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The result of this reconstruction is the text given in Chapter I. There, in order clearly to distinguish between text of different periods, old material used to bridge lacunae in the standard version is explicitly identified in editorial notes. The definition of a section is that it is the text customarily contained on an individual clay tablet, and so the sections are called, in accordance with Babylonian custom, 'tablets'.
The epic is told over eleven such sections, Tablets I-XI. The organizing of Babylonian literature in the latter part of the second millennium resulted in much of it being arranged in standard sequences of tablets, sequences that were known as 'series'.
The 'series of Gilgarnesh', in fact, comprises twelve tablets, not just the eleven of the epic. Tablet XII, the last, is a line-by-line translation of the latter half of one of the Sumerian Gilgarnesh poems. Somehow this partial translation survived into the first millennium while the original Sumerian text, like the other Sumerian poems of Gilgamesh, did not.
Though some have tried to show that Tablet XII had a real place in the epic, most scholars would agree that it does not belong to that text but was attached to it because it was plainly related material. The principle of bringing together related material was one of the criteria by which the scholars of Babylonia organized different texts into the same series.
Leaving aside lines that are lost but can be restored from parallel passages, overall about Many more are too badly damaged to be useful, so that considerably less than the four-fifths of the epic that is extant yields a consecutive text. In the translation offered here the damaged state of the text is all too evident, pock-marked as it is by the clutter of brackets and ellipses. While there is a temptation for a modern editor to ignore the gaps, to gloss them over or to join up disconnected fragments of text, I believe that no adult reader is well served by such a procedure.
The gaps are themselves important in number and size, for they remind us how much is still to be learned of the text. They prevent us from assuming that we have Gilgamesh entire. Whatever we say about the epic is provisional, for new discoveries of text may change our interpretation of whole passages. Nevertheless, the epic we have now is considerably fuller than that which fired the imagination of Rilke.
Accept it for what it is, a damaged masterpiece. In time, the holes that pepper the standard version of the epic will undoubtedly be filled by further discoveries of tablets in the ruin-mounds of Mesopotamia and in the museums of the world - for such is the lack of professional Assyriologists everywhere that we have yet to study properly many thousands of tablets that have long been in museum collections.
The correct identification and accurate placement of what are often only small fragments make for difficult and painstaking work. Not even a genius like George Smith always came up with the right identification. In comparison with those who had dug there before him, Smith brought home only a very small number of tablets - the 'DT' collection - from this, his first expedition, but there among them was indeed a fragment of the Flood, one that even filled an important gap in the narrative.
This was a most impressive fulfilment of the Daily Telegraph's expectations, but the expedition was a victim of its own success. The desired fragment so exactly met the newspaper's requirements that the news of its discovery led to the expedition's early recall.
In fact, we now know that this particular fragment of the Deluge story is part of a late version of the poem of Atram-hasis and not a piece of Gilgamesh at all. Smith had no way of knowing that at the time. His identification was the best that could then be expected, and went unchallenged for many years. Employed by the British Museum in to assist Sir Henry Creswicke Rawlinson, one of the grand pioneers of cuneiform decipherment, George Smith was more than the discoverer of Gilgamesh and the epic's first translator.
He was among the first in a long line of scholars who have sifted through the libraries of Ashurbanipal and, by sorting, joining and identifying thousands of pieces of Assyrian clay tablets, have over a period of years steadily increased our knowledge of the literature of the Babylonians. It is in this continuing work of discovery and identifica- tion of manuscripts, from Nineveh and elsewhere, in the field as well as in museums, that the Gilgamesh epic along with most other literary texts written in cuneiform on clay tablets differs from fragmentary texts in Greek and Latin.
The eventual recovery of this literature is assured by the durability of the writing medium. It is only a matter of time - providing, of course, that the society in which we live continues to place value on such things and to support the scholars who study them.
Uruk, the greatest city of its day, was ruled by the tyrannical Gilgamesh, semi-divine by virtue of his mother, the goddess Ninsun, but none the less mortal. He was one of the great figures of legend. His enduring achievement was to rebuild the wall of Uruk on its antediluvian foundations, and his military prowess ended the hegemony of the northern city-state of Kish.
