned in the Hebrew Bible.

  The renown accruing to the French “proto-archaeologist” prompted the British to dispatch their own Austen Henry Layard (1817–1894) to Mosul, who from 1845 through 1847 excavated the giant mound of Küyünjik, situated directly across the Tigris River from the Ottoman provincial center. Here {viii} he found what had once been the famous city of Nineveh, whose destruction was foretold in the biblical books of Nahum and Zephaniah. Perhaps Layard’s most important discovery at Nineveh was the library of the last significant king of Assyria, Ashurbanipal (668–ca. 627 BCE); the contents of thousands of clay tablets and fragments were packed up and shipped to the British Museum in London.

  The excavations of Botta and Layard, although clumsy and destructive by today’s archaeological standards, marked the beginning of the study of ancient Mesopotamia and the surrounding nations whose civilizations developed under its influence.

  The Cuneiform Writing System

  The Assyrian documents dispatched to London constituted the first substantial body of material inscribed in the cuneiform script that became available for investigation by Western scholars, and therefore the entire enterprise of studying ancient records on clay has been called “Assyriology” up to the present day, even if only a portion of the relevant material was in fact produced in Assyria.

  It is important to note that cuneiform (Neo-Latin “wedge-shaped” [script]) is a writing system and not a language. Invented in the closing centuries of the fourth millennium BCE in southern Mesopotamia to keep records in Sumerian, by ca. 2600 BCE cuneiform had been adapted to express the Semitic Akkadian language, whose major later northern and southern dialects were Assyrian and Babylonian, respectively. But cuneiform was also borrowed to write non-Mesopotamian tongues completely unrelated to either Sumerian or Akkadian—or indeed to one another. These included the Indo–European languages of ancient Anatolia (modern Turkey), most prominently Hittite, as well as Elamite at home in southwestern Iran and Hurrian in northern Syria and easternmost Anatolia. This situation might well be compared to the use today of the Latin alphabetic script, with appropriate modification, to express languages as different as English, Turkish, and Vietnamese.

  But whereas the Latin script has been in continuous use since its invention ca. 550 BCE, in the 1840s no one had read a cuneiform text since the late first century CE. At least that is when the latest known (Babylonian) inscription in this type of writing was produced. Therefore, cuneiform had first to be deciphered to enable the recovery of the wealth of historical, economic, and cultural information preserved on the clay tablets. Several schoolteachers, {ix} university professors, and gentleman scholars, primarily from England, Ireland, France, and Germany, working independently, undertook this daunting task. The tablets Layard sent to London proved crucial in this process by providing sufficient material for thorough study. By 1857 cuneiform had been largely deciphered, as demonstrated by a test in which four of the leading students of the script were each presented with an Assyrian royal inscription previously unknown to them and then independently produc
ed nearly identical English translations.

  A few years later, the British Museum engaged a young apprentice banknote engraver and amateur cuneiform enthusiast, George Smith (1840–1876), to help sort and catalogue the innumerable tablet fragments held by that institution. During the course of his duties he kept up with progress in the decipherment of cuneiform, ultimately himself becoming an expert on the script. In 1872 he was startled to recognize striking parallels to the Biblical account of Noah’s Flood in a mythological passage on a damaged Akkadian tablet. (We now realize that what Smith had found was an exemplar of Tablet XI of the version of the Gilgamesh Epic translated in this volume.) Smith’s widely attended lecture concerning this discovery was a sensation, followed in 1876 by the publication of his The Chaldean Account of Genesis. In response to public enthusiasm for his seeming confirmation of the veracity of Christian scripture, Smith himself was sent out to Nineveh—first under the auspices of a popular newspaper and later under those of the British Museum itself—to search for further relevant material. On the third of these expeditions he was stricken with dysentery and died near Aleppo.

  Nonetheless, other scholars have continued Smith’s work on the reconstruction of the entire text of the Epic, with major (partial) editions appearing in 1884 and 1930. By the time of Andrew George’s most recent comprehensive edition (2003), scholars had recovered around 2,450 of an estimated original 3,000 lines. Hopefully, with future excavation and discovery, we will eventually possess the entirety of the Epic, but we certainly already have the major portion and should expect no major textual surprises to challenge our philological and literary–critical interpretations.

  Even in its incomplete form, the Epic has served as inspiration for artists from the nineteenth century to the present, providing the basis for numerous literary retellings, psychoanalytical explorations, and even operas. Poets have rendered it—some faithfully, some more loosely—into most modern ­languages. No other work from ancient Mesopotamian literature has enjoyed such popularity.

  {x} Gilgamesh and Noah

  The excitement generated by Smith’s 1872 discovery had little to do with the figure of Gilgamesh, but rather it centered on the report delivered to the hero in Tablet XI by his distant ancestor Utanapishtim, whose name means “He Who Found Life.” To explain how he and his wife alone among humans had come to be granted immortality, the poet here provides Utanapishtim with a narrative that he has repurposed and adapted from a composition of the Old Babylonian period (ca. eighteenth–seventeenth centuries BCE), a text that Assyriologists refer to as “The Story of Atrahasis” after its main human character.1

  This earlier composition covers a much larger slice of primeval history than its excerpt in the Gilgamesh Epic. It explains how humans were created in order to perform the labor that the junior gods had refused to do, how the ever-increasing numbers of people had disturbed the peace of their divine masters, and how the latter had decided to rectify the situation by eradicating humanity. However, the single deity Ea, God of Wisdom, became the protector of humankind and advised his people on how to thwart the initial divine attempts at their annihilation. When the gods ultimately sought to destroy humanity by means of the Deluge and swore a solemn oath among themselves not to divulge this plan, Ea circumvented his promise by delivering his life-saving advice to Atrahasis (“Exceedingly Wise”) through the reed wall of his home. From this point on, the narrative inserted into the Gilgamesh Epic closely parallels that of the Old Babylonian poem.

