Ishtar, greatly insulted, runs up to Heaven, to her father, Anu, and asks to be given the Bull of Heaven, to avenge these insults. Descending to Uruk with the goddess, the formidable beast does serious harm even as it lands. One snort, and the earth opens up; a hundred men fall into it. A second snort, and another pit opens; two hundred men are swallowed up. On the third snort, when the cleft opens, Enkidu falls into it, but only up to his waist (because he is a giant), and he grasps the bull by the horns. It slobbers on Enkidu’s face. It defecates on him. But Gilgamesh stabs it in the neck, and it dies. When Ishtar protests, Enkidu tears off one of the bull’s haunches and throws it at her, saying that he would happily have ripped off her limbs and thrown them at the bull. He and Gilgamesh then wash their hands in the Euphrates and, clasping each other, return in triumph to the palace. “Who is the finest among men?” Gilgamesh asks his serving maids. “Who the most glorious of fellows?”
The triumph is short-lived. That very night, Enkidu has a dream that, to atone for the crime of murdering the Bull of Heaven, one of the two men must die. No one needs to ask which. Enkidu sickens. He starts to complain. Why could he not have died in combat? That way, people would remember him. But then the tablets break off. As Michael Schmidt writes, Enkidu has “some thirty so far silent lines to bid his beloved Gilgamesh good-bye and perish.”
There was a real king called Gilgamesh, it seems. Or, at least, his name appears in a list of kings compiled around 2000 B.C., and he probably lived in the first half of the third millennium B.C. For at least a thousand years after his death, poems were written about him, in various Mesopotamian languages. Then, sometime between 1300 and 1000 B.C., one Sin-leqi-unninni (his name means “The moon god Sin hears my prayers”) collected and edited the stories. We might call Sin-leqi-unninni a scribe or a redactor. According to one scholar, he was also a professional exorcist. What matters is that he pulled together the Gilgamesh poems that he had at hand and, adding this and deleting that, and attaching a beginning and an end, he made a unified literary work, in his language, Akkadian. This composition is what Assyriologists call the Standard Version of “Gilgamesh.” It was incised on eleven tablets, back and front, with roughly three hundred lines on each tablet.
We don’t have a complete copy of Sin-leqi-unninni’s tablets. Through the actions of time, wind, and, above all, war—Nineveh, with Ashurbanipal’s library, was attacked and destroyed by neighboring forces in 612 B.C.—a great deal of the text was lost. Some of the holes can be plugged with material from other Gilgamesh poems, but even once that has been done important sections are missing. Of an estimated thirty-six hundred lines, we have only thirty-two hundred, whole or in part. (Translations often supply ellipses where text is missing, and use italics and brackets to mark varying degrees of conjecture.)
Furthermore, the thing that we are looking at, after the insertions, is a patchwork of texts created at various times and places, in what are often different, if related, languages. One highly respected translation, by Andrew George, a professor of Babylonian at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, gives what remains of Sin-leqi-unninni’s text and then appends the “Pennsylvania tablet”; the “Yale tablet”; the “Nippur school tablet,” in Baghdad; the “fragments from Hattusa” (now Boğazköy, in central Turkey); and so on. Scholars cannot afford to ignore these outliers, because the symbols that constitute cuneiform, up to a thousand of them, changed over the millennium that produced Sin-leqi-unninni’s materials. So the word for “goddess of love and war” on a fragment in Baghdad may be different from its analogue in the vitrines of the British Museum. Indeed, meanings may change in the present as well, as additional discoveries are made. After a new piece came to light in 2015, George wrote that the energetic Enkidu and Shamhat had not one but two weeklong sex acts before repairing to Uruk. The text has no stability. It shifts in your hands.
Also, the text was missing for so long that it is relatively new to us. Schmidt estimates that the Iliad and the Odyssey have been studied by scholars for about a hundred and fifty generations; the Aeneid, for about a hundred; “Gilgamesh,” for only seven or eight. Translators of Homer and Virgil could look back on the work of great predecessors such as Pope and Dryden. Not so with “Gilgamesh.” The first sort-of-complete Western translation was produced at the end of the nineteenth century. I was not taught the poem in school, nor was anyone I know. There is no real tradition for reading it. Modern translators are pretty much on their own.