He appears as a god in early lists of deities and in the later third millennium he benefited from a cult. Later tradition made it his function, as explained in one of the Sumerian poems, to govern the shades of the dead in the Netherworld. Because we have actual records from kings whom the ancients held to be his contemporaries, it is possible that, as perhaps there was once a real King Arthur, so there was once an actual King Gilgamesh.
Certainly the native historical tradition held this to be the case, for Gilgamesh appears in the list of Sumerian kings as the fifth ruler of the First Dynasty of Uruk. He would thus have flourished about BC, though some would place him a century or so earlier. His reign, which the list of kings holds to have lasted a mythical years, falls in the shadowy period at the edge of Mesopotamian history, when, as in the Homeric epics, the gods took a personal interest in the affairs of men and often communicated with them directly.
Foremost among the gods was the supreme triad, which comprised the Sky God Anu, remote in his celestial palace, the more important Enlil, who presided over the affairs of gods and men from his temple on earth, and the clever Ea, who lived in his freshwater ocean beneath the earth the Ocean Below and sent the Seven Sages to civilize mankind.
The Moon's children were Shamash, the Sun God, the patron of travellers and Gilgamesh's special protector, and the Babylonian Venus, the impetuous Ishtar, whose res- ponsibilities were sexual love and war, and whose appetite for both was inexhaustible.
Beneath Ea's watery domain, deep in the Netherworld, the gloomy realm of the dead, lived its queen, the bitter Ereshkigal.
There she lay prostrate in perpetual mourning, attended by her minister, the gruesome N amtar, and the rest of her fell household. XXXll Introduction Men lived in cities and cultivated the land. Where irrigation could not reach, the farmland gave way to rougher country in which shepherds grazed their flocks, ever on the look-out for wolves and lions.
And further off still was the 'wild', the empty country prowled by hunters, outlaws and bandits, where legend had it there once roamed a strange wild man whom the gazelles brought up as their own. Enkidu was his name. Several months' journey across this wilder- ness, over many ranges of mountains, there was a sacred Forest of Cedar, where some said the gods dwelt.
It was guarded for the gods by a fearsome ogre, the terrible Humbaba, cloaked for his protection in seven numinous auras, radiant and deadly. Somewhere at the edge of the world, patrolled by monstrous sentries who were half man and half scorpion, were the twin mountains of Mashu where the sun rose and set. Further still, at the other end of the Path of the Sun, was a fabulous Garden of Jewels, and nearby, in a tavern by the great impassable ocean that surrounded the earth, lived the mysterious goddess Shiduri, who dispensed wisdom from behind her veils.
Across the ocean were the lethal Waters of Death, and beyond them, on a remote island where the rivers Euphrates and Tigris welled up again from the deep, far outside the ken of men and visited only by his ferryman Ur-shanabi, dwelt Uta-napishti the Distant, a primeval king who survived the great Deluge sent by Enlil early in human history and as a consequence was spared the doom of mortals.
Many other powers populated the Babylonian cosmos - deities, demons and demi- gods of legend - but these are the principal characters of the Babylonian Gilgamesh epic. The epic in its context: myth, religion and wisdom The Gilgamesh epic is one of the very few works of Babylonian literature which can be read and enjoyed without special knowledge of the civilization from which it sprang. The names of the characters may be unfamiliar and the places strange, but some of the poet's themes are so universal in human experience that the reader has no difficulty in understanding what drives the epic's hero and can easily identify with his aspirations, his grief and his despair.
The Assyriologist William L. As the beginning and end of the epic make clear, Gilgamesh is celebrated more for his human achievement than for his relationship with the divine. Though the story of Gilgamesh is certainly fiction, Moran's diag- nosis is also a warning not to read the epic as myth. There is little consensus as to what myth is and what it is not, and ancient Meso- potamian mythological texts show considerable variety.
Some of them, particularly the older ones, contain just one myth. Others put together two or more myths. Two features are particularly characteristic of these mythological compositions: on the one hand, the story centres on the deeds of a god or gods, and, on the other, its purpose is to explain the origin of some feature of the natural or social world.
More of the characters of the Epic of Gilgamesh are divine than not, but set beside the protagonist they are insignificant. The gods even attract unfavourable similes: in Tablet XI the poet compares them to dogs and flies, as if the rulers of the universe were parasitical scavengers. In the main the function of the poem is not to explain origins.
