The Epic of Gilgamesh (2 page)

When publishing the Assyrian ‘Deluge' Smith had stated that this was evidently a copy from a much older version made at Uruk, the biblical Erech, known today as Warka. Some years earlier, between 1849 and 1852, W. K. Loftus, a member of the Turko-Persian Frontier Commission, had spent two short seasons digging at Warka, where he found puzzling remains, including what are now known to be third-millennium mosaic walls, and also tablets. But Warka had to wait for further attention till the twenties and thirties of this century, when the Germans carried out massive excavations which have revealed a long series of buildings, as well as sculptures and tablets. Thanks to this work a great deal is now known about early Uruk, its temples, and the life of its inhabitants.

Even more important for the history of the Gilgamesh Epic were the activities of an American expedition from the University of Pennsylvania, led by John Punnet Peters, which at the end of the nineteenth century started work on the mound of Niffar, ancient Nippur, in Southern Iraq. By this time considerably more experience had been gained of the problems connected with excavating ancient cities: but there were still many hazards. The first season at Nippur in 1888—9 began light-heartedly with the arrival of Peters and his party at the site in a wild gallop through the canebrakes on rearing stallions; but their last view of the mound at the end of the season was of hostile Arabs performing a war-dance on the ruins of the camp. Nevertheless the work continued the following year, and a total of from thirty to forty thousand tablets was found and distributed between museums in Philadelphia and Istanbul. These tablets include a small group on which are found the oldest versions of the Gilgamesh cycle in the Sumerian language. Work proceeds in the field and among museum archives. Recent additions have been made by the publication of tablets from Ur in the British Museum, and tablets have been identified in Baghdad and elsewhere, some historical, and some directly connected with the text. Division of the material has complicated the work of decipherment, for in some cases one half of an important tablet has been stored in America and the other in Istanbul, and copies of both must be brought together before the contents are understood.

The majority of ancient texts are commercial and administrative documents, business archives, lists, and inventories which though profoundly interesting to the historian, are not for general reading. The recent decipherment of the so-called ‘linear B' script of Bronze Age Mycenae and Crete has revealed no literature. A huge library discovered at Kültepe in Central Anatolia is entirely made up of records of business transactions; and apart from a solitary text, and that a curse, there is not one of a literary kind. The importance of the excavations at Nippur, Nineveh, and other great centres of early civilization in Mesopotamia is that they have restored a literature of high quality and of unique character.

The Gilgamesh Epic must have been widely known in the second millennium B.C., for a version has been found in the archives of the Hittite imperial capital at Boghazköy in Anatolia, written in Semitic Akkadian; and it was also translated into the Indo-European Hittite, and the Hurrian languages. In southern Turkey parts have been found at Sultantepe; while a small but important fragment from Megiddo in Pales-tine points to the existence of a Canaanite or later Palestinian version, and so to the possibility that early Biblical authors were familiar with the story. The Palestinian fragment comes from the tablet which describes the death of Enkidu and is closest to the account already known from Boghazköy. Excavation at Ras Shamra, ancient Ugarit, on the Syrian coast has brought to life an independent epic literature of which the written versions mostly date from the later part of the second millennium, and which was also known in the Hittite capital; it includes a fragment from a flood narrative that probably stems from a version of the Gilgamesh flood. At this period therefore there was considerable overlapping and some mingling of the various literary traditions, including those of the Hittites themselves; and recently a case has been made out for the probable existence of a rather similar Aegean Mycenaean poetic tradition, elements from which would have survived the dark age, and reappeared in Homeric and later Greek poetry. The whole question of the date and nature of this undoubted Asiatic element in Greek myth and early poetry is still debatable and clouded with uncertainty.

Whether or not the fame of Gilgamesh of Uruk had reached the Aegean - and the idea is attractive - there can be no doubt that it was as great as that of any later hero. In time his name became so much a household word that jokes and forgeries were fathered on to it, as in a popular fraud that survives on eighth-century B.C. tablets which perhaps themselves copy an older text. This is a letter supposed to be written by Gilgamesh to some other king, with commands that he should send improbable quantities of livestock and metals, along with gold and precious stones for an amulet for Enkidu, which would weigh no less than thirty pounds. The joke must have been well received, for it survives in four copies, all from Sultantepe. The text has been translated and published recently by Dr Oliver Gurney.

