What was gilgamesh

The door jambs shake, the walls quake, but after a while the two men weary of the quarrel and decide to be friends. Gilgamesh introduces Enkidu to his mother, the goddess Ninsun. Who are his people? Thus snubbed, Enkidu weeps, and Gilgamesh, to cheer him up, proposes an adventure: the two of them will go to the Forest of Cedar, kill its protector, the monster Humbaba, and harvest some cedar wood for building projects in Uruk.

Humbaba is no ordinary monster. He is like a miasma, or a nightmare. He has seven auras in which he can wrap himself, and which he can send out, as a means of defense.

As Gilgamesh and Enkidu approach, he taunts them. He tells Gilgamesh that forest birds will soon be feasting on his body parts. Though shaking with fear, the two men seize him. Gilgamesh plunges a dirk into his neck. Enkidu rips out his lungs. The auras run away. Then the men cut down several giant cedars, build a raft, and, with Gilgamesh brandishing the head of Humbaba, sail back to Uruk.

Once home, Gilgamesh bathes, puts on clean clothes, and shakes out his long hair. His ewes will bear twins; his goats will bear triplets. Gilgamesh responds by inquiring how he would profit from marrying her.

You are a brazier that goes out in the cold, he tells her. You are a door that lets in the wind, a palace that collapses on top of its warriors, a water skin that leaks, a shoe that pinches the foot. The men that you loved: what became of them? One you turned into a frog, another into a wolf. No thanks, he says. 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 defecates on him. But Gilgamesh stabs it in the neck, and it dies. He and Gilgamesh then wash their hands in the Euphrates and, clasping each other, return in triumph to the palace. 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. There was a real king called Gilgamesh, it seems.

Or, at least, his name appears in a list of kings compiled around B. For at least a thousand years after his death, poems were written about him, in various Mesopotamian languages. Then, sometime between and B. 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. 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.

Indeed, meanings may change in the present as well, as additional discoveries are made. After a new piece came to light in , 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. Translators of Homer and Virgil could look back on the work of great predecessors such as Pope and Dryden. 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. 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. 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. 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:. 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! Uta-napishti now tells Gilgamesh the story that made George Smith take off his clothes. 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:. The gods Shullat and Hanish were going before him, bearing his throne over mountain and land. The Anunnaki gods carried torches of fire, scorching the country with brilliant flashes. 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. Five Sumerian stories about Gilgamesh were copied in these schools.

These tales, which were not part of an epic cycle, were originally oral narratives sung at the royal court of the Third Dynasty of Ur. Seeking revenge, the goddess sends the Bull of Heaven to kill Gilgamesh, but the hero, with the assistance of Enkidu, slays the monster.

Enkidu descends into the depths to find them and, upon his return to life, describes the horrid fate that awaits the dead.

They decide that he, like all of humankind, shall not be granted eternal life. In addition to the Sumerian compositions, young scribes studying in the Old Babylonian schools made copies of different oral stories about the hero Gilgamesh.

One noteworthy tale was sung in Akkadian rather than in Sumerian. Only fragments of this composition survive. By the end of the eighteenth century B. A shift in political power and culture took place under the newly ascendant Babylonian dynasties centered north of Sumer.

Hundreds of years later, toward the end of the second millennium B. Differing versions of classic compositions, including the Akkadian Gilgamesh story, proliferated, and translations and adaptations were made by poets in various lands to reflect local concerns. Some time in the twelfth century B. Not content to merely copy an old version of the tale, this scholar most likely assembled various versions of the story from both oral and written sources and updated them in light of the literary concerns of his day, which included questions about human mortality and the nature of wisdom.

The new version of the epic explains that Gilgamesh, although he is king of Uruk, acts as an arrogant, impulsive, and irresponsible ruler. Two-thirds human and one-third deity, the hero as king is unaware of his own strengths and weaknesses. He oppresses his own people. After an initial confrontation, Gilgamesh and Enkidu become friends and decide to make a name for themselves by journeying to the Cedar Forest to fight against Humbaba, the giant whom the gods have placed as guardian of the sacred trees.

The two kill the monster and take cedar back to Uruk as their prize. Repulsed, the headstrong goddess sends the Bull of Heaven to destroy Uruk and punish Gilgamesh. But Gilgamesh and Enkidu meet the challenge and Gilgamesh slays the bull. The gods retaliate by causing Enkidu to fall ill and die.

Gilgamesh, devastated by the death of his friend, now realizes that he is part mortal and sets out on a fruitless journey to seek immortality.

On his travels in search of the secret of everlasting life, Gilgamesh meets a scorpion man and later a divine female tavern keeper who tries to dissuade him from continuing his search.

But Gilgamesh is arrogant and determined. Uta-napishtim explains to Gilgamesh that his quest is in vain, as humans were created to be mortal. But upon questioning, Uta-napishtim reveals that he was placed by the gods on this remote island after being informed that the world would be destroyed by a great flood. Building a boxlike ark in the shape of a cube, Uta-napishtim took on board his possessions, his riches, his family members, craftsmen, and creatures of the earth.