The Epic of Gilgamesh (6 page)

The description of the flood itself in Tablet III has so much in common with the language of Gilgamesh Tablet XI that it seems the latter must have been modelled upon it, or rather upon some lost Middle Babylonian recension.

In the Gilgamesh flood Ishtar, and Enlil are as usual the advocates of destruction. Ishtar speaks, perhaps in her capacity as goddess of war, but Enlil prevails with his weapon of the storm. Only Ea, in superior wisdom, either was not present, or being present was silent, and with his usual cunning saw to it that at least one of the race of men should survive.

The dreadful havoc appalled even the gods; for Enlil summoned to his aid not only the horrors of the storm, but the Anunnaki, gods of the underworld, whose lightnings played about the rising waters. The description of the storm is more elaborate and impressive than the account in Genesis. In order to find language comparable to that which describes the black cloud coming from the horizon, which thundered within where the god of the storm was riding, it is necessary to go to the Psalms - ‘... darkness was under his feet. And he rode upon a cherub and did fly; yea, he did fly upon the wings of the wind.... At the brightness that was before him his thick clouds passed hailstones and coals of fire. The Lord also thundered in the heavens.'

In the Biblical story the same machinery is used: the building of the boat, the entry of the animals, the flood, loosing of the birds and the sacrifice; but while the god who ‘remembered Noah' lives in awful isolation, in the Assyrian, as in the Sumerian stories, we are still in the world of factious, flustered, and fallible deities. There is real danger that the powers of chaos and destruction will get out of hand. Things do indeed go too far, and the gods are shocked by the results of their own action; but nothing shows more strikingly the difference in outlook and purpose than the conclusion. In place of God's solemn pledge to Noah, ‘While the earth remaineth seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease‘, there is the nauseating picture of gods swarming like flies over the sacrifice. Instead of the rainbow pledge, there is only Ishtar fingering her necklace and exclaiming that she will not ‘forget these days'. But this is the word of the most notoriously faithless of all the gods. So, too, the immortality and semi-divine status which Utnapishtim, Atra-hasīs and Ziusudra win for themselves and their families is very different from the solemn covenant of the Bible, between God and a still entirely human Noah, through whom all mankind is given respite from anxiety. Part of the cause of the malaise present in the Mesopotamian psychology was this insecurity under which the people lived out their lives: the lack of a covenant.

The flood narrative is still an independent poem inserted into the framework of the Gilgamesh Epic. When it has been told we are back where we were; but it tends, like the other concluding incidents, to bring home to Gilgamesh the futility of his search. In spite of everything an obdurate hope remains with the hero; this must be crushed and shown for the evasion that it is. When challenged and put to the test Gilgamesh cannot even remain awake. At the Spring of Youth, where he receives the clothing which shows no sign of age, he experiences the irony of mere possessions outliving the body; while the plant of Youth Regained, brought with such difficulty from the sea's bottom, is briefly possessed and then lost; and so in this way the lesson is learnt for the last time. The text here is again very defective, but the snake that sloughs its skin needs no other gloss; it is the symbol of self-renewal. There is also a linguistic connection between the name given to the plant and that for bark of cassia which is called ‘snake rind', that is to say, the sloughed snake-skin.

Why does Gilgamesh not eat the plant at once and so regain his youth? Is it because of an altruistic desire to share it with his people and give the old men back their youthful strength? Is this just another trick of the gods? I do not think it is, nor that Gilgamesh is continually cheated of an almost attained immortality; but rather that the purpose of each of these incidents is cumulative, and is aimed at breaking down his refusal to accept human destiny. Gilgamesh's search was not for any eternal renewal of nature, such as the goddess Ishtar might have given, nor for the mere escape from old age into a life of ease and idleness, such as Utnapishtim had been granted; but much more an earthly immortality with its opportunity for heroic action, and for glory on the earth like that of the gods in heaven. It needs the repetition of the lesson to drive home the truth that Gilgamesh, the king, is not different from other men. Only after the return of the snake to its pool does he at last accept the futility of struggling for what cannot be had, ‘searching for the wind' as Siduri had said. The search is over, there is nothing more to do but go home.