It is more interested in examining the human condition as it is. On these grounds the epic is not myth. It certainly contains myths - the myth of the snake which shed its skin in Tablet XI being the purest example, the Flood story the most famous - and it makes many allusions to the mythology of the day, particularly in the episode of Gilgamesh's repudiation of the goddess Ishtar in Tablet VI. But most such myths are incidental to the story and the epic is certainly much more than the sum of its mythological parts - unlike, for example, Ovid's Metamorphoses.
Nevertheless, the text of Gilgamesh is often studied alongside compositions which are truly mythological. Indeed, no book on the mythology of ancient Mesopotamia can resist it.
The reason for this can best be explained by quoting the words of G. Kirk, who dealt at length with Gilgamesh in his important study of myth: 'Above all [the epic] retains, in spite of its long and literate history, an unmistakable aura of the mythical - of that kind of emotional exploration of the permanent meaning of life, by the release of fantasy about the distant past, that Greek myths, at least as we experience them, so often fail to exemplify in their own right.
Moran's phrase, 'a document of ancient humanism', is again a useful one, for it highlights the fact that the epic is not a religious poem either, at least not in the same way as, for example, John Henry Newman's 'Dream of Gerontius'.
Both poems wrestle with the fear of death and comparing them is instructive. Sensing on his deathbed the dreadful approach of the Angel of Death, Gerontius laments, A visitant Is knocking his dire summons at my door, The like of whom, to scare me and to daunt, Has never, never come to me before. These are words that could also have been placed in Gilgamesh's mouth. Gerontius in his anguish puts himself in the hands of his God, and in religious poetry this is the proper recourse of the pious afflicted.
There is plenty of Babylonian poetry in which a sufferer, often sick and feeling himself near to death, throws himself on the mercy of one or other of the inscrutable gods and asks for forgiveness and reconciliation. Gilgamesh, however, in his terror and misery spurns the help of his gods - specifically rejecting the good advice of Shamash, the god who protects him - and, even at the last, turns for solace to his own achievements rather than to his creator. The poem concludes with Gilgamesh proudly showing his companion the monument for which he became famous: o Ur-shanabi, climb Uruk's wall and walk back and forth!
Survey its foundations, examine the brickwork! Were its bricks not fired in an oven? Did the Seven Sages not lay its foundations? For it was Gilgamesh who in Babylonian tradition rebuilt his city's wall on its primordial foundations, and it was the fame won him by this enduring monument that would be his comfort. The late Thorkild J acobsen, a renowned Sumerologist who wrote on ancient Mesopotamian religion with considerable vision, once described the epic as a 'story of learning to face reality, a story of "growing Up"'.
In charting the hero's progress, the poet reflects profoundly on youth and age, on triumph and despair, on men and gods, on life and death. It is significant that his concern is not just Gilgamesh's glorious deeds but also the suffering and misery that beset his hero as he pursues his hopeless quest.
Maturity is gained as much through failure as success. Life, of necessity, is hard, but one is the wiser for it. There is in fact a formal indication that the epic is a work from which one is expected to learn.
In the prologue the poet asks the reader to believe that his poem was set down on stone by Gilgamesh himself for all to read. In other words, we are to imagine that the epic is an autobiography of the great hero himself, written in the third person. These are the words of King Gilgamesh for the benefit of future generations!
The epic accordingly bears some relation to the well-established literary genre of 'royal counsel'. Kings, by virtue of their many counsellors and the special trappings and rituals of king- ship, were expected to be wise and sagacious.
Many ancient Near Eastern collections of proverbial sayings purport to be the teachings of a king or other notable to his son or successor. The biblical Proverbs are the 'wisdom of King Solomon' addressed to his son, and the wise author of the book of Ecclesiastes introduces himself as 'the son of Da vid, king over Israel in Jerusalem'. Several such compositions survive from ancient Egypt, the best known perhaps being the 'Instruc- tions of Amen-em-Opet'.
In ancient Mesopotamia the genre is rep- resented by the 'Instructions of Shuruppak', a Sumerian composition that is among the very oldest extant works of literature, appearing first in copies from about the twenty-sixth century BC. In this text the wise old Shuruppak, son of Ubar-Tutu, counsels his son Ziusudra. It is this same Ziusudra who was known to the Babylonians by the twin names of Atram-hasis and Uta-napishti, and who survived the Deluge and dispensed sage counsel to Gilgamesh at the ends of the earth.
