CHAPTER ONE
THE TEMPLE IN THE MOONLIGHT
*
The Primeval Religious Experience
Somewhat more than five millenia ago, a human hand first carved
a written word, and so initiated history, mankind's recorded
story. This happened in Sumer, probably in a warehouse of Uruk,
perhaps the earliest human habitation to deserve the name of
"city," mased along the Euphrates River in ancient Mesopotamia
-- modern Warka in present day Iraq. The written word was an
invention born of necessity: how else wre the Sumerians to keep
their accounts straight? The novel agglomeration human beings
and their posessions into a city such as Uruk -- a mind-defeating
jumble of temples, dwellings, storerooms, and alleyways, an
agglomeration soon to be imitated throughout the ancient world
-- cried out for a new way of counting shipments and recalling
transactions, for a man's memory was no longer sufficient to
encompass such immensities. The human mind wearied before the
task, growing resistant and uncooperative -- and, at last,
alarmingly error-prone -- but human ingenuity proposed a
damnably clever solution: enduring written symbols to replace
fallible human memory.
This innovation, which would change forever the course
of the human story, making possible fantastic feats of
information storage and retrieval and wholly new forms of
communication, both interpersonal and corporate, had been
prepared for by other innovations that had preceded it over the
long centuries of the Sumerians' trial-and-error ascent to
urbanization. The invention of agriculture -- the discovery
that one need not wait upon the bounty of nature but can organize
that bounty more or less predictably through the seasonal planting
of seed--had greatly lessened man's reliance on the uncertain
harvests of hunting and gathering and had made possible the first
settled communities, organized around a dependable grain supply.
The domestication of flocks and herds for predictable yields of
eggs, milk, flesh, leather, and wool soon followed (or may even
have occurred earlier). The invention of the hoe and the further
invention of the plow--which probably occurred when some lazy
but sly farmer thought to tie his hoe to a rope hitched to the horn
of an ox, thus giving himself considerably more muscle power
through the ox's strength and enabling him to farm a far larger
territory--went a long way toward creating stable farming
communities throughout the Fertile Crescent, that great arch of
watered land stretching north from the Tigris-Euphrates plain,
turning south through the Jordan valley, and ending at the Sinai.
Someone's brilliant idea to dig trenches (and then to fashion
canals and reservoirs) so that river water could run controllably
from higher embankments to lower fields meant that the farmer
no longer had to wait for the uncertain rains of the Middle East
but could now farm fields he would once have looked on as
useless. This technique, refined to exquisite perfection over many
centuries, would at last make possible along the broad steppes of
the Tigris-Euphrates plain the Hanging Gardens of Babylon
(Babylonia being the direct successor to Sumer), that stupendous
wonder of the world, a detailed description of which became the
favorite party piece of ancient tourists, thus enabling them to
bore their friends to death long before the invention of
photography.
Then, the period just before the invention of written language
saw in Sumer an explosion of technological creativity on a scale
that would not be matched till the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries of our era. For this period witnessed not only the sudden
expansion of farming communities with their growing inventory of
agricultural and pastoral innovations, but wheeled transport,
sailing ships, metallurgy, and wheel-turned, oven-baked
pottery--all appearing, as it
were, within weeks of one another. The Sumerians were the first
to hit upon the methods of construction that enable human beings
to go beyond the simpler feat of providing
comfortable shelter for themselves and to erect vastly impressive,
even overwhelming enclosures for business and ritual:
monumental stone sculpture, engraving, and inlay, the brick mold,
the arch, the vault, and the dome all first came to light under the
dazzling Sumerian sun. Cumulatively, this unique
series of creations made possible for the first time ecumenical
trading and, thence, great concentrations of people and
possessions and, particularly, the gigantic storage facilities that
would encourage our unknown inventor to dream up writing.