The return is very summarily described and leaves much unexplained. It is like the breaking of a spell, when, at the end of trouble and search and with a prize almost won, everything suddenly returns to ordinary and we are back where we started, admiring the prosaic excellence of the city wall. All the fine things we had hoped to find - youth, eternal life, the dead friend - are lost. This ending has been described as ‘Jeering, unsatisfying, without tragedy or sense of catharsis.' With this judgement I do not agree, for it is the true ending, it is what really happens, and in its way as tragic as the end of Hector under the walls of Troy.

The last act of all, the death of Gilgamesh, exists only in the Sumerian. It is a solemn lament; not so much a cry of individual sorrow, as part of a ritual, the elaborate burial of the dead. It is such a scene as the excavation of the Royal Cemetery at Ur has revealed with the mass immolations as well as the magnificent paraphernalia of the funeral: the gifts, banquets, robings, and the bread and the wine offered by the dead king to the gods of the underworld at his entry of the ‘Land of No Return'.

This is the story which has survived precariously, to be rediscovered only within the last century; for when Nineveh fell in 612 B.C. to a combined army of Medes and Babylonians, the destruction that followed was so complete that it never rose again; and under the rubble of the Assyrian capital was buried the whole library of Assurbanipal. The Assyrians of the later Empire were not much loved by their neighbours, and the Hebrew prophet Nahum spoke no doubt for the sentiments of many when in ‘The Burden of Nineveh' he exulted over its imminent fall: ‘The chariots shall rage in the streets, they shall justle one against another in the broad ways: they shall seem like torches, they shall run like the lightnings.... Nineveh is laid waste: who will bemoan her?'

This seventh century was perhaps the last point in the history of the Near East when a great literature, and a story like that of Gilgamesh of Uruk, could have so nearly disappeared. The flood narrative had become once more an independent story, but the mechanics, as told by Eusebius, quoting from Berossus in, the third century B.C., have altered surprisingly little. In Babylonia the entire Epic probably survived rather longer than anywhere else, and copies are known from after the sack of Nineveh; but survival was a matter of a particular pattern of journeys and of adventures, which recurs in the frontierless, timeless world of folk-tale and romance. Aelian, writing in Greek c. A.D., 200 knew a Gilgamos, king of Babylon, and tells a story of his birth not unlike that told of Perseus, and also of Cyrus. Elements have been suspected in medieval Persian folk-tales and even further afield; but it was a twilight survival. Amongst the writings of the Near East and Mediterranean in the classical age there is no direct awareness of our Epic.

One of the reasons for this disappearance may have been the cuneiform characters in which it was written, and which were passing out of use, soon to become unintelligible to the new Mediterranean world. There may have been popular Aramaic versions which have not survived, but the Persians, who continued to use the old script, had their own literature and were apparently very little sympathetic to the history and legends of their late enemy. The Hebrews had still better reasons for wishing to forget Assyria, Babylon, and all that concerned them, except as a cautionary tale. Moreover, the century in which Nineveh fell was the same that saw the emergence of the modern poetic forms of the lyric and choral ode written in alphabetic script. But if Greek lyric of the seventh century is modern, the Greek Epic still belonged in part to the same legendary world as Gilgamesh the king of ancient Uruk. It would have been historically possible for the poet of the Odyssey to hear the story of Gilgamesh, not garbled but direct, for ships from Ionia and the Islands were already trading on the Syrian coast. At Al Mina and at Tarsus the Greeks were in contact with Assyrians. It is unlikely, but not impossible, that Assurbanipal heard a Greek story-teller reciting the
Iliad
in Nineveh.

It is possible that rather too much has been made recently of the apparent similarities between early Greek and western Asiatic mythology and legend. This is not the place to chase those beguiling will-o'-the-wisps of criticism: whether Gilgamesh was a prototype of Odysseus or wielded the club of Heracles. It is less a case of prototypes and parentage than of similar atmosphere. The world inhabited by Greek bards and Assyrian scribes, in the eighth and seventh centuries, was small enough for there to have been some contact between them; and the trading voyages of Greek merchants and adventurers provide a likely setting for the exchange of stories; particularly if the ground had been prepared, centuries earlier, by Bronze-Age Mycenaeans in their contacts with the people of Syria, and possibly with the Hittites of Anatolia. Therefore it is not surprising that Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and Humbaba should seem to inhabit the same universe as the gods and mortals of the
HomericHymns,
Hesiod's
Theogony
, and the
Odyssey
. Common to all is the
mise-en-scène,
a world in which gods and demi-gods fraternize with men on a fragment of known earth which is surrounded by the unknown waters of Ocean and the Abyss. These men occasionally emerge from the penumbra of myth and magic as sympathetic, recognizable human beings, such as the Homeric heroes, and with them is Gilgamesh of Uruk.

