Gilgamesh (2 page)

The story of its discovery and decipherment is itself as fabulous as a tale from
The Thousand and One Nights.
A young English traveler named Austen Henry Layard, who was passing through the Middle East on his way to Ceylon, heard that there were antiquities buried in the mounds of what is now the city of Mosul, halted his journey, and began excavations in 1844. These mounds turned out to contain the ruined palaces of Nineveh, the ancient capital of Assyria, including what was left of the library of the last great Assyrian king, Ashurbanipal (668-627
BCE
). “In amazement” Layard and his assistant Hormuzd Rassam “found room after room lined with carved stone bas-reliefs of demons and deities, scenes of battle, royal hunts and ceremonies; doorways flanked by enormous winged bulls and
lions; and, inside some of the chambers, tens of thousands of clay tablets inscribed with the curious, and then undeciphered, cuneiform (‘wedge-shaped') script.” Over twenty-five thousand of these tablets were shipped back to the British Museum.

When cuneiform was officially deciphered in 1857, scholars discovered that the tablets were written in Akkadian, an ancient Semitic language cognate with Hebrew and Arabic. Fifteen years went by before anyone noticed the tablets on which
Gilgamesh
was inscribed. Then, in 1872, a young British Museum curator named George Smith realized that one of the fragments told the story of a Babylonian Noah, who survived a great flood sent by the gods. “On looking down the third column,” Smith wrote, “my eye caught the statement that the ship rested on the mountains of Nizir, followed by the account of the sending forth of the dove, and its finding no resting-place and returning. I saw at once that I had here discovered a portion at least of the Chaldean account of the Deluge.” To a Victorian this was a spectacular discovery, because it seemed to be independent corroboration of the historicity of the biblical Flood (Victorians believed that the Genesis story was much older than it is). When Smith saw these lines, according to a later account, he said, “‘I am the first man to read that after more than two thousand years of oblivion!' Setting the tablet on the table,” the account continues, “he jumped up and rushed about the room in a great state of excitement, and, to the astonishment of those present, began to undress himself.” We aren't told if he took off just his coat or if he
continued to strip down further. I like to imagine him in his euphoria going all the way and running stark naked, like Enkidu, among the astonished black-clad Victorian scholars.

Smith's announcement, made on December 3, 1872 to the newly formed Society of Biblical Archaeology, that he had discovered an account of the Flood on one of the Assyrian tablets caused a major stir, and soon more fragments of
Gilgamesh
were unearthed at Nineveh and in the ruins of other ancient cities. His translation of the fragments that had been discovered up to then was published in 1876. Though to a modern reader it seems quaint and almost surrealistic in its many mistaken guesses, and is often fragmentary to the point of incoherence, it was an important pioneering effort.

Today, more than a century and a quarter later, many more fragments have surfaced, the language is much better understood, and scholars can trace the history of the text with some degree of confidence. Briefly, here is the consensus.

Legends about Gilgamesh probably began to arise shortly after the death of the historical king. The earliest texts that have survived, which date from about 2100
BCE,
are five separate and independent poems in Sumerian, entitled “Gilgamesh and Aga,” “Gilgamesh and Huwawa,” “Gilgamesh and the Bull of Heaven,” “Gilgamesh and the Underworld,” and “The Death of Gilgamesh.” (Sumerian is a non Semitic language unrelated to any other that we know, and is as distant from Akkadian as Chinese is from English. It became the learned language of ancient Mesopotamia and was part of the scribal
curriculum.) These five poems-written in a leisurely, repetitive, hieratic style, much less condensed and vivid than the Akkadian epic-would have been familiar to later poets and editors.

The direct ancestor of the eleven clay tablets dug up at Nineveh is called the Old Babylonian version. It was written in Akka-dian (of which Babylonian is a dialect) and dates from about 1700
BCE;
eleven fragments have survived, including three tablets that are almost complete. This version, though it paraphrases a few episodes in the Sumerian
Gilgamesh
texts, is an original poem, the first
Epic of
Gilgamesh.
In its themes and its form, it is essentially the same poem as its Ninevite descendent: a story about friendship, the death of the beloved, and the quest for immortality.

Some five hundred years after the Old Babylonian version was written, a scholar-priest named Sîn-lēqi-unninni revised and elaborated on it. His epic, which scholars call the Standard Version, is the basis for all modern translations. As of now, with seventy-three fragments discovered, slightly fewer than two thousand of the three thousand lines of the original text exist in readable, continuous form; the rest is damaged or missing, and there are many gaps in the sections that have survived.

We don't know exactly what Sîn-lēqi-unninni's contribution to the Standard Version was, since so few fragments of the Old Babylonian version have survived for comparison. From what we can see, he is often a conservative editor, following the older version line for line, with few if any changes in vocabulary and word order. Sometimes, though, he expands or contracts, drops passages or adds them, and functions not as
an editor but as an original poet. The two major passages that we know he added, the Prologue and the priestess Shamhat's speech inviting Enkidu to Uruk, have the vividness and density of great art.

The
Gilgamesh
that you are about to read is a sometimes free, sometimes close adaptation into English verse of Sîn-lēqi-unninni's Standard Version.
^*
Even scholars making literal translations don't simply translate the Standard Version; they fill in some of the textual gaps with passages from other versions, the Old Babylonian being the most important. I have taken this practice further: occasionally, when the Standard Version is particularly fragmentary, I have supplemented it with passages from the Sumerian
Gilgamesh
poems. I have also added lines or short passages to bridge the gaps or to clarify the story. My intention throughout has been to re-create the ancient epic, as a contemporary poem, in the parallel universe of the English language.

