Gilgamesh Page 2
I am the one who gave birth to these people,
And now they fill the ocean like fish!”
The Anunnaki wept along with her;
Tears in their eyes, the gods were weeping;
Their lips were dry and parched with fever.
(Tablet XI 109–19)
Indeed, it is their relief in learning of the survival of Utanapishtim, who immediately takes up his duties of caring for and feeding the gods, that leads them to bestow upon him and his spouse the eternal life that lies beyond the reach of all mortals.
The Human King Gilgamesh?
“The Sumerian King List,” a text first attested in fragmentary form under the Third Dynasty of Ur (ca. 2112–2004 BCE), was a piece of propaganda claiming that—in conformity with the intention of the gods—rule over the entirety {xiv} of Sumer (southernmost Mesopotamia) had always been held by a single city and its dynasty, before passing in succession to another polity. Historically this was untrue, for contemporary Sumerian-language royal inscriptions reveal that the region had long been home to a fair number of independent city-states, but the work served to justify the empire of the monarchs of Ur under whom it had apparently been composed. Its best preserved version dates to the very early second millennium BCE, when it had been adapted to buttress the claims to dominion of the city of Isin. Among the early rulers of the land listed here we find Bilgames—an earlier form of Gilgamesh—occupying the sixth place among the monarchs of the First Dynasty of Uruk (Early Dynastic Period; mid-third millennium BCE). But the historical existence of this figure is doubtful, if only due to the fantastic length of reign assigned to him—126 years. No records dating to his alleged reign have been recovered.
What is certain, however, is that a minor deity Bilgames is already mentioned in a text from the city of Shuruppak dating to around 2500 BCE and is the recipient of votive mace heads offered at about this time. The same figure was later held to be an ancestor of the rulers of the Ur III state. Indeed, it was almost certainly this spurious genealogical connection that prompted the composition—undoubtedly based on oral sources—by their court poets of the early Sumerian-language narratives featuring Bilgames/Gilgamesh.
The Sumerian Gilgamesh Tales
Five of these narratives have been recovered, primarily in copies from Babylonian scribal schools of the early second millennium BCE. (The titles are not ancient, but have been assigned by modern scholars.)
1) Bilgames and Akka relates how the king of Uruk and his servant Enkidu lead their city in successful resistance to oppressive demands made upon them by the ruler of the rival town of Kish.
2) Bilgames and Huwawa, preserved in two somewhat differing versions, recounts the journey of the hero and his retainer, here accompanied by troops from Uruk, to the Cedar Forest, where they slay its guardian and proceed to harvest timber.
3) In Bilgames and the Bull of Heaven the king rebuffs the sexual advances of Inanna/Ishtar and in response the goddess turns loose the fearsome beast upon Uruk. Bilgames and Enkidu battle and ultimately slaughter the rampaging bovine, further insulting the goddess by throwing one of its “haunches”—a euphemism for genitalia—in her face.
{xv} 4) Bilgames and the Nether World tells of Enkidu’s mission to recover some of his master’s prized possessions from the subterranean realm of the dead. Cautioned by Bilgames to behave correctly and not to call attention to himself in Hades, Enkidu nonetheless disobeys these instructions and is consequently unable to return to the earth. Bilgames is bereft, but the sympathetic deities Enki and the Sun God Shamash arrange for Enkidu’s ghost to visit briefly with him. The story concludes with Enkidu’s first-hand description of the various sad lots of those confined to the underworld.
5) The Death of Bilgames opens with the hero lying in delirium on his deathbed, where he sees a vision of the gods in council, debating his fate. Despite his mixed divine–human parentage, they rule that he is mortal and must therefore die, but that in consolation he should be awarded the position of judge in the hereafter. Following a break in the text, preparations for the funeral and interment of the king are discussed, including a lengthy description of the gifts that he will take along with him for presentation to the officialdom of his new home.
Of these compositions only Bilgames and Huwawa, Bilgames and the Bull of Heaven, and Bilgames and the Nether World contributed directly to the Akkadian-language tradition, although elements of The Death of Bilgames were reworked to describe the funeral of Enkidu in the final version (Tablet VIII).