The excavation of sites and decipherment of texts has taught us a great deal about the historical and the literary background of the Epic. Although only the last version, that of Assurbanipal's library, has survived as a relatively complete work, it appears that all the most important elements of the story existed as separate poems in the older Sumerian literature, and may have been, indeed probably were, composed and recited long before they were written down. While no element of the story can be later than the destruction of Nineveh in the seventh century, a recurring situation typical of the third millennium is discernible behind much of the action, and probably provided its context. Behind this again the tradition reaches back into a preliterate age on the borderline of legend and history, a little later than the Deluge, when gods were replaced by mortals on the thrones of the city-states. This was the age of the Archaic Sumerian civilization.

The Sumerians were the first literate inhabitants of Mesopotamia, and theirs is the language of the oldest tablets from Nippur which relate to Gilgamesh. They had already irrigated the country and filled it with their cities, before it was conquered by Semitic tribes in the course of the third millennium. They were themselves probably conquerors from the north and east, who arrived during the fourth millennium. The influence of this gifted people, shown in laws, language, and ideas, persisted long after they had been conquered by their Semite neighbours. It has been justly likened to the influence of Rome on medieval Europe. Their language was still written, like the Latin of the Middle Ages, centuries after they had lost their political identity. It is therefore no anachronism to find the early Gilgamesh texts still written in this ‘learned' language, although most of them date from the beginning of the second millennium, after the Semitic conquest.

Excavation has shown that the Archaic Sumerian or Early Dynastic civilization of the early third millennium follows notable flood levels at several important sites: Shurrupak, Kish, and Uruk among them. These levels close the last prehistoric period, the Jemdet Nasr Period of the archaeologists; but there is no proof of their being strictly contemporary. An earlier disaster, identified by Sir Leonard Woolley at Ur, was of only local extent, and archaeological evidence does not support any single overwhelming catastrophe; nor was a disastrous flood among the earliest of ancient Sumerian traditions. In later Sumerian, as in Old Babylonian writings, flood and deluge are sent by the gods, along with equally catastrophic visitations of plague, drought and famine. Five cities are named as existing before the Deluge, and to them ‘Kingship was let down from Heaven'. After the catastrophe ‘Kingship once more descended', and the city-states which then arose were often at war with one another. The semi-historical ‘Sumerian King-List', composed at the beginning of the second millennium, shows Kish as the first city to gain pre-eminence; but after a time Uruk defeated Kish and took away this supremacy. These two states were traditional rivals. In the King-List Gilgamesh is named as fifth ruler of the first post-diluvian dynasty of Uruk (see below).

Because of their wealth the cities were great prizes, tempting to the wild Semitic tribes of Arabia, and to the warlike people of Elam to the east, and of the Persian highlands. Not long after the fall of the dynasty of Uruk, when the Semites had established themselves at Agade in the north, Sargon, their king, claimed that he had a standing army of 5,400 soldiers. Amongst the chief of his exploits was the destruction of the walls of Uruk. These had been a by-word. Men said ‘Uruk of the strong walls', and Gilgamesh was traditionally the great builder.

In the Sumerian Early Dynastic age each city already had its temples of the gods. They were magnificent buildings decorated with reliefs and mosaics, and usually comprising a great court and an inner sanctuary, with sometimes, as at Uruk, a ziggurat behind. This was a holy mountain in miniature: an antechamber between heaven and earth where the gods could converse with men. So when Gilgamesh calls on the goddess Ninsun, his divine mother, she goes up to the roof of the temple to offer prayer and sacrifice to the great Sun God. The temples were served by a perpetual priesthood, in whose hands, at one time, was almost the whole wealth of the state, and amongst whom were the archivists and teachers, the scholars and mathematicians. In very early times the whole temporal power was theirs, as servants of the god whose estates they managed. Later a single individual became ‘tenant-farmer' and caretaker, till ‘Kingship descended from Heaven', power was secularized, and the royal dynasties, competitive and aggressive in aspect, arose in turn. The prestige of the temples remained, however, great.

One of the causes of the militarism of the third millennium was economic. The southern part of Mesopotamia as far as the Persian Gulf was, and is, a flat hot land of marsh and plain, very productive when drained, but, apart from the date-palm, altogether without timber and without metals. The demands of the rival cities on their neighbours in the surrounding highlands soon passed beyond the level of peaceful trade. Merchant colonies and distant trading posts were set up, but caravan communication was often broken, and raw materials were then fetched by force from reluctant tribes in Persia, Arabia, or Cappadocia. Here then the immemorial enmities of hill-tribe and plainsman were established; they provide the setting for a group of Sumerian poems which describe the troubled relations between Uruk and Aratta, a state in the eastern hills.