G
ilgamesh
is the story of a hero's journey; one might say that it is the mother of all heroes' journeys, with its huge uninhibited mythic presences moving through a landscape of dream. It is also the story of how a man becomes civilized, how he learns to rule himself and therefore his people, and to act with temperance, wisdom, and piety. The poem begins with the city and ends with it.

In the first lines of his Prologue, Sîn-lēqi-unninni states the breadth and depth of what his hero had endured: “He had seen everything, had experienced all emotions.” The next seven lines tell us the essential details, not even bothering to mention the hero's name. Gilgamesh had traveled to the edge of the world and been granted knowledge of the primeval days of humanity; he had survived the journey and returned to restore the great temple of Ishtar and Uruk's then famous six-mile-long wall.

And now, after this summary, something fascinating happens. Sîn-lēqi-unninni turns to his readers and invites them to survey the great city for themselves:

It is a very strange and touching moment. The poet is ostensibly addressing an audience of ancient Babylonians in 1200
BCE,
directing
them to admire a city that was built in time immemorial. But the readers, as it turns out, are you and I. We are the ones who are being invited, more than three thousand years later, to walk on the wall of Uruk and observe the splendor and bustling life of the great city. The invitation is touching not because the city is in ruins and the civilization has been destroyed-this is not an ironic “Ozymandias” moment-but because in our imagination we
can
climb the ancient stone staircase and observe the lush gardens and orchards, the palaces and temples, the shops and marketplaces, the houses, the public squares, and share the poet's amazement and pride in his city.

Then Sîn-lēqi-unninni's invitation becomes more intimate.

“Find the cornerstone,” he tells us,

I doubt whether even in 1200
BCE
this was meant to be taken literally. Even to an ancient Babylonian reader, the lines would have been vivid enough to make the physical act unnecessary. As we read the instructions, we can see ourselves finding the cornerstone, taking out the copper box, unlocking it, opening its lid, and taking out the priceless tablet of lapis lazuli, which turns out, in the end, to be the very poem we are about to read. We are looking beneath the surface of things, into the hidden places, the locked repositories of human
experience. The trials that Gilgamesh himself is supposed to have written down long ago are now being revealed to us in words that, whether “carved on stone tablets” or printed on paper, create their own sense of authenticity. They issue directly from the source: if not from the historical Gilgamesh, then from a poet who has imagined that hero's experience intensely enough for it to be true.

The Old Babylonian poem that Sîn-lēqi-unninni inherited begins with the phrase “Surpassing all kings.” It describes Gilgamesh as a gigantic and manic young man (his name may mean “The Old Man is a Young Man”), a warrior, and, after his return, as a good king and benefactor to his people: a combination of Goliath and David. But to begin with he is a tyrant. When we first enter the poem, there is an essential imbalance in the city; something has gone drastically wrong. The man of unsurpassable courage and inexhaustible energy has become a monster of selfishness; the shepherd has become a wolf. He oppresses the young men, perhaps with forced labor, and oppresses the young women, perhaps with his ravenous sexual appetite. Because he is an absolute monarch (and two-thirds divine into the bargain), no one dares to criticize him. The people call out to heaven, like the Israelite slaves in Exodus, and their cry is heard. But Anu, father of the gods, doesn't intervene directly. He sends help in a deliciously roundabout way. He asks the great mother goddess, Aruru, to reenact her first creation of human beings:

Like the Lord God in Genesis, Aruru forms a man from the dust of the ground, and he becomes a living being, the original man himself: natural, innocent, solitary. This second Adam will find “a help meet for him” not in a woman but in the man for whose sake he was created. Thus begins-a thousand years before Achilles and Patroclus, or David and Jonathan-the first great friendship in literature.

Enkidu is indeed Gilgamesh's double, so huge and powerful that when people see him they are struck with awe. But he is also Gilgamesh's opposite and mirror image: two-thirds animal to Gil-gamesh's two-thirds divine. These animal qualities are actually much more attractive than the divine ones. Where Gilgamesh is arrogant, Enkidu is childlike; where Gilgamesh is violent, Enkidu is peaceful, a naked herbivore among the herds. He lives and wanders with them from pasture to pasture, and (as we learn later in the poem) he drives away marauding predators, thus acting as both sheep and shepherd. With his natural altruism, he is also the original animal activist, setting his friends free from human pits and traps.

When the trapper discovers Enkidu drinking with the animals at a waterhole, he is filled with dread, as if he has seen a bigfoot or abominable snowman. What makes his face go white and his legs shake is not the fear of being harmed by a powerful savage (after all, he doesn't
have to get any closer): it is the fear of being face to face with primordial humanity, the thing itself. He goes to his father for advice, and the father sends him on to Gilgamesh, who “will know what to do.”

Gilgamesh may be a tyrant, but he is an insightful one. He does know what to do about the wild man, and he tells it to the trapper without a moment's hesitation. “Go to the temple of Ishtar,” he says,

It is a startling recommendation, especially coming from a man whose modus operandi is force. We might have expected him to send out a battalion to hunt down and capture Enkidu. Instead, he commissions a single woman. Somehow he knows that Enkidu needs to be tamed rather than captured, and that the only way to civilize him is through the power of eros. He doesn't seem to suspect, however, that the wild man has been sent by the gods to civilize
him.