02 Founding Cultures: Gilgamesh

The Sumerian poems come first, and they are not one story. Five short poems about a king called Bilgames, copied in Old Babylonian scribal schools around 1800 BCE:

• a standoff with Akka of Kish
• an expedition against an ogre named Huwawa, surviving in two versions
• one about the Bull of Heaven
• one about the netherworld
• one about the king's death

They share a hero and no plot. None needs the others, and none is about mortality the way the later epic is.

Someone turned that material into one poem. In the early second millennium an Akkadian poet built a single narrative out of it, with one arc and one problem. Titled by its first line, as these poems were: Surpassing all other kings. It survives in pieces, and that surviving third holds many of the lines people quote as the poem.

Then it was rebuilt again, and that rebuild is your set text. Late in the second millennium the poem was reworked into eleven tablets under a new first line and title, He who saw the Deep; Babylonian scholarly lists credit Sin-leqi-unninni. The changes are not cosmetic:

• knowledge replaces rank at the front
• the Flood becomes a long first-person speech
• an address to the reader frames the whole

Tablet XII was bolted on afterwards. It is a close Akkadian rendering of part of the Sumerian netherworld poem, and it does not fit: Enkidu is alive in it and he is a servant. Scribes kept it attached anyway, which tells you something about how ancient texts were curated. They were not edited for consistency.

Lost for two thousand years, then found in a library. The largest group of manuscripts came out of Nineveh in the 1850s, from Ashurbanipal's collection. In 1872 George Smith read the Flood tablet and recognised Genesis in it. Hence the Flood's fame, and hence the usual upside-down picture: the Flood is a speech inside a story about grief.

What follows, practically. Your volume is an anthology with one continuous page numbering, so a page number identifies your printing and nothing else. A tablet and line reference identifies the poem. That is the whole reason the citation rule below looks fussy.

It names him by what he knows, not by what he rules. The Old Babylonian epic began with rank: surpassing all other kings. The Standard Version begins with the Deep, the freshwater abyss of secret knowledge. Titled by their first lines, these poems make a retitling an argument: the subject is an education, not a career.

It claims he came back with something. Four things, says the prologue:

• he saw what was secret
• he came a long and exhausting road
• he brought back a tale of the time before the Flood
• he set his labours down in writing

At the end he has no object and no cure. What he has is a story, which is the thing you are holding.

It puts you on the wall. The imperatives are in the second person: go up, walk, inspect, look. You are given a survey task on a piece of masonry. That is an unusual way to open a heroic poem, and it means the first proposed proof of the hero's worth is a building rather than a battle.

It points at a tablet box and tells you to read. The prologue describes a stone box in the wall, a lapis tablet inside, and tells you to open it and read. The poem stages its own reading. The frame closes when Gilgamesh speaks the survey instruction to the ferryman: hero and reader at one wall, told to look.

The complaint is about power, not labour. In Tablet I the people of Uruk are worn out by their king: no young man left alone, no girl left to her mother. Read as a claim about marriage rights, the wording is too damaged to settle. The shape is certain: a city reports a king with nothing to push against.

The gods answer with a match, made of clay in the wild. The mother goddess pinches off clay and makes a counterpart: hairy, grazing with the gazelles, filling in the hunter's pits. Notice what was ordered: not a punishment, not a rival king, but an equal. An imbalance was reported; the answer is a counterweight.

Shamhat is the mechanism, and the poem prices it. A hunter complains, Gilgamesh sends Shamhat, and after six days and seven nights the animals run from Enkidu. His body is diminished and his understanding widened, says the text: a trade stated as a trade. He loses the steppe and gains a mind that can hold a plan. Quote it.

Bread, beer, oil and clothes finish the job. At the shepherds' camp he does not know what bread is, learns to drink beer, becomes cheerful, is washed, rubbed with oil and dressed. The poem spends real space on groceries, which is where the second reading gets its strength: nobody writes a beer lesson for a plot device.

The fight settles the relation, and settles it level. Enkidu blocks the way to a wedding, they wrestle in the gateway, the doorpost shakes, and no winner is named. Then they embrace and become inseparable. From here the poem can send them anywhere together, and it has a second body it can spend.