By the time the first word was incised on a small clay tablet
(which would for many centuries remain the common
medium of record), Sumer had risen to dominate all Mesopotamia
and had strong trading links and occasionally even
political suzerainty as far away as the Nile valley in northern
Africa and the Indus valley in the Far East. To the ever-circling
vultures, who no doubt took a dim view of civilization and
its unfortunate paucity of easy victims, Sumer appeared a
collection of some twenty-five city-states, remarkably
uniform in culture and organization. But to the human hordes
of Amorites--Semitic nomads wandering the mountains and
deserts just beyond the pale of Sumer--the tiered and clustered
cities, strung out along the green banks of the meandering
Euphrates like a giant's necklace of polished stone, seemed
shining things, each surmounted by a wondrous temple and
ziggurat dedicated to the city's god-protector, each city noted for
some specialty--all invidious reminders of what the nomads did not
possess.
What the nomads did not possess is nicely enumerated in this
Sumerian description of a typical Amorite:
A tent-dweller buffeted by wind and rain, he knows not
prayers,
With the weapon he makes the mountain his habitation,
Contentious to excess, he turns against the land, knows not
to bend the knee,
Eats uncooked meat,
Has no house in his lifetime,
Is not brought to burial when he dies.
This is almost a description of an animal: without manners or
courtesy--even toward the dead--without religion or even cooking
fire, the nomads were always getting themselves into bloody
disputes with more "civilized" landowners. Behind the description
we can detect the prejudice of imperialists throughout history,
who blithely assume their superiority, moral as well as technical,
over those whom they
have marginalized and therefore their divine right to whatever is
valuable, especially the land.
Thanks to the work of pioneering archaeologists, who have
dug up many Sumerian cities during this century and painstakingly
translated their abundant clay treasures, there is much we now
know of Sumer, the world's first civilization. Sumerian techniques
of farming and husbandry were extraordinarily sophisticated (the
Sumerians had two hundred words just for varieties of sheep);
their mathematics enabled them to do square roots and cube roots
and to calculate accurately the size of a field or a building and to
excavate or enlarge a canal. Their medicine was practical, not
magical, and their pharmacopoeias prescribed remedies for
everything from battle wounds to venereal disease (called "a
disease of the tun and the nu"--and though the experts tell us they
cannot be sure of the meaning of these two words, the layman
will have little trouble identifying them).
We even know much about Sumerian imagination. Manuals of
instruction were often written in the name of a god: a manual on
farming (a perennial best-seller, since copies of it have turned up
everywhere in the Sumerian ruins) claims to be authored by the
god Ninurta, "trustworthy farmer of Enlil"--the great god of the
Sumerian pantheon. The human farmer is advised to watch
carefully over his crop and to take all precautions, both human
and superhuman: "After the sprout has broken through the
ground" he is to scare off the flying birds, but he is also to pray to
Ninkilim, goddess of field mice, so that she will keep her
sharp-toothed little subjects away from the growing grain. Even the
process of brewing (the Sumerians were great beer drinkers) had
a sponsoring divinity, Ninkasi, a goddess born of "sparkling-fresh
water," whose name means "the lady who fills the mouth." On
this subject the Sumerians would wax poetic: Ninkasi was brewer
to the gods themselves, she who "bakes with lofty shovel the
sprouted barley," who "mixes the bappir-malt with sweet
aromatics," who "pours the fragrant beer in the lahtan-vessel
which is like the Tigris and Euphrates joined!"
We mustn't take too seriously every mention of the gods in the
Sumerian tablets, any more than we take seriously the pious
invocation of our own God by today's public figures. The
Sumerians were practical, down-to-earth businessmen, more
interested in calculating the extent of their fields and the capacity
of their warehouses than they were in anything else. But this does
not mean that they had no worldview beyond the steady
acquisition of possessions.
The worldview of a people, though normally left unspoken in
the daily business of buying and selling and counting shekels, is to
be found in a culture's stories, myths, and rituals, which, if
studied aright, inevitably yield insight into the deepest concerns
of a people by unveiling the invisible fears and desires
inscribed on human hearts. The stories of Sumer, as
resurrected from its plain clay tablets, possess a burnished
splendor that cannot but affect contemporary readers, giving us
flickering glimpses into the childhood of human imagination.