The Akkadian Gilgamesh Epic
From the Old Babylonian period (early second millennium BCE) come two well-preserved Akkadian-language tablets, now in collections at the University of Pennsylvania and at Yale University, that together deal with the meeting of Gilgamesh and Enkidu and their mooting of plans for an expedition to the Cedar Forest. Numerous more fragmentary tablets from various Mesopotamian sites dating to this era are also known, but they do not seem to be copies of a standardized text. The same is true of the material from the Late Bronze Age (later second millennium BCE), which in addition to Akkadian-language pieces also includes accounts in the Hittite and Hurrian tongues of the adventures of Gilgamesh. Furthermore, the Akkadian Gilgamesh tradition is represented for this era by finds from the periphery of the world that employed the cuneiform script—from Megiddo in Palestine, from Ugarit on the north Syrian coast, from Emar on the middle course of the Euphrates River, and most importantly from the Hittite capital Hattusa in central Anatolia.
{xvi} The Standard Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic
The Standard Babylonian Epic translated in this volume—so called after the literary Akkadian (Babylonian) dialect in which it is written—is initially attested on tablets from Babylonia and Assyria dating to the first centuries of the first millennium BCE. By far the largest source of relevant manuscripts is the tablet collections of the Neo-Assyrian kings, particularly the library assembled on behalf of Ashurbanipal at his royal seat Nineveh (Küyünjik). Remarkably, whatever their find-spots, these tablets generally present a codified text differing at most only in orthography or “spelling”; the division into tablets is identical across the sources. Therefore, scholars also often refer to this composition as the Canonical Version.
Nonetheless, grammatical features of the Standard Babylonian Epic indicate that it had been composed several hundred years before the inscription of the recovered manuscripts. (This situation is rather like having access to the Middle English Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey Chaucer only through an original-language modern paperback edition.) A scribal exercise from Ugarit displaying great similarities to the opening lines of Tablet I of the canonical text shows that the epic had assumed more or less its final form by the middle of the thirteenth century BCE. The Mesopotamians credited this creation to one Sîn-lēqi-unninnī (whose name means “The Moon God Listens to My Prayer”), otherwise known only in Babylonian tradition as a sage advisor to an earlier ruler.
Although yet another name for the Standard Babylonian Epic is the Twelve Tablet Version, the reader will note that only eleven tablets have been rendered here. This is because most authorities recognize Tablet XII as an awkward appendix to the composition, probably added at a relatively late point in its development. It is a close prose translation of the Sumerian tale Bilgames and the Nether World mentioned above, whose details contradict what we read of the fate of Enkidu in Tablet VII and whose presence spoils the splendid symmetry of the frame narrative of Tablets I and XI centered on the walls of Uruk (see below).
Akkadian Epic Poetry
The meter of Akkadian epic poetry, as evidenced in the Standard Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic and other literary works such as the Enuma Elish (the so-called “Babylonian Creation Epic”), is based upon patterns of syntactic units rather {xvii} than of syllabic stress, so it cannot be rendered authentically in English verse, which depends upon the latter. The translator compensates where possible by crafting lines with two main stresses flanking a central syntactic pause. To aid the modern
reader, he has also formatted the text into paragraphs rather than retaining the couplets and quatrains of the original.
Even after this modification, the text clearly displays a central feature of most Semitic poetry—parallelism. That is, the ancient poet often expresses a closely related or indeed the same idea in adjacent lines—or even within a single line. For example:
Your goats will bear triplets, your ewes twins,
Your laden donkey will outrun any mule,
Your team of horses will gallop in glory,
No ox will be a match for yours at the yoke.
(Tablet VI 19–22)
or Enkidu, eat the bread; it is the staff of life.
Drink the ale; it is the custom of the land.
(Tablet II 27–28)
or My friend, who was like a wild ass on the run,
An upland donkey, a leopard in the wild,
My friend Enkidu, a wild ass on the run,
An upland donkey, a leopard in the wild—
My friend Enkidu, he and I teamed up.
