The Epic of Gilgamesh (5 page)

The forest is ‘the Country of the Living', or simply ‘the Country', lying somewhere on the outer bounds of earth and reality. In the middle of it is the mountain, which is both a seat of the gods and the underworld, the sender of dreams. But the forest is also related to that ‘Garden of the Sun' which Gilgamesh will enter on a later journey, to meet again the great sun god, not in a dream, but face to face, for ‘the Country belonged to Shamash'. The forest is oddly familiar, so is its guardian. ‘Thou shalt see a vale like a great water-way and in the middle of the vale thou shalt see a great tree with the tips of its branches greener than the greenest fir-trees. And under the tree is a fountain.' So Cynon is directed by the keeper of the forest in his wanderings, ‘through the world and its wilderness' as told in the late Welsh romance from the
Mabinogion.
There he found ‘the fairest vale in the world, and trees of equal height in it, and there was a river flowing through the vale and a path alongside the river'. Although this is twelfth-century Welsh it describes what Gilgamesh and Enkidu saw when they entered the cedar forest in almost the same phrases: the cedar in front of the mountain, the glade green with brushwood, and the broad way where the going was good.

The guardian of the forest in the romance had power over animals, which grazed around him in the glade, and the guardian of the cedar forest in the Semitic poem could ‘hear the heifer when she stirred at sixty leagues distance'. This Humbaba is the perennial Monster Herdsman, like the ugly man with a club whom Cynon met or the Green Knight of the northern romance; he is a divinity of wild nature who would not alter through centuries any more than the forests themselves; but in the Sumerian poem he has a fiery aspect as well, perhaps connected with the volcano.

After what appeared to be a successful conclusion of the forest episode there comes a great act of glorification of Gilgamesh the King: robed, crowned, and in almost divine beauty, like Odysseus after his ordeal with the waves when Athene gave to him godlike beauty. At this moment the goddess Ishtar sees and desires him in love; she tries to woo him with tempting promises, after which comes a remarkable passage: the taunting of the goddess by a disdainful mortal. There is something here of Anchises, the herd-boy on Mount Ida, who in the Homeric Hymn was wooed by Aphrodite to his hurt, for ‘He who lies with a deathless goddess is no hale man afterwards', or proud Hippolytus, or Picus and Circe in Ovid. So Ishtar is accused by the memory of her unfortunate lovers who survived miserably, one as a bird with a broken wing, another a wolf or a blind mole; for this Ishtar has the power of Circe, and these seem like fragments from some once popular Babylonian ‘Metamorphoses'.

Next follows the killing of the ‘Bull of Heaven', a monster that personifies the seven years' drought which was sent by the angry goddess in punishment for her rejection by Gilgamesh. Anu at first refuses to create the bull, but when Ishtar threatens to break in the doors of hell and bring up the dead to eat with the living, he acquiesces, for this is not an idle threat, but was actually accomplished, as told in another poem. The acrobatic feat by which the bull was killed is like that performed in the bull games of Crete.

It is through hubris that disaster comes. Enkidu refused the prayer of Humbaba for mercy, and he insulted Ishtar. Gilgamesh seems less guilty; he was moved by Humbaba's prayer, though when they had killed the bull and the young men and singing girls crowded round to admire him, he let them cry, ‘Gilgamesh is most glorious of the heroes, Gilgamesh is most eminent among men.' So retribution falls first on Enkidu. He is warned by a dream. He sees the gods in council and we hear the ominous question ringing out, ‘Why do the great gods sit in council together?' Anu pronounces impartially, as is fitting in so lofty and remote a person: ‘One of the two must die.' Shamash comes to defend them, but the quarrel between Shamash and Enlil, as though between sun and storm, breaks out again, and Shamash can only save one, Gilgamesh, his special protégé: Enkidu must die. In the night Enkidu has a vision of death which is one of the main sources for our knowledge of the Babylonian after-life. Another is contained in the independent Sumerian poem ‘Enkidu and the Netherworld' and its Akkadian translation appended to the Gilgamesh Epic as Tablet XII of the Ninevite recension. Enkidu goes down alive into the Underworld in order to bring back a mysterious and perhaps shamanistic drum and drumstick that Gilgamesh has let fall into it. In spite of warnings he breaks all the taboos and is held fast, ‘for the Underworld seized him'; but a hole is made in the earth's crust so that he (or his spirit) may return and describe what he has seen.