The motive for the forest is a name. He proposes it in the language of reputation: he wants his name set where famous men's names are written, and tells Enkidu that if he falls he will at least have made a name. That substitute for immortality is the only one he has yet, and the ending withdraws it too.

The city's experts object and are overruled. The elders tell him he is young, that his heart carries him away, that Humbaba's roar is a flood and his mouth is fire. Then they let him go with advice. A poem wanting the expedition to look unavoidable would not stage the objection. It is on the tablet, for you to quote.

Humbaba asks for his life; Enkidu answers. In Tablet V the ogre pleads, offering timber. Gilgamesh hesitates. Enkidu tells him to finish it: leave him alive and the gods will hear of it. The friend argues for it, and the dying ogre curses them both. Two tablets later the assembly wants somebody; Enkidu's hand is up in the transcript.

The cedars come home as a door. They fell the forest, float the timber downriver, and the great cedar becomes a door for Enlil's temple at Nippur. Notice who is robbed: Humbaba was Enlil's appointed guardian of that forest, and the timber arrives as a gift to Enlil. The offering and the offence are made of the same wood.

Ishtar proposes, and is refused with a list. In Tablet VI she offers a chariot of lapis and gold, kings kneeling, prosperity for his herds. He answers with a catalogue of what happened to those who accepted:

• Dumuzi, given yearly mourning
• the bright allallu bird, its wing broken
• the lion, caught in pits
• the horse, given the whip and the goad
• the herdsman, turned into a wolf and driven off by his own boys
• her father's gardener, struck and transformed

It is not an insult about her character; it is an argument from precedent.

The Bull of Heaven, and the boast. Ishtar goes to Anu, who warns that the Bull means seven years of famine; she has the grain stored. Then:

• the Bull comes down, its snorts open pits, and hundreds of the men of Uruk fall in
• Enkidu takes it by the tail and Gilgamesh kills it
• Enkidu tears off the haunch and throws it at the goddess with a taunt
• the horns go up in the palace, and Gilgamesh asks the servant girls who is the finest of men

That last question is the last link in the chain.

He dreams the assembly and wakes up sentenced. Enkidu's dream reports gods arguing about the killing of Humbaba and the Bull. Enlil wants a death. Shamash speaks for the pair and is overruled. Enkidu wakes and tells Gilgamesh, and from that moment the poem has a dying man in it.

He curses the door he made himself. His first speech after the sentence is addressed to the cedar door he and Gilgamesh cut for Enlil's temple, telling it he would have taken an axe to it had he known. A man cursing his own best work: the poem's way of showing grief going looking for a cause it can name.

He curses the hunter, then Shamhat, then takes one back. The order on the tablet:

• he curses the trapper who found him at the waterhole
• he curses Shamhat, who brought him into the city
• Shamash answers from the sky and lists what she gave him: bread fit for a god, beer fit for a king, clothes, and a friend like Gilgamesh
• Enkidu blesses her

The order matters more than either speech: the poem lets him argue, be answered, and change his mind.

The netherworld dream is not a punishment. A figure with a bird's face takes him to the house of dust: kings are servants, crowns piled up, Ereshkigal ruling, a scribe reading from a tablet. Nobody is tortured. That is the horror, because death here is dust and loss of rank rather than judgement, so nothing he achieved travels with him.

Twelve days, and a complaint about the manner of it. He lies sick for twelve days and says he is not dying the way he wanted. He is not falling in battle; he is wasting in a bed. For a hero that is the wrong death, and the wrong death is what the second half is about.

Tablet VIII: the lament, and a statue. Three moves, in order:

• Gilgamesh calls on the elders, the roads, the pastures, the forest, the rivers and the animals to weep
• he piles up grave goods and has a statue of Enkidu made in gold, with a chest of lapis
• he tears off his fine clothes, puts on a lion skin, and leaves the city

The clothing is the hinge in one image: he puts on the animal Enkidu used to be.

The road is built to be impassable, and he passes it. At Mount Mashu, the twin peaks that hold up the sky, a scorpion-man and his wife guard the gate of the sun's road:

• they tell him nobody has done this, then open the gate
• the path is twelve double-hours of complete darkness, and he walks it
• he comes out in a garden where the bushes carry carnelian and lapis instead of fruit

The stretch proves no ordinary obstacle can stop him, so the failure at the end cannot be blamed on the journey.