(Tablet X 124–28)
Blanket repetition is also frequent in Akkadian epic, with entire passages reused in similar circumstances. Note, for example, the lines describing the travelers’ settling in for the night and the dreams of Gilgamesh in Tablet IV (e.g., ll. 10ff.) and the hero’s recapitulation of his and Enkidu’s back story to those whom he encounters in Tablets X and XI (e.g., Tablet X 47ff.).
As a rule, Akkadian epic style favors description over action. Consider the elaborate picture the poet draws here of the Cedar Forest. Even when he employs active verbs, he adduces recurrent and continuing activities that one might expect to observe upon any visit to the awesome site:
They gazed at Cedar Mountain, throne of the gods,
Seat of goddesses, its great expanse
{xviii} Shrouded with cool and fragrant shade,
The trees tangled with thickets of thorn
Under an arching canopy. Cedar saplings
Grew around the perimeter one league deep,
And cypresses for another two-thirds of a league.
The cedar bark was scabby with resin
Up to sixty cubits high, and the oozing sap
Dribbled down like raindrops into ravines.
Birds began to sing throughout the forest,
Answering each other, a constant din.
Cicadas joined in, chirping in chorus.
A wood pigeon moaned, a turtle dove called back.
The cries of storks and of francolins
Made the forest exult, the woodland rejoice.
Monkey mothers were crooning, and their young
Shrieked in unison. It was like a band of musicians
Beating out rhythms every day for Humbaba.
(Tablet V 6–24)
To this compare the concise manner in which the poet concludes the battle with Humbaba:
Gilgamesh heard his friend. He pulled out
The long dagger that hung from his belt
And struck Humbaba deep in the neck.
Enkidu helped him to pull out his lungs,
And then Gilgamesh leapt up
And cut the tusks from his jaws as a trophy.
(Tablet V 157–62)
Enkidu and Gilgamesh
Enkidu’s relationship to Gilgamesh can usefully be described as one which literary critics refer to as a doppelgänger, or “double.” That is, in some ways the two figures can be seen as representing complementary sides of a single personality. For instance, we see that the life path of Enkidu that carries him from wild man to civilized individual is followed in reverse by Gilgamesh, {xix} when in extreme mourning for his lost comrade he abandons his fine garments for animal skins and departs Uruk for aimless wandering in the wilderness. In turn, this process is undone in preparation for Gilgamesh’s return to his city and kingship, when he recapitulates the civilizing of Enkidu by bathing and donning his royal finery:
Then Urshanabi led Gilgamesh to the washtub,
And Gilgamesh washed his matted hair clean.
He threw his old pelts into the sea
And soaked in the tub until his skin glowed.
He had a new headband made for him to wear,
And royal robes that suited his dignity.
(Tablet XI 257–62)
Note also that on the way to the Cedar Forest the two characters alternate in providing encouragement to one another. When one becomes fainthearted and bewails the dangers ahead, the other cites previous successful undertakings in promising a favorable outcome of the expedition. This can be seen as the churning and recursive consideration of contradictory aspects of a problem within a single anxious mind.
As many writers have lately observed, homoeroticism is an aspect of the relationship between the two adventurers, as demonstrated by the repeated prediction that Gilgamesh would be “drawn to it [the meteor symbolic of Enkidu] as by the love of a woman” (e.g., Tablet I 199) and by his veiling his dead friend’s face “as if it were his bride’s” (Tablet VIII 56). But this begs the question of how much we should make of this, for a gay identity would be an anachronism in ancient Mesopotamia. After all, the basic heterosexuality of the king and his sexual abuse of his female subjects are a major motivating factor early in the narrative (Tablet I 65–66). Rather, the intense love of Gilgamesh for his comrade underlines the intimate bond between the friends. The excruciating grief from which Gilgamesh suffers following the demise of Enkidu is caused not only by the realization that he will ultimately share the latter’s fate, but also by the loss of his dearest one.