Virtually all the tablets are damaged, leaving us with holes in
every narrative. But many of the stories exist in several versions
(so that the holes in one version can sometimes
be filled in with passages from another) and even in
different languages, allowing us to reconstruct, at least partially, a
process of dynamic development that took place over many
centuries. For the process of Sumerian storytelling itself we may
be partly indebted to the wandering Semitic tribes, who, being
illiterate, possessed the inexhaustible narrative memory of
illiterate peoples and sometimes earned their keep by telling
stories to the settled folk. These tales, whether from nomadic
minstrels or from the oral traditions of the city-dwellers
themselves, were eventually written down by Sumerian scribes,
who did their best to categorize the wayward material into orderly
groupings, thus creating "books"--in actuality, uniform series of
tablets--of continuous narrative, episodic and sometimes
intergenerational.
Sometimes too orderly. The Sumerian grouping of the
narratives of their kings--the so-called King List--is completely
useless to modern historians. These thumbnail sketches of each
reign are arranged according to principles of symmetry and
numerology to please the eye and ring satisfyingly on the ear, but
without the least regard for what may in fact have occurred in
Sumerian history. Some of the kings are said to rule for thousands
of years, others for mere centuries; and recent studies,
comparing these lists with other ancient records, have found that
kings whose reigns are listed in sequence were actually
contemporaries or near contemporaries, ruling neighboring
Sumerian city-states.
The purposes of a modern historian would indeed have had no
meaning in Sumer, for Sumerians--paradoxically, since they
invented writing, the instrument that makes history
possible--had no sense of history. The city-states had been
founded by gods in time immemorial; and it was the gods who had
given the Sumerians, "the black-headed people" (as they called
themselves), all the tools and weapons and marvelous inventions
that we know were the products of their own ingenuity.
"Development" and "evolution"--words of such importance to
us--would have meant little in the timeless culture of Sumer, where
everything that was--their city, their fields, their herds, their plows--had
always been.
Even their stories miss a sense of development: they begin in
the middle and end in the middle. They lack the relentless
necessity that we associate with storytelling, from which we
demand a beginning, a middle, an end: a shape. When reading a
book or watching a movie that seems to wander without direction,
we ask impatiently, "Where is this going?" But all Sumerian stories
are shaggy-dog stories, sounding sometimes like the patter of
small children who imitate the jokes they have heard from older
children without realizing that there has to be a punchline. When
perusing Sumerian literature, the modern reader is often left
waiting for the punchline. Despite this, the tales of ancient
Sumer are full of pleasure for us, both because of their archaic
strangeness and because of the occasional mirror-moments in
which we are startled to glimpse something of ourselves: an image
or emotion that we have in common with this people of the dim
past.
The Sumerian work that has left the greatest impress on
contemporary imagination is the Epic of Gilgamesh, the story of
a legendary hero who probably flourished toward the middle of
the third millennium B.C. as king of Uruk, the very city where
writing was likely invented. He may have been of Semitic, rather
than Sumerian, stock because, at least according to one
translation of the notoriously unreliable King List, Lugalbanda,
Gilgamesh's father and king before him, "was a nomad." If so, the
nomadic minstrels would have had much reason to celebrate his
exploits; and Gilgamesh's kingship would represent an early
power grab by the wandering Semitic tribes, who by millennium's
end would wrest power throughout Sumer and establish their
languages at the expense of Sumerian. Sumerian, a language for
which no cognate tongues have been found, was replaced early in
the second millennium by Akkadian (or Old Babylonian) as the
lingua franca of Mesopotamia, after which Sumerian lived on
only as a literary language employed by learned
scribes for special documents. But the new Semitic rulers
took up not only cuneiform writing but the mythology and
beliefs of their Sumerian predecessors in seamless continuity,
which is why we have found stories of Gilgamesh not only
in Sumerian but in Akkadian and other ancient languages.
