Gilgamesh Page 5

  He has come so far.

  Have you forgotten how grief fastened onto you

  And made you crave some word, some gesture, once?

  Utnapishtim’s face grew tight, then relaxed,

  As when one is relieved of inner pain

  By one who sees more deeply than oneself.

  He looked at the younger man

  Who had come into his consciousness. Youth is very

  Cruel to an old face,

  He said in a hushed voice.

  It looks into its lines for wisdom

  So touchingly

  But there is nothing there to find.

  Gilgamesh wanted to reach out to tell him

  He was wrong, sensing suddenly the hours

  One might spend alone in contemplating oldness

  As he himself had spent alone in his spoiled youth,

  Seeing nothing there but time.

  I know your pain too well to lie,

  Said Utnapishtim.

  I will tell you a secret I have never told.

  Something to take back with you and guard.

  There is a plant in the river. Its thorns

  Will prick your hands as a rose thorn pricks

  But it will give to you new life.

  He heard these words and tried to speak

  But rushed instead to the old man and embraced him.

  The two men held each other for a moment.

  Then Utnapishtim raised his hands

  As if to say: Enough.,

  And Gilgamesh looked back at him

  Then hurried off to find the plant.

  He tied stones to his feet and descended

  Into the river. When he saw the plant

  Of rich rose color and ambrosial

  Shimmering in the water like a prism

  Of the sunlight, he seized it, and it cut

  Into his palms. He saw his blood flow in the water.

  He cut the stones loose from his feet and rose

  Up sharply to the surface and swam to shore.

  He was calling out, I have it! I have it!

  Urshanabi guided the ecstatic man away

  To the other shore, and when they parted

  Gilgamesh was alone again, but not

  With loneliness or the memory of death.

  He stopped to drink and rest beside a pool

  And soon undressed and let himself slip in

  The water quietly until he was refreshed,

  Leaving the plant unguarded on the ground.

  A serpent had smelled its sweet fragrance and saw

  Its chance to come from the water, and devoured

  The plant, shedding its skin as slough.

  When Gilgamesh rose from the pool,

  His naked body glistening and refreshed,

  The plant was gone; the discarded skin

  Of a serpent was all he saw. He sat

  Down on the ground, and wept.

  IV

  In time he recognized this loss

  As the end of his journey

  And returned to Uruk.

  Perhaps, he feared,

  His people would not share

  The sorrow that he knew.

  He entered the city and asked a blind man

  If he had ever heard the name Enkidu,

  And the old man shrugged and shook his head,

  Then turned away,

  As if to say it is impossible

  To keep the names of friends

  Whom we have lost.

  Gilgamesh said nothing more

  To force his sorrow on another.

  He looked at the walls,

  Awed at the heights

  His people had achieved

  And for a moment—just a moment—

  All that lay behind him

  Passed from view.

  Names and Places Appearing in the Narrative

  Anu (A’nu): The father of the Sumerian gods. The cosmic mountain, created from the primeval sea, had two parts: heaven (An) and earth (Ki), divided by the god Enlil, who proceeded to manage the affairs of the latter, with Anu overseeing the former. A temple in Uruk bore his name

  Bull of Heaven: Figure of drought created by Anu for Ishtar as a punisment for Gilgamesh’s arrogance

  Ea (E’a): God of fresh springs; patron of the arts; friend of mankind

  Enkidu (En-ki’du): Friend of Gilgamesh; figure of natural man; patron saint of animals. A goddess of creation, Aruru, was supposed to have created him on the Steppe from clay in the image of Anu

  Enlil (Enlil): God of earth, wind, and spirit. He is merged in the present narrative with Ninurta, the war god

  Gilgamesh (Gil’ga-mesh): Fifth king of Uruk after the great flood; son of the goddess-prophetess Ninsun and of a priest of Uruk. He is two-thirds god, one-third man, noted as a builder-king

  Humbaba (Hum-ba’ba): Guardian of the cedar forest; nature divinity; killed by Gilgamesh and Enkidu

  Ishtar (Ish’tar): Goddess of love and fertility, and of war; the daughter of Anu; patroness of Uruk

  Ishullanu (I’shul-la’nu): Anu’s gardener; rejected by Ishtar, who turned him into a mole

  Mashu (Ma’shu): A mountain with twin peaks (the Lebanon ranges), behind which the sun descends at nightfall and out of which it rises at dawn

  Ninsun (Nin’sun): Mother of Gilgamesh; minor goddess known for wisdom

  Scorpion man and woman: Guardians of the entrance to Mashu

  Shamash (Sha’mash): The sun; husband and brother of Ishtar; son of Sin, the moon god

  Siduri (Sid-ur’i): Classic barmaid who lives by the sea

  Urshanabi (Ur’sha-na’bi): The boatman of Utnapishtim at the waters of the dead. His actual role in the epic, a subject of numerous scholarly studies and interpretations, is greatly reduced in this narrative

  Uruk (Ur’uk): Biblical Erech in southern Babylonia; seat of an important dynasty of kings following the flood