{xx} Dreams
A major structural element of the Standard Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic is the reporting of dreams. Through their anticipation of future events, which unfailingly come to pass as foreseen, these dreams propel the narrative forward. These nocturnal visions always require interpretation by someone other than the dreamer himself. The interpreter need not be someone with special training in such explication: “Though born in the wild, Enkidu knew / How to give counsel. He interpreted the dream” (Tablet IV 26–27).
Ring Structure
Within its historical and literary context the Standard Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic is a quite sophisticated and thereby very unusual work. Perhaps the most striking feature is what critics refer to as a “ring narrative,” which encompasses the text. At the beginning of Tablet I, the poet invites the listener/reader to ascend and inspect the fortifications of Uruk and to view the city itself.
Climb the walls of Uruk and walk along them.
Examine the massive, terraced foundations.
Is the masonry not of fine, fired bricks?
Those foundations were laid by the Seven Sages.
One square mile is town, one square mile orchard,
One square mile clay-pits, and half a square mile
Is devoted to Eanna, its buildings and temples.
These four parts make up the city of Uruk.
(Tablet I 16–23)
The closing lines of the poem are almost identical to these verses, modified only slightly to fit their new context as an address by Gilgamesh to the ferryman Urshanabi, who has accompanied the king on his homecoming to Uruk:
O Urshanabi, climb Uruk’s walls and walk along them.
Examine the massive, terraced foundations.
Is the masonry not of fine, fired bricks?
Those foundations were laid by the Seven Sages.
One square mile is town, one square mile orchard,
{xxi} One square mile clay-pits, and half a square mile
The temple of Ishtar. Three square miles and a half
Is the area of Uruk.
(Tablet XI 318–25)
Furthermore, the Epic constitutes a veritable sampler of Mesopotamian literary genres. Included are entire or excerpted examples of elegy (Tablet X 271–95), lament (Tablet VIII 1–53), mythic narrative (Tablet XI 10–198), proverb (Tablet V 51–53), folktale (Tablet VI 48–69, Tablet XI 300–302), curse (Tablet V 1
52–53, Tablet VII 74–102), and even a parody of a royal inscription (Tablet VII 44–46). This sophistication contributes greatly to the appeal that the Epic has for modern readers and undoubtedly had for Babylonians as well.
Females in the Gilgamesh Epic
Here I leave aside minor figures such as the members of the divine court in the netherworld, who exercise little or no influence on the development of the plot (see the Glossary of Deities, Persons, and Places). With the exception of Ishtar, who as so often in Akkadian literature represents the dangers of unbridled sexuality, in the Epic major female characters, women and goddesses alike, perform roles befitting the position of women in a patriarchal society. These females do not display much in the way of agency. Gilgamesh’s mother Ninsun dispenses wise advice in explicating his dreams (Tablet I 203ff.) and exploits her position as a deity to request special attention for her son from higher authority (Tablet III 34ff.). Aya, wife of Shamash, is implored to nag her husband to make sure he abides by Ninsun’s desires (Tablet III 52–54, 65ff.). Shiduri the tavern-keeper provides the hero with a shoulder to cry on (Tablet X). The wife of Utanapishtim, who is not even dignified with a personal name, merely serves to hear her husband’s remarks (Tablet XI 204–6) and to bake the cakes that prove to Gilgamesh that he had indeed been asleep for a week (Tablet XI 212ff.).
Only the harlot Shamhat, albeit at the instruction of the king and explicitly exercising “all that a woman knows” (Tablet I 141, 146), performs a crucial function within the narrative by taming the primeval wild man Enkidu and introducing him to human mores.
{xxii} The Moral of the Story?
Like any great work of literature, the Standard Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic encompasses many meanings. As in most premodern heroic narratives, the hero’s primary motivation is the desire for lasting fame. Despite his initial realization that death is inevitable (“Men’s days are numbered. Whatever we do/ It is like a puff of wind, gone and no more,” Tablet II 134–35), Gilgamesh is “a man without any cares” (Tablet I 181). He proposes to achieve a kind of immortality through memorable deeds (“Let my journey begin. I will fell the cedar / And make for myself an eternal name!” Tablet II 161–62).