I shall go in and alter destiny: One who was born in open country has [superior (?)] strength!”
But Gilgamesh has already been alerted to the coming of Enkidu by symbolic dreams, which have been interpreted for him by his mother, Ninsun:
“… a strong partner shall come to you, one who can save the life of a friend,
He will be the most powerful in strength of arms in the land.
His strength will be as great as that of a sky-bolt of Anu.
You will love him as a wife, you will dote upon him.
[And he will always] keep you safe (?).”
Shamhat knows of Gilgamesh’s dreams and their interpretation and relates these to Enkidu, concluding:
“[The dreams mean that you will lo]ve one another.”
Tablet II, on which the story continues, is full of gaps, but it is clear that Enkidu, on arriving in Uruk, does challenge Gilgamesh and “they grappled,”
Wrestled in the street, in the public square.
Doorframes shook, walls quaked.
Then, upon the intervention of Ninsun, a weeping Gilgamesh makes a speech that is, given the present state of the text, largely incomprehensible. But
Enkidu stood, listened to him speaking,
Pondered, and then sat down, began to cry.
His eyes grew dim with tears.
His arms slackened, his strength [( )]
(Then) they grasped one another,
Embraced and held (?) hands.
The mystery of this long-departed people is made even more mysterious by the lacunae in this text. But a couple of things are clear: as in all warrior societies of the Bronze and Iron Ages, the most valued human relationships are between males (and, whether or not such relationships are actively sexual, they must surely be deemed, precisely, homosexual—that is, of the same sex); for all this, congress with a woman is, somehow, civilizing—that is, anti-animalizing, rendering a man ready for the life of the city—for it is because of his encounter with Shamhat that Enkidu is alienated from nature and made ready for entry into Uruk.3 As for Shamhat’s harlotry, she is obviously not a common harlot: she is given far too much prestige, being party to the king’s dreams and his most intimate conversations with his mother. Most likely, she is one of the company of holy harlots, sacred prostitutes consecrated to the worship of one of the gods and ritually (and regularly) ravished by a high priest within the temple pre Likewise, the repeated epithets used to describe Enkidu—“word of Anu,” “sky-bolt of Ninurta,” “axe”—appear to be, as the translator Stephanie Dalley puts it delicately, “puns on terms for cult personnel of uncertain sexual affinities who were found particularly in Uruk, associated with Ishtar’s cult”—in other words, sacred male prostitutes.
Gilgamesh and Enkidu, now fast friends, more closely bound than husband and wife, having vowed to defend each other even to death, set out to slay the monster Humbaba, an almost unimaginably terrifying creature whose face looks like coiled intestines and
… whose shout is the flood-weapon, whose utterance is Fire, whose breath is Death,
Can hear for a distance of sixty leagues through (?) the … of the forest, so who can penetrate his forest?
But, coos the mighty warrior Gilgamesh,
“Hold my hand, my friend, let us set off!
Your heart shall soon burn (?) for conflict; forget death and [think only of] life (?).
Man is strong, prepared to fight, responsible.
He who goes in front (and) guards his (friend’s) body, shall keep the comrade safe.
They shall have established fame for their [future (?)].”
With Enkidu’s help, Gilgamesh slays the monster—very dirty work—after which the king cleans himself up and attires himself in robes, “manly sash,” and crown. Looking good, he attracts the attention of Ishtar, goddess of love and war:
“Come to me, Gilgamesh, and be my lover!
Bestow on me the gift of your fruit!
You shall be my husband, and I can be your wife.”
But Gilgamesh knows that the goddess has had many mates, all of whom she eventually disposed of. “Which of your lovers lasted forever?” asks Gilgamesh.
“Which of your masterful paramours went to heaven?
Come, let me [describe (?)] your lovers to you!”
Gilgamesh then catalogues Ishtar’s many companions and their sad fate at her hands (she is, after all, the goddess of love and war), starting with the shepherd Dumuzi, with whom Gilgamesh feels a close identification:
“For Dumuzi the lover of your youth
You decreed that he should keep weeping year after year.”
