EPIC OF GILGAMESH
Stories do not need to inform us of anything. They do inform us of things. From The Epic of Gilgamesh, for example, we know something of the people who lived in the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in the second and third millenniums BCE. We know they celebrated a king named Gilgamesh; we know they believed in many gods; we know they were self-conscious of their own cultivation of the natural world; and we know they were literate. These things we can fix -- or establish definitely. But stories also remind us of things we cannot fix -- of what it means to be human. They reflect our will to understand what we cannot understand, and reconcile us to mortality.
In the prologue we learn that Gilgamesh was two-thirds god and one-third man, and this knowledge is key to all that follows. Gilgamesh is a hero -- more beautiful, more courageous, more terrifying than the rest of us; his desires, attributes, and accomplishments epitomize our own. Yet he is also mortal: he must experience the death of others and die himself. How much more must a god rage against death than we who are merely mortal!And if he can reconcile himself with death then surely we can. In fact, without death his life would be meaningless, and the adventures that make up the epic would disappear. In celebrating Gilgamesh -- in reading The Epic of Gilgamesh -- we celebrate that which makes us human.
The story begins with the coming of Enkidu. As a young man and a god, Gilgamesh has no compassion for the people of Uruk, where he is king. He kills their sons and rapes their daughters. The people call out to the sky-god Anu, the chief god of the city, to help them. Hearing the people's lament, the gods create a wild man, Enkidu, out in the harsh and wild forests surrounding Gilgamesh's lands. This brute, Enkidu, has the strength of dozens of wild animals; he is to serve as the subhuman rival to the superhuman Gilgamesh. Enkidu is meant as a match for Gilgamesh, a second self: "`Let them contend together and leave Uruk in quiet'" (62). Just as Enkidu arrives, Gilgamesh claims the right to have sexual intercourse first with every new bride on the day of her wedding. Outraged, Enkidu prevents Gilgamesh from entering the house of a bride and bridegroom. They fight furiously until Gilgamesh wins the upper hand; Enkidu concedes Gilgamesh's superiority and the two embrace and become devoted friends, much like combatants who realize they are equally superior in skill and strength develop a respect for one another..
Who is Enkidu? Created of clay and water and dropped into the wilderness, Enkidu is "innocent of mankind," knowing "nothing of cultivated land.” He lives in joy with the beasts.Animals don’t run from him; he understands the ways of nature; he is the personification of nature. One day a trapper sees that Enkidu is destroying the traps and helping the beasts escape. The trapper needs to do away with Enkidu.
To distract and corrupt Enkidu, the trapper sends a temple harlot named Shamhat. She meets Enkidu at the watering-hole where all the wild animals gather; she offers herself to him and he submits, instantly loosing his strength and wildness; he is now rejected by the beasts. This seems a dirty trick. Yet for Enkidu as for human beings in general, sexual desire leads to domesticity, or love. After they have sex she gives him wine to drink; he becomes drunk. She also feed him, and he eats the usual human food. "Enkidu was grown weak," the narrator tells us, "for wisdom was in him, and the thoughts of a man were in his heart." However, he has now gained understanding and knowledge. The woman says to him, "You are wise, Enkidu, and now you have become like a god. Why do you want to run wild with the beasts in the hills?" Enkidu is civilized through the action of a woman and through access to sexual knowledge. This represents a fall of man, a loss of innocence; it is a loss of natural separation from society, which developed through the agency of the temple harlot. There is a connection between sex, religion, and society.
She offers to take him to the city where all the joys of civilization shine, telling him about "strong-walled Uruk" and "the blessed temple of Ishtar and of Anu, of love and of heaven," and about Gilgamesh himself. Enkidu is pleased: "he longed for a comrade, for one who would understand his heart" (65). And so he sets out to meet Gilgamesh.Both Enkidu and Gilgamesh gradually weaken and grow lazy living in the city, so Gilgamesh proposes a great adventure: they are to journey to the great Cedar Forest in southern Iran and cut down all the cedar trees. This is important because cedars are a long ways away. There is no wood in Mesopotamia. If they are to build with wood they must go somewhere that has it and either trade for it or steal it. To do this, they will need to kill the Guardian of the Cedar Forest, the great demon, Humbaba the Terrible. Enkidu knows about Humbaba from his days running wild in the forest; he tries in vain to convince Gilgamesh not to undertake this folly.
Gilgamesh and Enkidu enter the gloriously beautiful Cedar Forest and begin to cut down the trees. Hearing the sound, Humbaba comes roaring up to them and warns them off. Enkidu shouts at Humbaba that the two of them are much stronger than the demon, but Humbaba, who knows Gilgamesh is a king, taunts the king for taking orders from a nobody like Enkidu. Turning his face into a hideous mask, Humbaba begins to threaten the pair, and Gilgamesh runs and hides. Enkidu shouts at Gilgamesh, inspiring him with courage, and Gilgamesh appears from hiding and the two begin their epic battle with Humbaba. On his knees, with Gilgamesh's sword at his throat, Humbaba begs for his life and offers Gilgamesh all the tress in the forest and his eternal servitude. While Gilgamesh is thinking this over, Enkidu intervenes, telling Gilgamesh to kill Humbaba before any of the gods arrive and stop him from doing so. Should he kill Humbaba, he will achieve widespread fame for all the times to come. Gilgamesh, with a great sweep of his sword, removes Humbaba's head. But before he dies, Humbaba screams out a curse on Enkidu: "Of you two, may Enkidu not live the longer, may Enkidu not find any peace in this world!"