  Utnapishtim (Ut’na-pish’tim): Wise man of Shurrupak, one of the oldest cities of Mesopotamia, situated about twenty miles north of Uruk. His name means “He who saw life.” He was protected from the flood by Ea

  About the Gilgamesh

  In the nineteenth century a number of clay tablets on which the Gilgamesh was written were discovered in the temple library and palace ruins in Nineveh, once the capital of the ancient Assyrian empire, by two Englishmen, Austen H. Layard and George Smith, both of the British Museum, and the Turkish archaeologist Hormuzd Rassam. In 1872 George Smith delivered a paper before the Society of Biblical Archaeology which included his partial translation of the cuneiform texts along with an analysis of several episodes of the Gilgamesh epic, especially the narrative of the flood. The reaction to this “new” material, with its far-reaching implications for Biblical history in particular, was one of great enthusiasm and curiosity, and spurred others on to further explorations in the ruins of Mesopotamia’s ancient cities and to an expanded study of cuneiform inscriptions in general.

  This spreading interest and scholarly research led to the discovery of other tablets and fragments concerning Gilgamesh and his adventures, and, eventually, to a continuing appearance of annotated editions and translations in European languages which, if not yet definitive, have been based on steadily accumulated knowledge.

  The epic, in at least a number of its stories, was Sumerian in origin and was later added to and unified as a national epic by the Semitic Babylonians, heirs in the Tigris and Euphrates valley to Sumerian culture and civilization. The tablets from Nineveh, which constitute the largest extant portion of the epic, date from the seventh century B.C. and were probably collected at that time from much older Sumerian texts and translated into the contemporary Akkadian Semitic language at the request of King Assur-bani-pal for his palace library. From the existence of tablets found elsewhere in Mesopotamia and in parts of Anatolia in the older Sumerian language and in Hurrian and Hittite translations, each depicting portions of the Gilgamesh story, scholars have been able to date the ep
ic at about 2000 B.C. However, the most recent scholarship believes that all extant portions are copies of still older originals deriving from a much earlier time, and moves the epic’s creation back as far as the third millennium B.C. It is virtually impossible to determine when the material was first written down, let alone when it originated orally or how long it existed in an oral tradition. Rather it can be assumed, from the materials handed down from succeeding ancient peoples and languages, that it was not composed all of a piece and at one time but was added to gradually and varied by many tellers.

  The Gilgamesh is unquestionably older than either the Bible or the Homeric epics; it predates the latter by at least a millennium and a half. The discovery of a fragment of the epic in Palestine suggests the existence of a version known to early Biblical authors. Though we cannot know how widespread knowledge of the Gilgamesh epic was in the ancient Near East, we can say with surety that it is one of man’s oldest and most enduring stories.

  As to Gilgamesh’s historical identity, the Sumerian king list establishes a Gilgamesh as fifth in line of the First Dynasty of kingship of Uruk following the great flood recorded in the epic, placing him approximately in the latter half of the third millennium. He was supposed to have reigned a hundred and twenty-six years. He was known as the builder of the wall of Uruk, and his mother was said to be the goddess Ninsun, wife of a god named Lugalbanda, who however was not his father. His real father was, according to the king list, a high priest of Kullab, a district of Uruk, from whom he derived his mortality. These few details are drawn from the epic itself and from a number of Sumerian inscriptions listing kings, rulers, and princes. Gilgamesh’s name was associated with many stories and fabulous adventures as well as with the experience of grief.

  Probably there was a Gilgamesh and he was endowed by tradition with a superhuman mind and spirit. Perhaps if we were to doubt the reality of Gilgamesh because of the folkloric hyperbole about him and his emotions as drawn in the epic, we would have to doubt whatever it is in ourselves that identifies with him—or, for that matter, with the Biblical Job or the Shakespearean King Lear. Looked at in this light, the Gilgamesh has survived in our world because a constellation of our emotions is reflected in it. We could almost say that anything so profoundly human as the image of Gilgamesh was bound to reappear, yet we are still surprised to learn that one of the very oldest stories of man is so inherently contemporary.

  It is the epic’s emotional power which assures its place in world literature. The Gilgamesh is a kind of touchstone to other, more “modern” works. It reminds us of many stories of the Bible and episodes in Homer that are part of our cultural consciousness: of the universality of the friendship theme and of the experience of heartbreak over loss, of Achilles’ reaction to the death of his friend Patroklos in the Iliad, or even the depth of Lear’s grief at his daughter Cordelia’s death.

  Certain structural formulas in the Gilgamesh, of recurring themes and architecturally sequential episodes (which in this instance scholars have had to reconstruct tentatively), places it in the company of the Odyssey and the Iliad. Though non-oral epics like Virgil’s Aeneid and Dante’s Divine Comedy have an intellectual coherence to us which it lacks, its intense and sophisticated grouping of stories around the theme of death and the human challenge to death gives it an elemental coherence which cements and heightens its otherwise rambling structure, and places it in their magnificent company.