With the death of Enkidu more than half the story has been told. The companionship is broken and Gilgamesh is left alone; after having known the joy of an almost perfect friendship, he must learn to live without it; but this is more than he can bear. The knowledge that death is inevitable had earlier proved a challenge to bold undertakings and to victorious action; but now it stultifies action and brings the new experience of defeat. The great king is after all an ordinary mortal. In this crisis he thinks of his forefathers, and in particular of Utnapishtim, who, it was rumoured, found everlasting life, having entered the company of the gods. He was the survivor of the flood, another Noah, whom the gods took ‘to live at the mouth of the rivers', and he is called ‘the Faraway'. Then follows the search for ancestral wisdom which takes Gilgamesh to the limits of the earth, as did Odysseus's journey to find Teiresias. This second journey is not a repetition of the other to the Cedar Mountain. It can be based on no historical event; the topography is other-worldly in a manner which before it was not. The planes of romantic and of spiritual adventure have coalesced. Although clothed in the appearances of primitive geography it is a spiritual landscape as much as Dante's Dark Wood, Mountain, and Pit. As far as is known at present there is no Sumerian counterpart to this episode, unless it is to be found in the unpublished Lugulbanda cycle.

After long wanderings through the wilderness, living like a poor hunter and wearing the skins of animals, Gilgamesh arrives at the mountain passes where he kills lions which he sees playing in the moonlight. This short episode is introduced almost casually, but it probably had a significance which is lost to us now, for on a great number of seals a figure, generally supposed to be that of Gilgamesh, is shown in combat with lions; and for the rest of the journey, until he reaches the Fountain of Youth, he wears the lion's pelt. The heraldic group of a warrior flanked by two lions rampant has passed into the iconography of the classical, medieval, and modem worlds, and is called even now ‘the Gilgamesh motif'. We know that the lion which met Dante on the mountain's lower slope, ‘Head held aloft and hunger mad', was the sin of Pride, while the panther carved on a medieval choir-stall may be the symbol of Christ, seen as the panther that killed a dragon, slept for three days, and then sweetened the world with its breath. But how should we understand these figures, which were commonplace to our Saxon and Medieval ancestors, without the researches of medievalists to explain them? It is not surprising that we have no clue now to the real significance of this lion combat. Only in the Hittite version there is a hint of some special connection between the lions and the Moon God.

From the pass where he killed the lions Gilgamesh came to the mountain of the sun with its awful guardians, part man, part dragon with a scorpion's tail. This description may be intended to remind us that the man-scorpion was one of the monsters created by chaos at the beginning of the world, according to the
Enuma Elish.
The mountain is shown on seals with the sun disappearing into it. It is the western horizon beyond whose ultimate range Shamash disappears at sundown and from which he returns at dawn; it is at the same time the wall of heaven and the gate of hell. The Sumerians thought of the sun as asleep through the night in the bosom of his mother earth, but the Semites held that he continued his journey in a boat, passing under the earth and over the waters of the underworld, till he came to the eastern mountain, to rise up in the morning with his bride the dawn. Gilgamesh in his journey through the mountain called Mashu retraces on foot the sun's journey; the twin peaks are both sunrise and sunset, and the goal at the end is the sun's garden by the shores of Ocean.

This garden of the gods is not the heavenly abode, but rather an earthly paradise, the country of the dawn ‘Eastward in Eden'. But in contrast to the land of Dilmun, where the survivor of the flood was taken to live for ever, it is on this side of the waters of death. The episode survives, unfortunately, in a very fragmentary state, and the account of the wonders of the garden with its jewelled fruit is nearly lost; only enough remains to give us one of the rare hints of Eden-garden which survive in old Semitic. Here the sun walks in the early morning and sees Gilgamesh as an unkempt and desperate man; he remonstrates with him, but in spite of the god's warning that his quest is certain to fail, Gilgamesh is driven on. In a house beside the sea he finds the woman Siduri with her vineyards and wine-vats. She is also called Sabit which once meant ‘barmaid' before it became a proper name. There may also be a connection between this name and that of the Chaldean Sibyl in Berossus. She is an enigmatic figure never explained, but her language is like that of Circe, herself a daughter of the sun, whose island home lay in the sea, where east and west were confused, and which grew magic herbs and moly. Like Circe and like her son Comus, Siduri dispenses the ‘philosophy' of eat, drink, and be merry ‘for this too is the lot of man'. Thefigure of the wine-bearer was still used by medieval Sūfī poets for whom it was the symbol of ‘reality revealed'. From Siduri, Gilgamesh received instruction how to cross the waters of death, much as Odysseus had directions from Circe for the way to Hades, across the ‘river of Ocean'. But Gilgamesh, unlike Odysseus, is alone and has no boat; he must find the ferryman, and the directions are doubtful. There is another great difference, for though it entails crossing Ocean and the waters of death, this is not an underworld journey, nor is the boatman Urshanabi a ferryman of the dead. It is still the journey the sun takes every night to ‘the place of transit at the mouth of the rivers'. To reach Utnapishtim ‘the Faraway', Gilgamesh must cross the same Ocean which was the last boundary of the known or knowable earth to all the ancients, Greeks, Semites, or Sumerians. It was an impassable barrier because it communicated with the waters of death and with the abyss, ‘Absu', the waters that are above the firmament. Even sophisticated Romans were afraid of the Atlantic; and Caesar's crossing to Britain was considered an act of almost superhuman daring, because, unlike the Mediterranean Sea, the English Channel was the beginning of Ocean.