Gilgamesh and Enkidu cut down the cedar forest and in particular the tallest of the cedar trees to make a great cedar gate for the city of Uruk. They build a raft out of the cedar and float down the Euphrates river to their city. The goddess Ishtar is always taking mortal lovers. It happens all the time in Mesopotamian mythology. She offers herself to Gilgamesh. He rebuffs her. He says that all the men that end up having sex with you end up coming to very bad ends. He doesn’t want anything terrible to happen to him. Rebuffed, she is so hurt that she tells her dad, Anu, head of the Babylonian pantheon to send down some terrible misfortune on Gilgimesh and Uruk.
The Bull of Heaven is sent down; the people of Uruk have seven years of famine; they also have earthquakes. Enkidu and Gilgamesh fight and destroy the Bull of Heaven, undoing the plagues and evils sent down. There is a tension between the human and divine. Divine intentions are being frustrated by humans. After the bull is dead, Enkidu actively insults Ishtar. As they are cutting the bull apart, he throws a piece of meat at her. His hubris and refusal to accept his human status exceeds that even of Gilgamesh, and for that reason it is decided that one of these two must die. Enkidu is the one to be killed as retribution for his disrespect of Ishtar. [Back then, if you sicken and die for some reason, some magical agency must be behind it.]
Before he dies he curses the temple prostitute that brought him into society. However, she reminds him that he would have died anyway, and that it was better that he was able to taste the fruits of civilization before death.
At the death of Enkidu, Gilgamesh mourns and realizes that Enkidu looks an awful lot him and in fact is his image. It occurs to him that he is going to die, too. This confrontation with one’s own mortality is the touchstone for having a bounded ego—a recognition of certain facts in human life in which all must participate. The recognition of death starts Gilgamesh’s quest for immortality. Gilgamesh seeks out Utnapishtim the Faraway—the sole survivor of a great flood. He is the only mortal to whom the gods have given everlasting life. He passes by a number of mythological creatures which serve as way stations in his journey. He talks to a group known as the scorpion men. The Scoprion men tell him that what he is doing unprecedented and is sure to fail; Gilgamesh moves on. In another case he goes up to the cosmic barmaid, Siduri. Why she has a bar near paradise and what sort of traffic she gets never is explained. But in every case Gilgamesh is stopping at a way station and asks directions. He asks Siduri what it is about human life that makes us mortal and unable to live forever. She says, “Drink up. This is the best you get.”
With Urshanabi, the ferryman, Gilgamesh crosses the waters of death—the Hades of Greece. Utnapishtim asks Gilgamesh, "Where are you hurrying to?" In answer to Gilgamesh's question, "How shall I find the eternal life for which I am searching?" he says, "There is no permanence" (106). But he reveals the mystery of his own possession of everlasting life. He tells Gilgamesh the story of the flood, of the time when the gods, unable to sleep for the uproar raised by mankind, agreed to destroy mankind, and would have succeeded had not Ea, one of the gods, instructed Utnapishtim to build a boat and "take up into [it] the seed of all living creatures" (108). The story is familiar to us not only because it anticipates Noah's story in the book of Genesis, but because it is the story of life, the story of destruction and renewal.
Utnapishtim offers Gilgamesh a chance at immortality. If Gilgamesh can stay awake for seven days, he, too, will become immortal. Gilgamesh accepts these conditions and sits down on the shore; the instant he sits down he falls asleep. (Keep in mind that sleep is an analogue of death; it is symbolic death. If you can’t resist sleep for a day, much less a week, how much less are you capable of resisting death.) Utnapishtim tells his wife that all men are liars, that Gilgamesh will deny having fallen asleep, so he asks his wife to bake a loaf of bread every day and lay the loaf at Gilgamesh's feet. Gilgamesh sleeps without ever waking up for six days and seven nights, at which point Utnapishtim wakes him up. Startled, Gilgamesh says, "I only just dozed off for half a second here." Utnapishtim points out the loaves of bread, showing their states of decay from the most recent, fresh bread, to the oldest, moldy, stale bread that had been laid at his feet on the very first day. Gilgamesh is distraught: O woe! What do I do now, where do I go now?
Death has devoured my body,
Death dwells in my body,
Wherever I go, wherever I look, there stands Death!
When Gilgamesh is ready to begin his long journey home, Utnapishtim, at the urging of his wife, reveals a second mystery of the gods. He tells Gilgamesh of a plant growing under water that can restore youth to a man. Gilgamesh ties stones to his feet, sinks to the bottom, and plucks the magic plant. He then makes off for home, where he will share the plant with his citizens of Uruk.
However, on the way Gilgamesh decides to take a bath and so leaves the plant with his clothes. A snake comes along and eats the plant, and that is why snakes shed their skins and seem to live forever. It is a shame. If it hadn’t been for that one bath people would be living forever now.
Gilgamesh returns to the strong-walled city of Uruk, and the story itself returns to its beginning. Gilgamesh returns to Uruk and tells a citizen, “climb up on to the wall of Uruk, inspect its foundation terrace, and examine well the brickwork; see if it is not of burnt bricks; and did not the seven wise men lay these foundations?" The narrator tells us once again that Gilgamesh, worn out with his labor, "engraved on a stone the whole story" (117). And finally, with the death of Gilgamesh -- the end of the story and the end of the telling of it -- the text returns us to our mortal lives.
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