Dumuzi, Sumerian mythology’s great dying god—like Osiris in Egypt, Adonis in Greece, and many others—was particularly beloved of ordinary people, who interpreted the dramatic cycle of the seasons as his annual death (his “weeping year after year”) and resurrection. So moved were they by his fate that they would sit and weep for him during the rains of winter. It may well be that Dumuzi’s story is a faint memory of a time when Sumer’s kings, imagined as consorts of a goddess, were periodically sacrificed to ensure fertility, as were kings in other ancient societies.
Gilgamesh ends his catalogue of Ishtar’s lovers with a story similar to Dumuzi’s, that of another force of fertility, the garden god Ishullanu, whose inventions were responsible for much of the beauty of Sumer’s cities:
“You loved Ishullanu, your father’s gardener,
Who was always bringing you baskets of dates.
They brightened your table every day;
You lifted your eyes to him and went to him
‘My own Ishullanu, let us enjoy your strength,
So put out your hand, touch our vulva!’
But Ishullanu said to you,
‘Me? What do you want of me?
Did my mother not bake for me, and did I not eat?
What I eat (with you) would be loaves of dishonor and disgrace,
Rushes would be my only covering against the cold.’
You listened as he said this,
You hit him, turned him into a frog (?),
Left him to stay amid the fruits of his labors.
But the pole (?) goes up no more, [his bucket] goes down no more.4
And how about me? You will love me and then [treat me] just like them!”
Ishtar, furious at Gilgamesh, who has “spelled out to me my dishonor, my dishonor and my disgrace,” ascends to heaven and convinces the father god to send down the Bull of Heaven to destroy Gilgamesh. But together Gilgamesh and Enkidu overcome the unconquerable Bull and butcher it. For this impiety, one of the friends must die, and Enkidu is chosen by the Council of Heaven. Why Enkidu? The text of the tablets, so often repetitive and meandering (much more so than is apparent from my terse summaries), turns uncharacteristically compact and understated. But there may be a suggestion that Gilgamesh deflects the malign attention of the gods because he has a patronal god all his own—his dead father Lugalbanda, whose portable effigy he anoints while dedicating to him the spoils of the Bull’s enormous horns, now splendidly decorated with “thirty minas of lapis lazuli” and sheathed with “two minas of gold.” This homage to an ancestor or other household god, whose presence was localized in a small image, was a ritual of many ancient societies.
At Enkidu’s death, Gilgamesh sets up a wailing hymn of mourning, more tender than we might think this earliest civilization capable of, asking for tears from all the orders of human beings that make up the city of Uruk, from the wild beasts and even from the trees, thus exalting Enkidu to the status (and even, to some extent, to the identity) of the pathetic, beloved Dumuzi. Gilgamesh ends with the same gesture Achilles will make many centuries later in the Iliad on the death of his companion-in-arms Patroclus:
“Turn to me, you! You aren’t listening to me!
But he cannot lift his head.
I touch his heart, but it does not beat at all.”
Gilgamesh weeps over the body of Enkidu for six day
s and seven nights, allowing him to be buried only after “a worm fell out of his nose.”
Enkidu, like all who die, has gone down to Kur, a dark, dreary, pleasureless place on the far side of a river where a ferryman—just like Charon in the later Greek myth of Hades—transports the naked and enervated souls of the dead to their final haunt, where “vermin eat [them] like an old blanket,” where one “sits in a crevice full of dust.” (The picture is not unlike the one that medieval artists will paint of hell.) Gilgamesh resolves to avoid the common human fate by obtaining the secret of immortality. But only one mortal man has been granted immortality: Ut-napishtim. This figure of Sumerian mythology, the model for Noah in the later biblical narrative, was found virtuous enough to be given the divine guidance to save his family and a remnant of all living things by building an ark in the primordial time of the universal flood, when the gods decided to destroy the human race.
After horrifying adventures among the Scorpion-men, “whose aura is frightful and whose glance is death,” great Gilgamesh succeeds in reaching an alewife who can give him directions to the paradise of Dilmun, where “Ut-napishtim and his woman are as gods,” living forever. But in one especially well-preserved version, the alewife has her own sage advice to give:
“Gilgamesh, where do you roam?
You will not find the eternal life you seek.
When the gods created mankind
They appointed death for mankind,
Kept eternal life in their own hands.