More particularly the epic can be compared with a small group of Babylonian texts that have been described as 'fictional royal autobio- graphy'.
Naram-Sin's lapse was to go into battle without their consent. The following injunction from his 'autobiography' bears close comparison with the prologue of Gilgamesh: Whoever you may be, governor, prince or anyone else, whom the gods may choose to exercise kingship, I have made you a tablet-box and written a stone tablet.
I have deposited them for you in Cutha, in the cella of Nergal in the temple E-meslam. Behold this stone tablet, give ear to what this stone tablet says! The message of the Gilgamesh epic is the vanity of the hero's quest: pursuit of immortality is folly, the proper duty of man is to accept the mortal life that is his lot and enjoy it to the full. Make merry each day, dance and play day and night!
Let your clothes be clean, let your head be washed, may you bathe in water! Gaze on the child who holds your hand, let your wife enjoy your repeated embrace! So too advises the author of Ecclesiastes: 'Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry heart Let thy garments be always white; and let not thy head lack ointment.
Live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest all the days of thy life. In the ancient world religion permeated intellectual activity in a way that it does not now. Read as 'wisdom', ultimately the epic bears a message of serious religious content. Its views on the proper duties of men and kings are strictly in line with the gods' requirements and conform to the religious ideology of ancient Mesopotamia: do the will of the gods, fulfil your function as they intended.
So while the epic can be enjoyed for its own sake without further inquiry, some knowledge of the mythology which expressed the relationship between gods, kings and men, of how the Babylonians understood their uni- verse, and of their religion and how their beliefs conditioned the Babylonians' approach to the divine, will give us greater insight into this masterpiece.
We know from many ancient Mesopotamian sources, in Sumerian and in Akkadian, that the Babylonians believed the purpose of the human race to be the service of the gods. Before mankind's creation, the myth tells us, the cities of lower Mesopotamia were inhabited by the gods alone and they had to feed and clothe themselves by their own efforts.
Under the supervision of Enlil, the lord of the earth, the lesser deities grew and harvested the gods' food, tilled the soil and, most exhaustingly, dug the rivers and waterways that irrigated the fields. Eventu- ally the labour became too much for them and they mutinied. The resourceful god Ea called Enki in the poem of Atram-hasis devised first the technology to produce a substitute worker from raw clay and then the means by which this new being could reproduce itself.
The first humans were duly born from the womb of the Mother Goddess and allotted their destiny, 'to carry the yoke, the task imposed by Enlil, to bear the soil-basket of the gods'.
This act of creation could be repeated as necessary. So when, as related in Tablet I of the Gilgamesh epic, the need arises to make a match for Gilgamesh, which plainly could not be done by human reproduction, The goddess Aruru, she washed her hands, took a pinch of clay, threw it down in the wild. In the wild she created Enkidu, the hero, offspring of silence, knit strong by Ninurta. XXXVlll Introduction Enkidu is thus a replica of the first man, born without a mother's cries of pain.
In the poem of Atram-hasis the yoke and soil-basket, the means of carrying earth from the diggings, symbolize the burden imposed on mankind by the god Enlil. This burden was much more than earth- moving, however; it was all the work that went into looking after the gods in their temples on earth, from irrigating their fields, raising their crops and pasturing their livestock to baking their bread, butchering their meat and clothing their statues. And so it was in reality.
The principal deities of the Babylonian pantheon lived, embodied in anthro- pomorphic statues, in palatial houses, surrounded by their divine families, courtiers and servants. The ideology was that soon after the sundering of heaven from earth the rulers of gods had divided up the land between the major deities of the pantheon, allocating to each a city and its surrounding territory.
Though many cities possessed more than one temple - Babylon traditionally had forty-three - the notion remained that the city and its hinterland belonged in principle to its patron deity, the god to whom they had been given in the original partition of the land, and that they were his to exploit. Accordingly, the patron deity occupied a large complex in the centre of town.
This, the chief temple of the city, functioned as his house or, better, his palace, for the domestic arrangements of the great gods were in all essentials modelled on those of the king. Here in his palace the god or goddess was looked after by means of elaborate rituals. He was seated on a throne, fed regular meals, clothed in expensive garments woven with gems, and entertained with music, dance and song.