  What such “classics” do for, us by the very rarity of their occurrence is to give us what W. H. Auden once called “a high holiday.” They show us, by their concentration on a great soul’s struggles to reach a passionately desired goal, our essential human drama raised beyond our everyday recurring life. They show rather than preach how acceptance of limitations in the face of metaphysical facts actually occurs. They begin in a world where impending doom is felt as a living force and gain their momentum as the individual feels power to challenge that force and finally to obtain the spiritual courage to accept the danger of being crushed by its superior power and mystery. In the Gilgamesh, particularly, life is very serious and “the world is redundant with life,” as Thorkild Jacobsen says in Before Philosophy. This seriousness is expressed in the total oneness of people, animals, plants, dreams, and what to us would seem dead things, stones and gates. Professor Jacobsen has described the inner action of the Gilgamesh as “a revolt against death.” This revolt, in a universe once thought to be ordered and good, grows from a belief that death is evil and a crime against humanity’s growing consciousness of human rights. Hence, it is an outcry on behalf of life and its injured kindredness.

  The survival of this great poem in the world must relate partly to the survival of the same vision in a few people in our world, people who may not consciously believe in personified gods nor have culturally handed-down names to give them, but who through pain of loss may have made this “revolt,” or through compassion may understand how intimately related they really are to all the creatures and things of the universe. In an age in which we consume and are consumed by a superfluity of one-dimensional images, this poem calls us to be profound. And in a war age in which all kindredness is overlooked and life and substance are destroyed indiscriminately, this very old story reminds us what human history, our destiny, and we ourselves really are.

  At the end of the epic a serpent finds the power to renew its life, which a man had sought and finally lost. In a very large sense, the reader must decide what that ending means for himself. It is an inward problem. One can view the loss tragically, as perhaps the Sumerians and Babylonians did, and despair in this as the ultimate fate of man. Or one can believe and hope that for the human being the experience of wisdom is more important than possession of even the highest things.

  There are extant tablets which can be viewed as sequels to this ending. One depicts the death and regal funeral of an old and honored Gilgamesh. Another contains a Semitic version of part of a Sumerian story relating additional experiences of Gilgamesh and Enkidu.* This tablet tells of a sacred tree which Gilgamesh has lost to the Underworld. Enkidu, the one who brings back lost things, offers to go down into the Underworld and retrieve it for his friend. The story includes a long lamentation by Gilgamesh over the loss of the tree and an illusion of Enkidu’s physical return after death has devoured him in the Underworld. From this latter illusion the tablet has been called “Enkidu’s Resurrection.”

  These and other stories about Gilgamesh have not been included in the present narrative for reasons of dramatic unity.

  The following lines are based on the last portion of Gilgamesh and Enkidu’s illusory reunion and, as an interpretation only, represent an afterglimpse into Gilgamesh’s state of grief.

  One night in his loneliness

  Gilgamesh pleaded with Ea

  To open the door of death

  To let the spirit of Enkidu

  Return to him a moment.

  For a moment, by Ea’s grace,

  The two friends met

  And almost touched. Gilgamesh

  Could not hold back his tears

  And begged him to come near.

  You have wept enough for me,

  Enkidu said.

  A friend is not allowed to add to grief.

  I have grown weak, devoured

  In my flesh. You must not try to touch me.

  I need to see you are the same,

  Cried Gilgamesh.

  I am afraid that you will hate

  The friendship we have known

  Because it did not last forever.

  Gilgamesh, not listening, reached out

  To the image of his friend

  Trying to see what Ea veiled.

  If you are my friend, Enkidu said,

  You must not touch me. Treat me

  As Utnapishtim treated you.

  He gave me a plant

  He knew that I would lose!

  He gave you the wisdom of your soul.

  Gilgamesh stood still

&
nbsp; In the darkness, conscious

  Of the silence once again

  And of the shadows which had held for years

  The absence of his friend,

  As if just drawn

  From recollection

  Back to life.

  The noises in his city

  And laughter from outside

  Had reached his ears, or was

  It just another dream

  Or Ea’s further tricks of grace?

  No matter which, he went outside

  To see himself

  Just what had drawn them

  Into celebration.

  Since the discoveries of the Gilgamesh episodes and the subsequent efforts to assemble them into an organic and logically sequential whole, numerous scholarly translations based directly on the cuneiform texts have been made into modern languages.

  Most important among those consulted for the present narrative, which represents a personal attempt to revivify the Gilgamesh in a free form as a living poem, are Alexander Heidel’s The Gilgamesh Epic and Old Testament Parallels, 2d ed. (Chicago, 1949); E. A. Speiser’s translation in James B. Pritchard’s Ancient Near Eastern Texts, 2d ed. (Princeton, 1955); R. Campbell Thompson, The Epic of Gilgamesh (London, 1928; textual edition, Oxford, 1930); Erich Ebeling in Gressmann’s Altorientalische Texte zum Alten Testament (Berlin and Leipzig, 1926); and G. Contenau, L’Epopeé de Gilgamesh (Paris, 1939).