So, Gilgamesh, let your stomach be full,
Day and night enjoy yourself in every way,
Every day arrange for pleasures.
Day and night, dance and play,
Wear fresh clothes.
Keep your head washed, bathe in water,
Appreciate the child who holds your hand,
Let your wife enjoy herself in your lap.”
After battling “the things of stone,” Gilgamesh finally reaches Ut-napishtim “the far-distant”; and this Sumerian Noah has even blunter advice:
“[Why (?)] have you exerted yourself? What have you achieved (?)?
You have made yourself weary for lack of sleep,
You only fill your flesh with grief,
You only bring the distant days (of reckoning) closer.
Mankind’s fame is cut down like reeds in a reed-bed.
A fine young man, a fine girl,
[ ] of Death.
Nobody sees Death,
Nobody sees the face of Death,
Nobody hears the voice of Death.
Savage Death just cuts mankind down.
Sometimes we build a house, sometimes we make a nest,
But then brothers divide it upon inheritance.
Sometimes there is hostility [in the land],
But then the river rises and brings flood-water.
Dragonflies drift on the river,
Their faces look upon the face of the Sun,
(But then) suddenly there is nothing.
The sleeping (?) and the dead are just like each other,
Death’s picture cannot be drawn.…
The Anunnaki, the great gods, assembled; …
They appointed death and life.
They did not mark out days for death,
But they did so for life.”
On these sober words, which appear to constitute the main lesson of the Epic, we take our leave of Gilgamesh, but not without drawing some conclusions from what we have read. Though the casual reader may easily identify certain Sumerian qualities—such as love of invention and admiration of those who are unabashedly competitive—as qualities that are valued in our own society, one misses much if one fails to notice how differently these qualities play in the ancient context. Inventions are the property of the gods—as are human beings, who have been created to be servants of the gods and to offer them assuaging sacrifices. The aggression of the great warrior lords, like Gilgamesh, and the strong bonds of solidarity between warriors are supremely necessary to the city-states of Sumer, which, though they belong to a single, unified culture, war with one another constantly, as will the later city-states of Greece, always jockeying for some advantage one over the other. But there can be no permanent victory, for either city or warrior. Even the gods are often at odds with one another; and Gilgamesh survives despite the wishes of outraged Ishtar probably because he has the protection of two gods, the wise wild cow who is his mother and the now-deified Lugalbanda, his father. But who can say when a human being will trespass against one of the many gods and incur doom? And even if one should escape such a fate, Death, the end of happiness, is inescapable.
There are faint echoes in the Epic of Gilgamesh of notes that will sound more forcefully and coherently in the Epic of Israel, the early books of the Hebrew Bible, which, though they will be written down in a later time and in a somewhat different place, grow out of this time and place. The strongest of these is the theme of the primordial flood and the ark, which saves from destruction the just remnant of the living.5 Ut-napishtim and his wife, who have become “as gods” in the garden paradise of Dilmun, may also remind us of Adam and Eve, whose desire to become “as gods” precipitates their exile from a garden called “Eden”—a name which may itself be a borrowing from the Sumerian. And Shamhat’s reassurance to Enkidu that his humanization has made him more “like a god” reminds us of the assertion in the Book of Genesis that humans are created, unlike animals, “in the image of God.” And Enkidu was created, like the creation in Genesis, by the word of the father god and, like Adam, was molded from clay.
Among the fainter echoes of our Bible that we may discern in these most ancient records is the language of love that Ishtar employs, not unlike the language of the Song of Songs. The “Council of Heaven” reminds us of many biblical phrases in which God seems to take counsel with other divine beings or with angels and in which heaven is envisioned as a royal court. The descriptions of the realm of the dead are reminiscent not only of the Greek Hades but of the Jewish Sheol. The waters of the flood are described as rising up from the primordial Chaos that surrounds the Heaven-Earth, the universe laid out by the gods, in a manner very like the Chaos that surrounds God’s emerging creation at the outset of Genesis. And the worldly-wise advice of Ut-napishtim and the alewife must prompt us to think of the Bible’s Wisdom books, especially Ecclesiastes with its cynical, world-weary tone.