In the case of a god, his wife occupied a suite of rooms close by his own, where a suitably outsize marriage bed was ready for their conjugal bliss. Other members of the family, especially the first-born son, might also be provided with a suite of rooms. The god also needed on hand his court, especially his vizier or minister, the lesser deity who did his bidding, and his domestic servants, who likewise were minor gods and goddesses.
All these deities, from the greatest to the smallest, were resident in the temple and received some kind of cult there: ritual offerings of meat and incense, ritual worship with prayer and song. The ideology was that the god was served by his divine court. The reality was that his needs were cared for by a body of human personnel specially inducted into temple service.
We call these men priests, but not all of them are properly so described. For the great temples were centres of economic activity, too. In line with the belief that the land was divided among the gods in remotest history, many of these temples possessed huge holdings of arable land let out to tenant farmers.
They also owned vast herds of cattle and flocks of sheep and goats. Some temples were also involved in manufac- turing, scribal training and other social and commercial activities. Such temples employed a considerable workforce, comprising more or less independent persons, as it were sub-contractors, and dependent persons such as those dedicated to temple service.
Among the latter were those who had no other means of support, widows, orphans and foundlings, who wore a symbol of some kind that disclosed their status. The administration of the temple's estates, workshops and person- nel was in the hands of the temple managers, just as they had responsi- bility for servicing the cult. This was right and proper, for the purpose of all mankind, as Ea created him, was to till the land, tend the flocks and engage in every other activity that was conducive to the comfort, satisfaction and best advantage of his divine lords.
The long life of this ideology, from at least the third millennium BC until the coming of Islam, long after the demise of Babylonian civilization, is confirmed by Sura 5I of the Koran, which makes a particular point of rejecting the old belief: 'I have not created genii jinn and men for any other end than that they should serve me.
I require not sustenance from them; neither will I that they feed me. With his flesh and his blood let the Lady of the Gods mix some cIa y, so that god and man are mixed together in the cIa y. In future time let us hear the drumming of the heartbeat, from the flesh of a god let the spirit be produced.
It also explains why, in Babylonian belief, men live on after death as spirits or shades in the Netherworld - as famously reported in Enkidu's dream of the Netherworld in Tablet VII and in the Sumerian poem of Bilgames and the Netherworld. But the trouble was that the god who was executed to provide the blood was not the best material. In one tradition, at least, he was the leader of the rebels, who had instigated a mutiny. Small wonder, then, that mankind could be wayward.
Uta-napishti tells his wife in Tablet XI, 'Man is deceitful, he will deceive you', and Gilgamesh duly confirms this unpalatable aspect of human nature by lying to him. The innately rebellious and unruly nature of man encapsulated in this myth of his creation also informs one tradition about early human history, first found in several Sumerian literary compositions, that in the beginning the human race roamed the land like the beasts of the field, naked but hairy, and for sustenance grazing on grass.
According to Berossus, a Babylonian scholar of the fourth century BC who wrote in Greek, at this stage men 'lived without laws just as wild animals', 15 that is, without government, cities or social institutions. The creation of Enkidu in Tablet I of the Gilgamesh epic also alludes to this tradition: He knows not a people, nor even a country. Coated in hair like the god of the animals, with the gazelles he grazes on grasses. As is well known, the first two chapters of Genesis preserve two quite different accounts of God's creation of man.
The civilization of mankind, according to Babylonian mythology, was the work of the gods, who sent kingship from heaven, and especially of the god Ea, who despatched the Seven Sages to Eridu and other early cities, and with them all the arts and crafts of city life.
These were the beings who, according to the epic's prologue, founded Uruk with its wall: 'Did the Seven Sages not lay its foundations?
Government, society and work were thus imposed on men. The tradition that the first men roamed free and lawless and were not subject to kings helped to give rise to a myth that kings were created as distinct beings, significantly different from other mortals in appearance, capabilities and duties. The text that tells us most in this regard is known from a single tablet from Babylon written in the middle or late first millennium BC, but coronation prayers from seventh-century Assyria quote part of it and the text itself may be older.
In it, the god Ea and the Mother Goddess between them create man from clay, as in the poem of Atram-hasis and other mythological texts. Then they create a superior being and give him the tools for ruling: Ea opened his mouth to speak, saying a word to the Lady of the Gods: 'You are Belet-ili, the sister of the great gods, you have created man the human, fashion now the king, the counsellor-man!