When the Babylonian gods and their universe went underground it was only to reappear in later Mediterranean religions, and particularly in Gnostic beliefs; so too the heroes were transformed and survived, travelling westward as well as east. Gilgamesh has been recognized in the medieval Alexander, and some of his adventures may have been transferred to the romances. So perhaps behind the Welsh Cynon, behind Owen and Ivain, behind Sir Gawain searching for the Green Chapel through the northern winter forest with its oak trees and trailing moss, behind Dermot fighting the ‘wild man' at the fountain (which is the way to the country under the waves) there is still the Sumerian Country of the Living, the Cedar Forest and the Silver Mountain, Amanus, Elam, Lebanon. These are stories of folklore and romance which run back from the medieval courts through Celtic legend and minstrelsy to archaic Sumer, and perhaps further, to the very beginning of story-telling. Although the Sumerian hero is not an older Odysseus, nor Heracles, nor Samson, nor Dermot, nor Gawain, yet it is possible that none of these would be remembered in the way he is if the story of Gilgamesh had never been told.

Today ours is a world as violent and unpredictable as that of Assurbanipal, the king of Assyria, the Great King, king of the World, and of Nahum of Judea, and even of the historical Gilgamesh, the king of Uruk, who made war and sent out expeditions in the third millennium before Christ. The difference is only that for us the ‘swirling stream of Ocean' lies not over the rim of a flat horizon, but at the end of our telescopes, in the darkness they cannot penetrate, where the eye and its mechanical extensions turn back. Our world may be infinitely larger, but it still ends in the abyss, the upper and nether waters of our ignorance. For us the same demons lie in wait, ‘the Devil in the clock‘, and in the end we come back to the place from which we set out, like Gilgamesh who ‘went a long journey, was weary, worn-out with labour, and returning engraved on a stone the whole story'.

In works separated by as great a period of time as that which lies between the Sumerian and the latest Semitic versions of the Gilgamesh Epic there are naturally differences in diction as well as feeling. The ancient writers themselves described the Epic as ‘the Gilgamesh Cycle', a poem in twelve songs or cantos of about three hundred lines each, inscribed on separate tablets. The Ninevite recension is written in loose rhythmic verse with four beats to a line, while the Old Babylonian has a shorter line with two beats. In spite of its primitive features of repetition and stock epithet the language is not at all naive or primitive; on the contrary it is elaborately wrought. The short Homeric ‘stock epithet' is sparingly used; the Sun God is ‘glorious' and Ninsun is ‘wise', but not invariably, and these epithets are far less frequent than those attached to a Hector or Odysseus. What we have in both the Sumerian and Semitic versions is the word for word repetition of fairly long passages of narrative or conversation, and of elaborate greeting formulae. These are familiar characteristics of oral poetry, tending to assist the task of the reciter, and also to give satisfaction to the audience. A demand for exact repetition of favourite and well-known passages is familiar to every nursery story-teller, along with the fierce disapproval of any deviation, however slight, from the words used when the story was told for the first time. Now, as then, an almost ritual exactitude is required of the reciter and story-teller.

We do not know how long the poem was recited, but the retention of those passages suggests an oral tradition alongside the written. They provide a special problem for the translator, particularly where they come very close together without narrative or emotional compulsion. This applies to the instructions to the hunter on his ruse for the capture of Enkidu, which are given in quick succession by his father, by Gilgamesh, and repeated by him himself. In this case I have compressed (perhaps a reciter would have filled out his material with interpolations). But in the case of the words with which Gilgamesh is greeted by the various characters whom he meets in his search for Utnapishtim, and his long replies, the effect is cumulative; each repetition enhances the sense of weariness, frustration, and obstinate endeavour, and must be retained; or again where repetitions in similar words, with slight variations, increase tension and lead to a climax, as in Gilgamesh's journey through the mountain. This, when spoken, would have left a powerful impression of time passing, and of the strain of the ordeal, so, though the effect is much diminished in reading, I have only slightly compressed. Indeed, how to express the passage of time appears to have been a considerable difficulty, and this device may have aimed at meeting it, for the same type of repetition occurs wherever a journey has to be described.