In the historical material we have nearly contemporary records of several expeditions, undertaken during the third millennium, by Sargon of Agade and Gudea of Lagash, to protect their merchant colonies and bring back timber for their buildings; nor were they certainly the first. Cedar came from the Amanus mountains in north Syria and south Turkey, and perhaps from the Lebanon and from south-east Persia. It is written of Sargon that he made a victorious campaign through the northern lands; and Dagon his god gave him the ‘upper region' as far as the ‘Cedar Forest' and the ‘Silver Mountain'. The cedar forest in this case is certainly Amanus. Again when Gudea, the ruler of Lagash, wished to build a temple for the god Ningirsu, ‘They brought from Susa, from Elam and the western lands copper for Gudea ... they brought great willow logs and ebony logs, and Gudea made a path into the cedar mountain which nobody had entered before, he cut its cedars with great axes, cedar rafts like giant snakes were floating down the river from the cedar mountain, pine-rafts from the pine mountain. Into the quarries where no one had been, Gudea the priest of Ningirsu made a path, stones were delivered in large blocks, also bitumen in buckets and gypsum from the mountains of Magda, as many as boats bringing barley from the fields.' Behind the solid fleshly Gudea we may see the shadowy figure of Gilgamesh, a great builder of temples and cities, who ventured into strange forests and brought back precious cedar-wood.

Five poems relating to Gilgamesh have survived from Sumerian literature. Of these, two are used combined with later material in this version of the Epic; they are ‘Gilgamesh and the Land of the Living', and fragments from the ‘Death of Gilgamesh' which are now known to be part of a much longer text of at least 450 lines. This uses language much like that of a lament for Ur-Nammu, an historical ruler of Ur who lived around 2100 B.C., which incidentally names Gilgamesh. Another poem concerning ‘Gilgamesh and the Bull of Heaven' lies behind the corresponding episodes in the Ninevite collation describing the flouting and revenge of the Goddess Ishtar. A large part of the Sumerian ‘Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the Netherworld' was translated almost word for word and appended to the Assyrian Epic (Tablet XII), with no attempt at integration, although it is incompatible with the events described earlier (Tablet VII), and seems to provide an alternative to the ‘Dream' and ‘Death of Enkidu' which are placed at the centre of the Assyrian poem. ‘Gilgamesh and Agga' like the ‘Death of Gilgamesh' is known only in Sumerian. It is a detached and not very heroic tale of debate and mild warfare between the rival states of Kish and Uruk. Its temper, though typical of some Sumerian poetry, is too far removed from the rest of the Gilgamesh material for its inclusion in a ‘Gilgamesh Epic'. It is not surprising if Assurbanipal's clerks and scholars rejected it; though of course it may have been unknown to them.

The story of the Deluge did not form any part of the Gilgamesh cycle in Sumerian literature, but was an independent poem with, in the role of Noah, a hero named Ziusudra, which means ‘he saw life'. There is also an Old Babylonian ‘Deluge' dating from the first half of the second millennium, in which the hero is named Atrahasis. In this poem the flood is only the last among a number of disasters sent to destroy mankind. The first part is taken up with other matters, including the creation of mankind. A fragment from Ugarit in Syria has already been mentioned. A late version of the Atrahasis poem was written down in the reign of Assurbanipal. It is not possible to say at what time the flood was drawn into the Gilgamesh cycle, since evidence is lacking from the Old Babylonian period. There has been much controversy on the question of the relationship between the Genesis flood and that of the Assyrian, Babylonian, and Sumerian writers. The opinion, at one time widely held, that the Genesis account was a late refinement on a story once current in all the cities of Babylonia, is not now so general; while the view that it derives directly from a very old and independent history has many supporters. There is no need to enter this difficult controversy in order to follow the account of the flood as it stands in the eleventh tablet of the Gilgamesh Epic. The decipherment of fresh texts may throw more light on the whole question; but at present the Genesis account is probably best seen against a background of many very ancient flood stories not necessarily relating to the same disaster, and with different protagonists, both human and divine. Not all the versions current in Mesopotamia and the Near East in the third millennium need have survived till today. The persistence and independence of different stories is shown by the fact that the hero in the third-century B.C. account, which in the last resort derives from a Greek-speaking priest of Babylon, Berossus, is given the name of Xisuthros or Sisuthros, which can only be the Sumerian Ziusudra, although that name has dropped out of the known Semitic versions.