And they have a special challenge. When, at the conclusion of Tablet7, Enkidu dies, “Gilgamesh” does not end. On the contrary, something like a new poem begins, in a different key. Before, the two young men were killing monsters and having sex—not such a different plot line from that of a modern action movie. Now, with the death of Enkidu, everything changes. Gilgamesh sends up a great, torn-from-the-gut lament: “O my friend, wild ass on the run, donkey of the uplands, panther of the wild,” may the Forest of Cedar grieve for you, and the pure Euphrates. He calls for his craftsmen—“Forgemaster! [Lapidary!] Coppersmith! Goldsmith!”—and orders Enkidu’s funerary monument: “Your eyebrows shall be of lapis lazuli, your chest of gold.” For six days, Gilgamesh cannot bear to leave his watch over the body. Finally, a maggot falls out of one of Enkidu’s nostrils. (That appalling detail is recorded again and again. The poets knew its power.) Seeing it—and understanding, accordingly, that his friend has truly been turned into matter, into dead meat—Gilgamesh is assailed by a new grief: he, too, must die. This frightens him to his very core, and it becomes the subject of the remainder of the poem. Can he find a way to avoid death?
He flees Uruk and clothes himself in animal skins. First he goes to the mountain where the sun rises and sets. It is guarded by two scorpions. Gilgamesh explains to them that he is seeking Uta-napishti, the one man, he has heard, who became immortal. The scorpions grant him entry to a tunnel that the sun passes through each night. But if he wants to get through it he must outpace the sun. He starts out and, in utter, enfolding darkness, he runs. He can see nothing behind him or ahead of him. This goes on for hours and hours. In the end, he beats the sun narrowly, emerging into a garden where the fruits on the trees are jewels:
A carnelian tree was in fruit,
hung with bunches of grapes, lovely to look on.
A lapis lazuli tree bore foliage,
in full fruit and gorgeous to gaze on.
To me, this is the most dazzling passage in the poem: the engulfing darkness, in which Gilgamesh can see nothing for hours—he is just an organism, in a hole—and then, suddenly, light, color, beautiful globes of purple and red hanging from the trees. God’s world, made for us, or so we thought.
Gilgamesh does not linger in the garden. He at last finds Uta-napishti, the man who gazed on death and survived. Gilgamesh wants to know, How did you do this? Unhelpfully, Uta-napishti explains:
“No one at all sees Death,
no one at all sees the face [of Death,]
no one at all [hears] the voice of Death,
Death so savage, who hacks men down....
Ever the river has risen and brought us the flood,
the mayfly floating on the water.
On the face of the sun its countenance gazes,
then all of a sudden nothing is there!”
“I don’t need a reason—it’s just better if we all kick at the same time, O.K.?” Cartoon by Yael Green Link copied
Uta-napishti now tells Gilgamesh the story that made George Smith take off his clothes. We might have done the same, for Uta-napishti’s tale is far more bloodcurdling than the one in the Old Testament. Like Noah, Uta-napishti was warned of the coming catastrophe, and he ordered an ark to be built. The bottom of the hull was one acre in area, with six decks raised on it. (And the vessel seems to have been cube-shaped!) Once the ark was finished, Uta-napishti and his family and all the animals he could lay his hands on, and whatever craftsmen he could summon, boarded the ark. Before he sailed, he gave his palace and all its goods to the shipwright—an ironic gift, since the palace and its goods, and presumably the shipwright, too, would be destroyed the next day. Uta-napishti continues:
“At the very first glimmer of brightening dawn,
there rose from the horizon a dark cloud of black,
and bellowing within it was Adad the Storm God.
The gods Shullat and Hanish were going before him,
bearing his throne over mountain and land.“The god Errakal was uprooting the mooring-poles,
Ninurta, passing by, made the weirs overflow.
The Anunnaki gods carried torches of fire,
scorching the country with brilliant flashes.“The stillness of the Storm God passed over the sky,
and all that was bright then turned into darkness.
[He] charged the land like a bull [on the rampage,]
he smashed [it] in pieces [like a vessel of clay.]...“Even the gods took fright at the Deluge,
they left and went up to the heaven of Anu,
lying like dogs curled up in the open.
The goddess cried out like a woman in childbirth.”
These last lines are what everyone quotes. How thrilling they are, with the gods bent over, howling, in the skies and the storm shattering the earth like a clay pot. In the end, the rains stop, and Uta-napishti’s ark, like Noah’s, gets snagged on a mountaintop. He and his fellow-survivors disembark, and re-people the earth.
For suffering this ordeal, Uta-napishti and his wife were granted immortality, but, he suggests, no one but they can live forever. Then he relents and gives Gilgamesh some tests whereby he might cheat death. Gilgamesh fails. (They are silly tests, and he fails in silly ways. The poem is not perfect.) Uta-napishti’s boatman takes Gilgamesh home. When they arrive in Uruk, Gilgamesh tells the boatman to climb Uruk’s city wall:
“Survey its foundations, examine the brickwork!
Were its bricks not fired in an oven?
Did the Seven Sages not lay its foundations?“A square mile is city, a square mile date grove, a square mile is clay-pit, half a square mile the temple of Ishtar:
three square miles and a half is Uruk’s expanse.”