Gird the whole of his figure sweet, make perfect his countenance and well formed his body! They gave to the king the task of doing battle for the [great] gods. Anu gave him his crown, Enlil gave him his throne, Nergal gave him his weapons, Ninurta gave him his corona of splendour; The Lady of the Gods gave him his features of majesty , N uska commissioned counsellors, stood them before him.
The hero is shaped by the gods, of perfect looks and majestic stature, as the poet tells us in Tablet I: It was the Lady of the Gods drew the form of his figure, while his build was perfected by divine Nudimmud W hen he grew tall his beauty was consummate, by earthly standards he was most handsome. Not only this, but as king he exhibits an instinctive longing for trustworthy counsel, and at the end of the same tablet he looks forward with enthusiasm to the predicted arrival of Enkidu: Let me acquire a friend to counsel me, a friend to counsel me I will acquire!
Aside from fighting the gods' battles for them - maintaining law and order in the land by repelling the advance of the enemy and subduing internal revolt - the principal duty of the Babylonian king was to oversee the repair and maintenance of the gods' cult-centres and to ensure that they were stocked with foodstuffs and treasure.
In another myth, which forms the prologue of a prayer to be said during the elaborate rituals that attended the building and rebuilding of Babylonian temples, the god Ea organizes the world to ensure the gods' comfort in their houses.
In doing so, 'he created the king for the task of provisioning, he created men to be the workforce'. This passage is much broken, but the gist of it seems to be that, just as the moon and constellations 'the gods of the night' mark out the regular progression of month and year, so the king must ensure the delivery of the regular offerings required by the gods' temples.
In the epic Uta-napishti fills the role of the quintessential wise man who knows the secrets of the cosmos - as it were, the meaning of life.
He and his knowledge, ancient and unique among men, are the end of Gilgamesh's long and arduous quest. Apart from the observation on the duties of kings regarding the provisioning of temples, what does the old sage say? First Uta-napishti contrasts the lot of kings with the lot of fools. By fools are meant simpletons, halfwits and village idiots, those who occupied the position in human society furthest from kings.
Kings are enthroned in splendour, clad in finery, nourished with the best-quality foodstuffs. Fools make do with the opposite. One implication seems to be that Gilgamesh, who has been wandering alone clad in ragged skins and eating raw meat, is behaving not as a king but as a fool. His quest is the quest of an idiot. This is a matter of reproach, for one born to be king should act as one. Another implication is that it was the duty of kings to help those who could not help themselves.
The second part of Uta-napishti's counsel, as already explained, out- lines the gods' expectations of the king. This is what Gilgamesh should have been doing instead of wandering the wild: looking after the gods, his masters, and the people, his subjects.
The third part of Uta-Napishti's counsel - and certainly the most important - is his discourse on life and death and on the futility of Gilgamesh's search for immortality. In the Old Babylonian epic Gilgamesh received a similar, but much shorter, lecture from Shiduri: The life that you seek you never will find: when the gods created mankind, death they dispensed to mankind, life they kept for themselves.
These lines, and the advice that follows, do not appear in the episode of the late epic where Gilgamesh talks with Shiduri.
It seems that the poet of the standard version wanted to keep the wisdom for the climax and intentionally held it in reserve for Uta-napishti. The dispensing of death and life took place, as Uta-napishti tells us, in an assembly of the gods. This is another reference to the mythology of early human history. Newly created man, as we have seen, was flawed by virtue of his innate rebelliousness.
Being innate this flaw could not be corrected. But the human race had another defect: it bred with great ease and rapidly became too numerous. As the poem of Atram-hasis relates, three times, at intervals of 1, years, the god Enlil tired of the relentless hubbub of the new creation, which kept him awake in his chamber. Each time he was successful at first, so that the numbers of man were considerably diminished. But inevitably he was thwarted by the god Ea, who each time communicated the method of man's salvation to Atram-hasis another name for Uta-napishti , king of the city Shuruppak.
Eventu- ally the exasperated Enlil came up with the final solution, which all the gods, including Ea, swore to keep secret: he would send the Deluge to wipe out mankind. By subterfuge, however, Ea managed to warn Atram-hasis in advance, and Atram-hasis built his curious ark, ostens- ibly so that he could sail down to Ea's cosmic domain, the Ocean Below. The Deluge came but Atram-hasis survived, safe aboard the ark with his family, his treasure and representatives of each craft and species of animal.
