Gilgamesh (19 page)

p. 23,
as Jacob said to his angel:
Genesis 32:26.

p. 23,
the genital sexuality is explicit:
“According to
A. D.
Kilmer, the symbols by which Enkidu is represented in the dream episodes make allusion to the Ißtar cult: the meteorite,
kiçru,
evokes
kezru,
who would be a male counterpart of a
kezertu
woman (a kind of cultic prostitute), and the axe,
£aççinnu,
evokes
assinnu,
a cultic performer who, typically as a eunuch, took the female role in the sexual act. By this analysis what Gilgameß sees in his dreams is a twofold prediction of the arrival of a close male friend who will also be his lover” (George,
BGE,
I, p. 452). “The repeated use of the verb
£abäbu
in this connection implies a sexual connection. If there is any doubt about the significance of this imagery, note also SB [Standard Ver-sion] VIII 59, where, in death, Gilgameß veils Enkidu ‘like a bride.'
Graphic evidence for a sexual relationship now comes from SB XII 96-9, as understood in the light of a new manuscript of the text's Sumer-ian forerunner, BN [“Bilgames and the Netherworld”] 250-3” (ibid., p. 454, n. 48). These lines from Tablet XII describe the return of Enkidu's ghost from the underworld:

Fascinatingly, the Sumerian text from which this Akkadian text is translated has Enkidu talking about the decay of a
female
lover of Gilgamesh's:

p. 23,
A boulder representing Enkidu:
Literally, “lump of Anu,” i.e., meteorite.

p. 24,
“Thy love to me [is] wonderful, passing the love of women”:
2 Samuel 1:26.

p. 25,
each loves the other as his own soul:
“And when he had finished speaking to Saul, the soul of Jonathan was merged with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul” (1 Samuel 18:1).

p. 26,
ancient Babylonian kings prided themselves:
“The perfect prince was an intellectual as well as a warrior and an athlete, and among his many achievements King Shulgi [2094-2047
BCE
] was particularly proud of his literacy and cultural accomplishments. He had rosy memories of his days at the scribal school, where he boasted that he was the most skilled student in his class. In later life he was an enthusiastic patron of the arts and claims to have founded special libraries at Ur and at Nippur, further north in central Babylonia, in which scribes and minstrels could consult master copies of, as it were, the Sumerian songbook. Thus he envisaged that hymns to his glory and other literature of his day would be preserved for posterity:

p. 26,
We must kill him and drive out evil from the world:
The literal text here is fragmentary: “[ … ] kill [ … ], destroy [ … ].” I have adopted the conjecture of Schott (followed by Tournay and Shaffer): “[You and I will] kill [him] / [so that we can] destroy [all the evil in the land].” A later, fragmentary speech, from MS BB1 col. v, may assign a similar statement to Gilgamesh; in George's restoration, it reads: “[During the days that we travel there and] back, / [until we reach the Forest of] Cedar, / [until we] slay [ferocious ¶umbaba,] / [and annihilate] from [the land the Evil Thing that §amaß hates]” (Standard Version III, 202 ff.).

p. 27,
the poet does provide a motivation:
This motivation is at least as old as the Sumerian poem “Gilgamesh and Huwawa” (Version A), ll. 28 ff.: “No one is tall enough to reach heaven; no one can reach wide enough to stretch over the mountains. Since a man cannot pass beyond the final end of life, I want to set off into the mountains, to establish my renown there. Where renown can be established there, I will establish my renown” (from the translation posted on the Sumerian Literature site of the Oriental Institute, University of Oxford, at http://www-etcsl.orient.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/ etcslmac.cgi?text=t.1.8.1.2#). It is also found in the Old Babylonian Yale tablet,
OB
III, l. 188: “I will establish an everlasting name.”

p. 27,
can produce great art:

p. 29,
the cause of all human misery:
“I have discovered that all human misery comes from a single thing, the inability to sit at peace in a room” (Blaise Pascal,
Pensées,
fragment 139).

p. 30,
hasn't harmed a single living being:
When attacked, Humbaba does
threaten
to kill Gilgamesh and Enkidu. (There is even a hint of cannibalism—“I didn't kill you, you were too scrawny, / you wouldn't have made a decent meal”—though this line is actually difficult to decipher; George translates it as “[ … ] … you, … in my belly.”) But these threats are not actions; they are words to terrify men away from the forest.

p. 30,
“If anyone knows the rules of my forest:
For a literal translation of this passage, see note, p. 256.

p. 31,
to paraphrase Wallace Stevens:
“If there must be a god in the house …” (“Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit,”
The Collected Poems of Wallace
Stevens,
Knopf, 1954, p. 327).

p. 31,
Seng-ts'an:
Seng-ts'an (?-606) was a Chinese monk and the Third Founding Teacher of Zen. This couplet is from his poem “The Mind of Absolute Trust,” in Stephen Mitchell, ed.,
The Enlightened Heart: An Anthology
of Sacred Poetry,
HarperCollins, 1989, p. 26.

p. 32,
one fragmentary passage:
See note, p. 232.