The Epic opens on a charming description of ancient Uruk,
with the poet acting as tour guide to a first-time visitor:
See its wall, which is like a copper band,
Survey its battlements, which nobody else can match,
Take the threshold, which is from time immemorial,
Approach Eanna, the home of Ishtar,
Which no future king nor any man will ever match!
Go up on the wall of Uruk and walk around!
Inspect the foundation platform and scrutinize the
brickwork!
Testify that its bricks are baked bricks,
That the Seven Counselors must have laid its foundations!
One square mile is city, one square mile is orchards, one
square mile is claypits, as well as the open ground of
Ishtar's temple.
Three square miles and the open ground comprise Uruk.
The poet's pride in the splendor and extent of his city is
unmistakable. Uruk is "from time immemorial," its foundations
laid by the Seven Counselors, the gods who brought
the black-heads all the special skills and crafts that have made
them great. True greatness belongs exclusively to this
"time immemorial," and "no future
king nor any man will ever
match" such primeval achievements
as the Eanna, Uruk's temple to Ishtar, goddess of love and
war. Then, as if he were working
from a shooting script for a
movie, the poet, having given us
his establishing shots of the ancient
city, invites us to have a
closer look at one of the wonders
it contains, a secret document preserved on a slab of Sumer's
most precious material:
Look for the copper tablet-box,
Undo its bronze lock,
Open the door to its secret,
Lift out the lapis lazuli tablet, read it,
The story of that man, Gilgamesh, who went through all
kinds of sufferings.
He was superior to other kings, a warrior lord of great
stature,
A hero born of Uruk, a goring wild bull.
He marches at the front as leader,
He goes behind, the support of his brothers,
A strong net, the protection of his men,
The raging flood-wave, which can destroy even a stone wall.
Son of Lugalbanda, Gilgamesh, perfect in strength,
Son of the lofty cow, the wild cow Ninsun.
He is Gilgamesh, perfect in splendor,
Who opened up passes in the mountains,
Who could dig pits even in the mountainside,
Who crossed the ocean, the broad seas, as far as the sunrise.
Gilgamesh, part human, part divine (since his mother is the
wild cow goddess, Ninsun), has all the attributes of a proper
mythological figure--fierce as a bull, strong as a wave--but also
possesses the practical skills valued by your down-to-earth
Sumerian businessman: he is a terrific engineer and an
incomparable navigator. And this winning combination
of qualities gives us a hint that the story of Gilgamesh is
the result of a long process of development and maturation. It
may easily have arisen in a past so remote--long
before writing, even long before agriculture--that no
archaeologist can recapture it. But it has been turned and turned
like pottery and elaborately decorated by successive hands, first
prehistoric, then Sumerian, then Semitic.
The lines I have quoted come from an unbroken portion of
Tablet I. But now I must quote from a portion of the tablet that
will give a better idea of the difficulties faced by a translator--lines
that also suggest that even in lordly Uruk Gilgamesh was a
bit much:
In Uruk the Sheepfold he would walk about,
Show himself superior, his head held high like a wild bull.
He had no rival, at his pukku
His weapons would rise up, his comrades have to rise up.
The young men of Uruk became dejected in their private
[quarters(?)].
Gilgamesh would not leave any son alone for his father.
Day and night his [behavior(?)] was overbearing. . . .
He is the shepherd of Uruk the Sheepfold,
He is their shepherd, yet [ ]
Powerful, superb, knowledgeable, [and expert],
Gilgamesh would not leave young girls [alone],
The daughters of warriors, the brides of young men.