One theme that belongs to Gilgamesh but is nowhere to be found among the books of the Bible is fertility—or, rather, its timbre is so different as to make it unrecognizable. The temple of Ishtar, awesomely dominating the heights of Uruk, scene of sacred sexual rites involving orders of prostitutes both male and female, harks back to a world even older than Uruk, a world in which human copulation was seen as the localized expression of the cosmic Heaven-Earth, the great fertility machine created by the gods, who were themselves the archetypal—and highly sexed—engenderers of all that is.
We have looked on Uruk, this city of baked brick rising from the banks of the Euphrates in the intense heat of the Mesopotamian sun, we have imagined its society and listened to some of the many-told tales that were the staple of its entertainment. Now let’s delve into the deepest level of the Sumerian psyche—to the ultimate beliefs that held this society together, to the spiritual matrix that created the Sumerian worldview. In order to delve deeper we must, paradoxically, climb higher. For we must ascend the lofty stair and enter the great temple overlooking the heights of another Sumerian city—the Temple of the Moon, acropolis of the city of Ur, ancient imperial capital of Sumer. As we make our way to the center of mystery, we need to ask some basic questions about this place.
Why were all early temples and sacred places built at the highest point available to the builders? Because this is the place nearest the sky. And why is the most sacred space nearest the sky? Because the sky is the divine opposite of life on earth, home of all that is eternal in contrast to the mortal life of earth. When primitive man looked up at t
he heavens, he saw a vast cavalcade of divine figures regularly passing before his eyes—the cosmic drama, breathtaking in its eternal order and predictability. Here are the eternal prototypes and models for mortal life; but a great gulf yawns between the two spheres, for the life of the heavens, the life of the gods, is immortal and everlasting, while life in the earthly sphere is mortal, ending in death. For the earliest human beings—the first creatures to look upon the drama of the heavens with comprehension—these insights required little reasoning and no discussion; they were immediate and obvious, self-evident truths. This meditation on the heavens was the aboriginal religious experience. In the words of the preeminent modern scholar of religion Mircea Eliade: “The phrase ‘contemplating the vault of heaven’ really means something when it is applied to primitive man, receptive to the miracles of every day to an extent we find it hard to imagine. Such contemplation is the same as a revelation. The sky shows itself as it really is: infinite, transcendent. The vault of heaven is, more than anything else, ‘something quite apart’ from the tiny thing that is man and his span of life. The symbolism of its transcendence derives from the simple realization of its infinite height. ‘Most high’ becomes quite naturally an attribute of the divinity. The regions above man’s reach, the starry places, are invested with the divine majesty of the transcendent, of absolute reality, of everlastingness. Such places are the dwellings of the gods; certain privileged people [like Lugalbanda] go there as a result of rites effecting their ascension into heaven.… The ‘high’ is something inaccessible to man as such; it belongs by right to superhuman powers and beings; when a man ceremonially ascends the steps of a sanctuary, or the ritual ladder leading to the sky, he ceases to be a man.”
As we continue to climb to the sanctuary, the primeval worldview of the people who built the steps we tread becomes ever more evident. The cosmology of the Sumerians was based on perceptions of societies, now irretrievably ancient, that had preceded them; and, with a few adjustments, it would be received as truth by almost all societies that followed the Sumerians, right down to the threshold of modern times. Earth was a flat circle, attached at its perimeter to the dome of Heaven. Between Earth and Heaven was the element of Air, in which, high up, hung the astral bodies passing before the eyes of Earth-dwellers, pictorial projections of the drama of Heaven, which was also of course predictive of life on Earth, itself a kind of weak imitation of the heavenly drama. Just beneath the circle of Earth was the realm of Death—Hades, Sheol, the shadowy hell to which the dead were consigned—a sort of basement of the Sea of Chaos that surrounded the Earth-Heaven on all sides, whence rain fell and flood rose. Each of these great elements was a god: Heaven was father; Earth was mother; Air, which contained the eternal but ever-revolving pictures of the cosmic drama and clues (for the insightful interpreter) to our life on Earth, was mediator between Heaven and Earth and therefore the most important god in the Sumerian pantheon; and the Sea was necessarily an unpredictable and troubling ally, to be treated with caution.