p. 32,
by the method known as “reversal of values”:
“All these dreams are terrify-ing; but they are always interpreted by the method known as ‘reversal of values': the evil seen in the dream is turned around, in the future reality, into something favorable” (Bottéro, p. 100).

p. 33,
imperviously brave men:
Siegfried is “a man who doesn't know the meaning of fear.” As for Beowulf, he is portrayed as fearless in the battles with Grendel and with Grendel's mother (“he didn't fear at all for his life,” l. 1444), and in the battle with the dragon, he feels “no dread at all” (l. 2348). It is true that later in the battle he and the dragon are said to cause “terror in each other” (l. 2565). And yet, what Beowulf seems to be feeling at that moment is not what we would call fear. He is in a state of rage, totally focused on killing his enemy. His adrenaline is telling him not to flee but to attack. In the very next line, he is described as “unyielding” (“firm-spirited”
in another translation, “stout” in another). So whatever the poet means by “terror,” it is not the same kind of emotion described in
Gilgamesh,
where the heroes feel despair, their blood runs cold, and they want to run away.

p. 33,
his predecessor in the Sumerian poem “Gilgamesh and Huwawa,”:
In “Gil-gamesh and Huwawa” (Version A). Here is that poem's climax (in the translation from the Sumerian Literature site of the Oriental Institute, University of Oxford, ll. 152G ff.):

p. 34,
he is aware that killing him:
“For a reason that is unclear to us, but without doubt primarily because of the ‘divine' character of Humbaba and of the mission that the king of the gods had assigned to him … , Enlil did not want the Guardian of the Forest to be killed, and Enkidu knew it. Hence his eagerness to put him to death before Enlil could intervene from his great temple in Nippur, and §amaß from his, in Larsa or Sippar. §amaß was thus thought to be opposed to the death of the adversary of his two protégés: in other words, he was willing to help them defeat Humbaba, in order to use him as they wished, with his forest and especially his cedars, but not to destroy him. The rest of the story follows from this fact: Enkidu, held responsible for the death of Humbaba, will be condemned by the gods to a premature end” (Bottéro, p. 117).

p. 35,
“played a greater role in myth, epic, and hymn:
Samuel Noah Kramer,
From the Poetry of Sumer: Creation, Glorification, Adoration,
University of California Press,1979, p. 71.

pp. 35-36,
marvelously erotic song cycle:
I am referring to the versions by Diane Wolkstein in
Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth: Her Stories and Hymns from Sumer
(with Samuel Noah Kramer), Harper & Row, 1983. Some of the most delicious of them are reprinted in Robert Hass and Stephen Mitchell, ed.,
Into the Garden: A Wedding Anthology,
HarperCollins, 1993.

p. 36,
an invocation to the “goddess …”:
“Goddess of the fearsome divine powers, clad in terror, riding on the great divine powers, Inanna, made complete by the strength of the holy
ankar
weapon, drenched in blood,rushing around in great battles, with shield resting on the ground (?), covered in storm and flood, great lady Inanna, knowing well how to plan conflicts, you destroy mighty lands with arrow and strength and overpower lands” (from the translation posted at
http://www.gatewaystoba-bylon. com/myths/texts/inanna/inannaebih.htm#top
).

p. 36,
first the Sumerians:
The Sumerian poem “Gilgamesh and the Bull of Heaven,” though it is without an equivalent to Gilgamesh's long diatribe, has basically the same plot: it begins with Gilgamesh's rejection of the goddess's advances and ends with him flinging a haunch of the slaughtered Bull at her.

p. 36
later compared to dogs and flies:
In Book XI, pp. 186, 188.

p. 38,
the roughly contemporaneous bull-leaping fresco:
Painted ca. 1600 to 1400
BCE,
the time of the Old Babylonian version. A photograph of the fresco can be found on http://www.daedalus.gr/DAEI/THEME/B30.jpg and on many other Internet websites.

p. 41,
the killing of Humbaba will have fatal consequences:
The explicit causality of Enkidu's death is missing from the Standard Version, and most translators fill in with a passage from the Hittite version: literally, “I dreamed that Anu, Enlil, and Shamash held a council, and Anu said to Enlil, ‘Because they killed the Bull of Heaven and also killed Humbaba, one of them must die.' Then Enlil said to him, ‘Enkidu, not Gilgamesh, is the one who must die.'” (Tablet III, §1, ll. 2 ff.)

It is impossible to know whether in the Standard Version Anu as well as Enlil is involved in the death sentence, and whether Enkidu is condemned for killing both monsters or only Humbaba.

p. 44,
like a woman who has lost her only child:
For a literal translation of this line, see note, p. 268.

p. 46,
“When you see the unborn:
Here is a more literal version of the Buddha's statement: “There is an unborn, unoriginated, uncreated, unformed. If there were not this unborn, unoriginated, uncreated, unformed, escape from what is born, originated, created, and formed would not be possible. But since there is an unborn, unoriginated, uncreated, unformed, escape is possible from what is born, originated, created, and formed.” (Udana 8.3).