"At his pukku" may mean "alert" or "erect" or it may refer to a
kind of hockey game associated with fertility and
played at weddings. The translator's brackets mark places where
the tablet is broken or unclear. The young men may have become
dejected in their private quarters or in their private thoughts--we can't
be sure. But despite the lacunae and untranslatable words, we
can be pretty sure that Gilgamesh was making a nuisance of
himself, bullying the boys and bedding the girls. And this seems to
be seen by the Sumerians as the necessary excrescence of
greatness. Sumerian society, we know from other tablets, was
intensely competitive, and Sumerians were swaggerers of the
worst kind. Kings indulged in their own constant self-praise
without a trace of inhibition. The citizenry often resorted to the
law courts, whose "verdicts" fill many tablet collections as one of
the most pervasive literary forms. Another pervasive form, which
the Sumerians found especially entertaining, is the "contest," a
fanciful public disputation between two rivals--between, for
instance, two schoolboys over who is the better student (a
disputation replete with such appellations as "dolt," "numbskull,"
"illiterate," and "windbag"); between two suitors for the hand of a
goddess; even between copper and silver, summer and winter.
This was a society full of contentiousness and aggression, in
which the "good" man--the ideal--was imagined as ambitious in the
extreme, animated by a drive for worldly prestige, victory,
success, with scant regard to what we would think of as ethical
norms. This was also a society that despised poverty.
At any rate, the people of Uruk, for all their pride in
Gilgamesh, need some relief, and so they complain bitterly
to their gods, especially to "great Aruru," the universal mother:
"Did [Aruru (?)] create such a rampant wild bull?
Is there no rival? . . .
You, Aruru, you created [mankind (?)]!
Now create someone for him, to match (?) the ardor (?) of
his energies!
Let them be regular rivals, and let Uruk be allowed peace!"
So Aruru creates "inside herself the word of Anu," the father
god. Then, washing her hands, she pinches "off a piece of clay,
cast[s] it out in open country," where it becomes "Enkidu, the
warrior, offspring of silence, and sky-bolt of Ninurta":
His whole body was shaggy with hair, he was furnished with
tresses like a woman,
His locks of hair grew luxuriant like grain.
He knew neither people nor country; he was dressed as
cattle are.
With gazelles he eats vegetation,
With cattle he quenches his thirst at the watering place.
With wild beasts he satisfies his need for water.
Enkidu, the ultimate "natural man," at one with animals rather
than humans, foils the strategies of the local hunters, one of
whom brings the hunters' complaints to Gilgamesh:
"I am too frightened to approach him.
He kept filling in the pits that I dug [ ],
He kept pulling out the traps that I laid.
He kept helping cattle, wild beasts of open country, to
escape my grasp."
Gilgamesh's solution is remarkable:
"Go, hunter, lead forth the harlot Shamhat,
And when he approaches the cattle at the watering place,
She must take off her clothes, reveal her attractions.
He will see her and go close to her.
Then his cattle, who have grown up in open country with
him, will become alien to him."
The hunter does as Gilgamesh bids, bringing Shamhat to the
watering place; and when Enkidu, "the murderous youth from the
depths of open country," arrives to drink with the wild beasts:
Shamhat loosened her undergarments, opened her legs and
he took in her attractions.
She did not pull away. She took wind of him,
Spread open her garments, and he lay upon her.
She did for him, the primitive man, as women do.
His love-making he lavished upon her.
For six days and seven nights Enkidu was aroused and
poured himself into Shamhat.
When he was sated with her charms,
He set his face towards the open country of his cattle.
The gazelles saw Enkidu and scattered,
The cattle of open country kept away from his body.
For Enkidu had become smooth; his body was too clean.
His legs, which used to keep pace with his cattle, were at a
standstill.
Enkidu had been diminished, he could not run as before.
Yet he had acquired judgment (?), had become wiser.
Dumbfounded by this transformation, Enkidu returns to the harlot
to find out what this is all about. She tells him that he has "become like a
god" and urges that his proper place is now in Uruk,
"Where Gilgamesh is perfect in strength,
And is like a wild bull, more powerful than (any of) the
people."
She spoke to him, and her speech was acceptable.
Knowing his own mind (now), he would seek for a friend.
Of course, Enkidu's way of "seek[ing] for a friend" is unusual:
"Let me challenge him, and [ ]
(By saying:) `In Uruk I shall be the strongest!'
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. 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 precincts.
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.
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 days 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.
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, Eke 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.