But the gods were stricken with hunger and thirst. Their temples were flooded. The human servants who fed and watered them were dead. Enlil's final solution was exposed as fatally flawed. The gods were about to die of want. In the meantime the flood had abated and the ark had grounded on a high mountain peak. Then, as incense rose from where Atram-hasis offered thanks for his survival, the sweet smell of food wafted up to heaven and the gods all rushed down to feed.
Enlil remonstrated with the gods for the failure of his plan and fingers were pointed at Ea. Ea, clever as always, responded by exposing the unwisdom of the Deluge. In the story as adapted for the Gilgamesh epic, Ea then asks the gods in assembly to determine what to do with the survivor.
Enlil gives Uta-napishti and his wife life 'like the gods' - they will live for ever - and removes them to the ends of the earth. In the poem of Atram-hasis a bigger task is undertaken, in line with the theme of that composition. The problem of human noise has not been resolved. Ea's solution to it constitutes the climax of the poem. He has the Mother Goddess redesign man slightly so that the human race does not reproduce so effectively.
Women are to be barren as well as fertile. Stillbirth and infant mortality are introduced. Certain classes of women are to be chaste as a religious requirement, like nuns. In this way fewer babies will be conceived, not all will be born alive and not all will survive to adulthood. But the biggest change, one that will have the greatest effect on the numbers of men, is that the gods establish an end to the naturallifespan.
What must happen is that Enki commands the Mother Goddess to make death an inevitable fact of life: [ You,] 0 mother goddess, maker of destiny, [assign death] to the people! From the time of the Deluge onwards, death is to follow life as a matter of course.
This crucial moment in human history is the mythological background to the conclusion of Uta-napishti's discourse on life and death in the epic of Gilgamesh: The Anunnaki, the great gods, held an assembly, Mammitum, maker of destiny, fixed fates with them: both Death and Life they have established, but the day of Death they do not disclose.
In fact, the context of this momentous change in man's destiny is now confirmed by the newly available text of the Death of Bilgames, in the words of the god Enki to his partners, An and Enlil: After the assembly had made the Deluge sweep over Ziusudra, one of mankind, still lived!
From that time we swore that mankind should not have life eternal. The sole exception to the new doom of mankind is the survivor of the Flood, who is made immortal. And how this came about, the story of the Deluge, is the subject of the continuation ofUta-napishti's teach- ing to Gilgamesh. But, as he himself explains, Uta-napishti's elevation to immortal status was an isolated event born of a particular set of circumstances never to be repeated.
Gilgamesh may acquire the 'secret of the gods', the knowledge of how Uta-napishti 'found life' in the company of the gods, but he cannot follow in his footsteps. To underline his message of the futility of Gilgamesh's quest Uta-napishti challenges his visitor to defeat Sleep, the younger brother of Death, knowing that he will fail. Only the snake is destined to benefit from it. And aware at last of his own capabilities he becomes reconciled to his lot, and wise. In the words of the prologue, to which we return: 'He came a far road, was weary, found peace.
In fact, it is the tale of one whose extraordinary experiences make him extraordinarily wise. The poet makes it clear right at the beginning that we should expect this: He who saw the Deep, the country's foundation, [who] knew The change wrought in Gilgamesh occurs only after a long history of heroic misdemeanours. At first he does everything wrong. He is king but he does not behave like a king. In Babylonian ideology, as throughout the ancient Near East, the king should be to his people as a shepherd to his sheep, guiding them, protecting them and ruling them with a just and equitable hand.
Far from that, Gilgamesh is a cruel tyrant, whose brutality calls forth the complaint of his people. The contrast between the ideal and the actual is implicit in their lament: Yet he is the shepherd of Uruk-the-Sheepfold, Gilgamesh, [the guide of the] teeming [people. All that is certain is that his demands mean that filial and conjugal duties are displaced.
Daughters have no time to help their mothers nor sons their fathers, and wives are unable to tend the needs of their husbands. Some commentators have inferred that Gilgamesh's abuse is sexual.
Such things did not happen in Babylonia in the historical period. However, according to the text this activity was divinely sanctioned, and therefore could not have been an abuse in the context: By divine consent it is so ordained; when his navel-cord was cut, for him she was destined. Painkiller - Collected Works 4 CD A-Ha - Collection Pixar Collection.
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