  The degree of similarity between the stories of Utanapishtim and of Noah is well demonstrated in a comparison of their respective accounts of the aftermath of the Great Flood. The Mesopotamian survivor relates his ordeal to Gilgamesh as follows:

  Six days and seven nights the gale-winds blew,

  The rain poured down, the Flood flattened the land.

  But when the seventh day dawned

  The winds died down, and the water subsided.

  The sea that had writhed like a woman in labor

  Now was calm, the storm over, the Deluge ended.

  I opened a window, and sunlight fell on my face.

  {xi} I looked at the weather, and it was perfectly calm,

  But all of the people had turned into clay,

  And the land was as flat as the roof of a house.

  I sank to my knees and wept,

  Tears running all down my face.

  I scanned the ocean’s horizon in all directions

  And saw fourteen patches of land emerging.

  The ship came to ground on Nimush Mountain,

  Mount Nimush held it fast and did not let it move.

  A first day and a second day Nimush Mountain

  held the boat fast and did not let it move.

  A third day and a fourth day Nimush Mountain

  held the boat fast and did not let it move.

  A fifth day and a sixth day Nimush Mountain

  held the boat fast and did not let it move.

  When the seventh day dawned

  I brought out a dove and let it go.

  The dove flew off but then came back to me;

  There was no place to land and so it came back.

  I brought out a swallow and let it go.

  The swallow flew off but then came back to me;

  There was no place to land and so it came back.

  I brought out a raven and let it go.

  The raven flew off and saw the water subsiding.

  It found food, cawed, and did not come back.

  Then I sacrificed incense to the Four Winds,

  Pouring out offerings on the mountain top.

  I set out seven pots and another seven,

  Piling beneath them cane, cedar, and myrtle.

  The gods smelled the savor, smelled the sweet savor,

  And gathered like flies around the sacrifice.

  (Tablet XI 120–57)

  The King James Bible describes the conclusion of Noah’s tribulations thus:

  4. And the ark rested in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, upon the mountains of Ararat. 5. And the waters decreased continually until the tenth month: in the tenth month, on the first day of the month, were the tops of the mountains seen.

  {xii} 6. And it came to pass at the end of forty days, that Noah opened the window of the ark which he had made: 7. And he sent forth a raven, which went forth to and fro, until the waters were dried up from off the earth. 8. Also he sent forth a dove from him, to see if the waters were abated from off the face of the ground; 9. But the dove found no rest for the sole of her foot, and she returned unto him into the ark, for the waters were on the face of the whole earth: then he put forth his hand, and took her, and pulled her in unto him into the ark. 10. And he stayed yet other seven days; and again he sent forth the dove out of the ark;

  11. And the dove came in to him in the evening; and, lo, in her mouth was an olive leaf pluckt off: so Noah knew that the waters were abated from off the earth.

  12. And he stayed yet other seven days; and sent forth the dove; which returned not again unto him any more. 13. And it came to pass in the six hundredth and first year, in the first month, the first day of the month, the waters were dried up from off the earth: and Noah removed the covering of the ark, and looked, and, behold, the face of the ground was dry. . . . 20. And Noah builded an altar unto the LORD; and took of every clean beast, and of every clean fowl, and offered burnt offerings on the altar. 21. And the LORD smelled a sweet savour; and the LORD said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man’s sake; for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite any more every thing living, as I have done. (Genesis 4–14, 20–21)

  Despite efforts to utilize these two accounts as evidence for an actual worldwide (or at least regional) catastrophe, there is no geological evidence for synchronous wide-ranging flooding over the entirety of the Near East, let alone the entire Earth. More significantly, the narrative details here—the
exploration by means of birds, the coming to rest of the vessel upon particular mountains, the burnt offerings presented immediately upon disembarkation—indicate that the texts partake of a single literary tradition. The direction of borrowing is not in doubt: Since “The Story of Atrahasis” was inscribed hundreds of years prior to the earliest possible date for the composition of the Hebrew Bible, the tale must be of Mesopotamian origin. Most likely, intellectuals among the Judahites exiled to Babylonia in the sixth century BCE, some of whom learned {xiii} cuneiform in order to serve in the local bureaucracy, adopted the story from their Babylonian “schoolbooks” or scribal colleagues.

  A major difference between the Biblical and Akkadian accounts is the role the Deluge plays within the respective national traditions. In the Hebrew Bible, as an incident within the development of their relationship to God as set forth in the Torah, men bring their destruction upon themselves as a result of their wicked behavior. While after the trial God promises not to repeat the eliminationist flooding, he insists that human nature remains essentially evil.

  In Mesopotamia by contrast—as seen more clearly in the fuller account provided in “The Story of Atrahasis”—there is no question of human disobedience or perversity involved. Humans in their multitudes and noisy, frenetic activity had simply become a nuisance within the once-serene universe, leading the gods to seek to eliminate them. But following the example of the Mother Goddess, they almost immediately regret their decision:

  Belet-ili cried out in her lovely voice,

  Our Lady wailing like a woman in childbirth:

  “The days of old have turned into clay

  Because I said bad things among the gods.

  How could I say bad things among the gods,

  Declare a war to destroy my people?