The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels (4 page)
Authors: Thomas Cahill
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),
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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.
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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 pre 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.
4And 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.”