Shiduri, and the version problem in one scene. A tavern-keeper at the edge of the sea bolts her door when she sees him. Two versions, two speeches:

• Standard Version: she asks why his face is wasted, hears about Enkidu, and tells him about the crossing and Ur-shanabi
• Old Babylonian Sippar tablet: the same character says the gods kept life for themselves, so he should fill his belly, be merry, wash, dress and hold a child's hand

That second speech is the most famous one connected with this poem, and the set text does not contain it.

Ur-shanabi, the stone crew, and three hundred poles. The ferryman's crew is stone figures, and Gilgamesh smashes them on sight. So he must cut three hundred punting poles and use each once: the Waters of Death may not be touched by hand. Comic and serious: the reflex destroyed the boat's engine, and from here force is an overhead.

The first answer is about destiny, not consolation. Before the Flood story Uta-napishti tells him the great gods fixed death and life together and withheld the length of a life. Nobody sees death; nobody is shown the day. It is the flattest statement of the problem, and it stands before the story, so the Flood arrives as evidence.

The Flood, told in the first person. Ea leaks the plan to a reed fence and a brick wall, so the god can say he told a wall and not a man. Then:

• the boat is a sealed cube, seven decks, nine compartments
• the storm runs six days and seven nights, the gods cower, and the boat grounds on Mount Nimush
• a dove returns, a swallow returns, a raven does not; he sacrifices and the gods crowd the smell like flies
• Enlil arrives furious that anyone lived, Ea argues him down, and Uta-napishti and his wife are given endless life at the mouth of the rivers

What the speech never supplies is a reason for the Flood.

Test one: bread counts the days. Told to stay awake seven nights, he is asleep at once. His wife bakes a loaf a day and lines them up; he wakes insisting he only dozed, and the first loaf is stone while the last is fresh. He cannot argue with bread. Sleep is the cheapest possible test: everyone loses nightly.

Test two: the plant, and the snake. As a parting gift he is told of a plant in the freshwater Deep:

• he ties stones to his feet, dives, and gets it
• he names it The Old Man Has Grown Young and plans to take it to the elders of Uruk
• he stops to bathe, and a snake smells it and carries it off, shedding its skin as it goes

The snake gets the rejuvenation. He weeps, goes home, and tells the ferryman to look at the wall.

Move one, the claim. One sentence, present tense, about the poem rather than about you. The test is falsifiability: could a classmate disagree? The poem treats becoming human as an exchange passes. The poem explores the theme of civilisation does not, because nobody can disagree. Failed-claim words: explores, shows the importance of, is a timeless story about.

Move two, the quotation. Six to twenty words is the useful range: longer and the marker cannot see which part you meant, shorter and there is nothing to read.

• give tablet and line, and name the translator once per answer
• without the book, paraphrase and say you are paraphrasing: as Shamash reminds him, she gave him bread, beer, clothes and a friend

An honest paraphrase costs very little; a quotation invented under pressure costs the paragraph.

Move three, the warrant. This is where the marks are: it says why this wording supports the claim. It usually points at one of five things:

• a verb form
• an order of items
• a repetition
• a word doing double duty
• something the text pointedly does not say

If your sentence after the quotation only restates the quotation, you have written a paraphrase.

Move four, the consequence. One sentence saying what the claim now lets you do: explain a later scene, rule out a common reading, transfer to the other text in the cluster. It is what makes a paragraph part of an argument, and in the course project it is what lets paragraphs be ordered.

What this course adds. Two things, and one instruction.

• Version discipline, from earlier in this section: name the version when you quote, because half the famous lines are from the earlier epic.
• Honesty about local variation: this course runs in many parallel sections with many instructors, and the binding General Syllabus sets the same four clusters for everyone while leaving some text choices to the section. It says flatly that other editions or translations will not be accepted.
• So verify with your own instructor which edition and which quiz format you face, and never write in this course we read as if it were a fact about all sections.

One more thing markers notice. A paragraph that names the strongest objection to itself in a clause reads as confident, not weak. The servant reading of Enkidu is available in Tablet XII, and saying so while ruling it out of the main poem beats pretending it does not exist.