For the Sumerians, Ocean was somewhere out beyond the Persian Gulf, and there too was Dilmun, where the rivers ran into the sea, so that ‘the mouth of the rivers' is exactly equivalent to the Greek ‘springs of Ocean', there were the Elysian Fields and the blessed isles of Homer and Hesiod, ‘towards night, in the far west in a soft meadow among spring flowers'. Like them, Dilmun was not for the ordinary dead. Utnapishtim did not die, but was singled out to live there for ever like Menelaus among Greek heroes, when he was sent to ‘the Elysian plain at the world's end, to join red-haired Rhadaman-thus in the land where living is made easiest for mankind, where no snow falls, no strong winds blow, and there is never any rain, but day after day the West Wind's tuneful breeze comes in from Ocean to refresh its folk'. There is a very old account of Dilmun, written on a tablet from Nippur. It describes how, when the world was young and the work of creation had only just begun, Dilmun was a place where ‘the croak of the raven was not heard, the bird of death did not utter the cry of death, the lion did not devour, the wolf did not rend the lamb, the dove did not mourn, there was no widow, no sickness, no old age, no lamentation'.

That part of our texts which described the meeting of Gilgamesh with the boatman and their embarkation, in spite of recent publication of a little additional material, is still very defective. Certain seals show two figures, which may be Gilgamesh and Urshanabi, sailing in a boat with a serpent prow. This prow may explain the serpent which is referred to during the meeting between Gilgamesh and the Ferryman; but the nature of the ‘Things of Stone', which Gilgamesh rashly smashes, remains mysterious and unexplained. All that can yet be said of them is that their destruction makes necessary the use of punting poles, and that they are connected in some way with ‘wings' or ‘winged beings or figures', but beyond this ‘they retain for the present most of their secrets' as Professor Gadd, in a discussion of the new texts, wrote in 1966.

The encounter of Gilgamesh with Utnapishtim ‘the Faraway' begins with one of those set pieces of ‘Wisdom', all of which, like Siduri's exhortation to a life of carefree pleasure, while having a very pessimistic tone, seem intended to reconcile man to his lot on earth. It is followed by Utnapishtim's account of the flood. This is the best preserved of all the tablets in the Assyrian version, with over 300 extant lines. I have already referred to the older versions unconnected with Gilgamesh: the Sumerian ‘Deluge', in which Ziusudra stands in the place of Noah or Utnapishtim, and the old Babylonian Atra-hasīs. There is a remarkable resemblance between the story told in Genesis and the Gilgamesh tablet, but there are also striking differences. In Genesis the city is not named, but in the other versions it is usually Shurrupak, the modem Fara, and one of the first of the Sumerian city-states to gain a pre-eminent position.

The account of the eleventh tablet begins with a council of gods. Such councils never boded any good for men and this is no exception. There is no explanation of the immediate cause of the gods' decision to destroy mankind. Probably it was much the same as in Genesis: ‘The earth was corrupt before God, and the earth was full of violence', for later there is talk of ‘laying his sin upon the sinner'. In the Sumerian story the account of the flood follows that of the creation of man, vegetation and animals, the institution of kingship and of the proper worship of the gods. Then unfortunately there is a long break in the text, which has obliterated the cause of the gods' wrath and their decision to destroy mankind by flood, It may be suggestive that the last decipherable phrase is connected with the cleaning and irrigation of small rivers. When the story does become intelligible the gods are divided much as in the eleventh tablet of Gilgamesh. Other flood stories were known in ancient Mesopotamia but the earliest Sumerian literary reference does not seem to be much older than the Old Babylonian Atra-hasis of the early second millennium. In this poem the flood follows pestilence, famine and drought, each designed to exterminate mankind. In the definitive edition of W. G. Lambert and A. R. Millard these lines occur: