VI. LETTERS AND LITERATURE
Cuneiform—Its decipherment—Language—Literature—The epic of Gilgamesh
Did this life of venery, piety and trade receive any ennobling enshrinement in literary or artistic form? It is possible; we cannot judge a civilization from such fragments as the ocean of time has thrown up from the wreckage of Babylon. These fragments are chiefly liturgical, magical and commercial. Whether through accident or through cultural poverty, Babylonia, like Assyria and Persia, has left us a very middling heritage of literature as compared with Egypt and Palestine; its gifts were in commerce and law.
Nevertheless, scribes were as numerous in cosmopolitan Babylon as in Memphis or Thebes. The art of writing was still young enough to give its master a high rank in society; it was the open sesame to governmental and sacerdotal office; its possessor never failed to mention the distinction in narrating his deeds, and usually he engraved a notice of it on his cylinder seal,133 precisely as Christian scholars and gentlemen once listed their academic degrees on their cards. The Babylonians wrote in cuneiform upon tablets of damp clay, with a stylus or pencil cut at the end into a triangular prism or wedge; when the tablets were filled they dried and baked them into strange but durable manuscripts of brick. If the thing written was a letter it was dusted with powder and then wrapped in a clay envelope stamped with the sender’s cylinder seal. Tablets in jars classified and arranged on shelves filled numerous libraries in the temples and palaces of Babylonia. These Babylonian libraries are lost; but one of the greatest of them, that of Borsippa, was copied and preserved in the library of Ashurbanipal, whose 30,000 tablets are the main source of our knowledge of Babylonian life.
The decipherment of Babylonian baffled students for centuries; their final success is an honorable chapter in the history of scholarship. In 1802 Georg Grotefend, professor of Greek at the University of Göttingen, told the Göttingen Academy how for years he had puzzled over certain cuneiform inscriptions from ancient Persia; how at last he had identified eight of the forty-two characters used, and had made out the names of three kings in the inscriptions. There, for the most part, the matter rested until 1835, when Henry Rawlinson, a British diplomatic officer stationed in Persia, quite unaware of Grotefend’s work, likewise worked out the names of Hystaspes, Darius and Xerxes in an inscription couched in Old Persian, a cuneiform derivative of Babylonian script; and through these names he finally deciphered the entire document. This, however, was not Babylonian; Rawlinson had still to find, like Champollion, a Rosetta Stone—in this case some inscription bearing the same text in old Persian and Babylonian. He found it three hundred feet high on an almost inaccessible rock at Behistun, in the mountains of Media, where Darius I had caused his carvers to engrave a record of his wars and victories in three languages—old Persian, Assyrian, and Babylonian. Day after day Rawlinson risked himself on these rocks, often suspending himself by a rope, copying every character carefully, even making plastic impressions of all the engraved surfaces. After twelve years of work he succeeded in translating both the Babylonian and the Assyrian texts (1847). To test these and similar findings, the Royal Asiatic Society sent an unpublished cuneiform document to four Assyriologists, and asked them—working without contact or communication with one another—to make independent translations. The four reports were found to be in almost complete agreement. Through these unheralded campaigns of scholarship the perspective of history was enriched with a new civilization.134
The Babylonian language was a Semitic development of the old tongues of Sumeria and Akkad. It was written in characters originally Sumerian, but the vocabulary diverged in time (like French from Latin) into a language so different from Sumerian that the Babylonians had to compose dictionaries and grammars to transmit the old “classic” and sacerdotal tongue of Sumeria to young scholars and priests. Almost a fourth of the tablets found in the royal library at Nineveh is devoted to dictionaries and grammars of the Sumerian, Babylonian and Assyrian languages. According to tradition, such dictionaries had been made as far back as Sargon of Akkad—so old is scholarship. In Babylonian, as in Sumerian, the characters represented not letters but syllables; Babylon never achieved an alphabet of its own, but remained content with a “syllabary” of some three hundred signs. The memorizing of these syllabic symbols formed, with mathematics and religious instruction, the curriculum of the temple schools in which the priests imparted to the young as much as it was expedient for them to know. One excavation unearthed an ancient classroom in which the clay tablets of boys and girls who had copied virtuous maxims upon them some two thousand years before Christ still lay on the floor, as if some almost welcome disaster had suddenly interrupted the lesson.135
The Babylonians, like the Phoenicians, looked upon letters as a device for facilitating business; they did not spend much of their clay upon literature. We find animal fables in verse—one generation of an endless dynasty; hymns in strict meter, sharply divided lines and elaborate stanzas;136very little surviving secular verse; religious rituals presaging, but never becoming, drama; and tons of historiography. Official chroniclers recorded the piety and conquests of the kings, the vicissitudes of each temple, and the important events in the career of each city. Berosus, the most famous of Babylonian historians (ca. 280 B.C.) narrated with confidence full details concerning the creation of the world and the early history of man: the first king of Babylonia had been chosen by a god, and had reigned 36,000 years; from the beginning of the world to the great Flood, said Berosus, with praiseworthy exactitude and comparative moderation, there had elapsed 691,200 years.137
Twelve broken tablets found in Ashurbanipal’s library, and now in the British Museum, form the most fascinating relic of Mesopotamian literature—the Epic of Gilgamesh. Like the Iliad it is an accretion of loosely connected stories, some of which go back to Sumeria 3000 B.C.; part of it is the Babylonian account of the Flood. Gilgamesh was a legendary ruler of Uruk or Erech, a descendant of the Shamash-napishtim who had survived the Deluge, and had never died. Gilgamesh enters upon the scene as a sort of Adonis-Samson—tall, massive, heroically powerful and troublesomely handsome.
Two thirds of him is god, One third of him is man,
There’s none can match the form of his body. . . .
All things he saw, even to the ends of the earth,
He underwent all, learned to know all;
He peered through all secrets,
Through wisdom’s mantle that veileth all.
What was hidden he saw,
What was covered he undid;
Of times before the stormflood he brought report.
He went on a long far way,
Giving himself toil and distress;
Wrote then on a stone tablet the whole of his labor.138
Fathers complain to Ishtar that he leads their sons out to exhausting toil “building the walls through the day, through the night”; and husbands complain that “he leaves not a wife to her master, not a single virgin to her mother.” Ishtar begs Gilgamesh’s godmother, Aruru, to create another son equal to Gilgamesh and able to keep him busy in conflict, so that the husbands of Uruk may have peace. Aruru kneads a bit of clay, spits upon it, and moulds from it the satyr Engidu, a man with the strength of a boar, the mane of a lion, and the speed of a bird. Engidu does not care for the society of men, but turns and lives with the animals; “he browses with the gazelles, he sports with the creatures of the water, he quenches his thirst with the beasts of the field.” A hunter tries to capture him with nets and traps, but fails; and going to Gilgamesh, the hunter begs for the loan of a priestess who may snare Engidu with love. “Go, my hunter,” says Gilgamesh, “take a priestess; when the beasts come to the watering-place let her display her beauty; he will see her, and his beasts that troop around him will be scattered.”
The hunter and the priestess go forth, and find Engidu.
“There he is, woman!
Loosen thy buckle,
Unveil thy delight,
That he may take his fill of thee!
Hang not back, take up his lust!
When he sees thee, he will draw near.
Open thy robe that he rest upon thee!
Arouse in him rapture, the work of woman.
Then will he become a stranger to his wild beasts,
Who on his own steppes grew up with him.
His bosom will press against thee.”
Then the priestess loosened her buckle,
Unveiled her delight,
For him to take his fill of her.
She hung not back, she took up his lust,
She opened her robe that he rest upon her.
She aroused in him rapture, the work of woman.
His bosom pressed against her.
Engidu forgot where he was born.139
For six days but seven nights Engidu remains with the sacred woman. When he tires of pleasure he awakes to find his friends the animals gone, whereupon he swoons with sorrow. But the priestess chides him: “Thou who art superb as a god, why dost thou live among the beasts of the field? Come, I will conduct thee to Uruk, where is Gilgamesh, whose might is supreme.” Ensnared by the vanity of praise and the conceit of his strength, Engidu follows the priestess to Uruk, saying, “Lead me to the place where is Gilgamesh. I will fight with him and manifest to him my power”; whereat the gods and husbands are well pleased. But Gilgamesh overcomes him, first with strength, then with kindness; they become devoted friends; they march forth together to protect Uruk from Elam; they return glorious with exploits and victory. Gilgamesh “put aside his war-harness, he put on his white garments, he adorned himself with the royal insignia, and bound on the diadem.” Thereupon Ishtar the insatiate falls in love with him, raises her great eyes to him, and says:
“Come, Gilgamesh, be my husband, thou! Thy love, give it to me as a gift; thou shalt be my spouse, and I shall be thy wife. I shall place thee in a chariot of lapis and gold, with golden wheels and mountings of onyx; thou shalt be drawn in it by great lions, and thou shalt enter our house with the odorous incense of cedar-wood. . . . All the country by the sea shall embrace thy feet, kings shall bow down before thee, the gifts of the mountains and the plains they will bring before thee as tribute.”
Gilgamesh rejects her, and reminds her of the hard fate she has inflicted upon her varied lovers, including Tammuz, a hawk, a stallion, a gardener and a lion. “Thou lovest me now,” he tells her; “afterwards thou wilt strike me as thou didst these.” The angry Ishtar asks of the great god Anu that he create a wild urus to kill Gilgamesh. Anu refuses, and rebukes her: “Canst thou not remain quiet now that Gilgamesh has enumerated to thee thy unfaithfulness and ignominies?” She threatens that unless he grants her request she will suspend throughout the universe all the impulses of desire and love, and so destroy every living thing. Anu yields, and creates the ferocious urus; but Gilgamesh, helped by Engidu, overcomes the beast; and when Ishtar curses the hero, Engidu throws a limb of the urus into her face. Gilgamesh rejoices and is proud, but Ishtar strikes him down in the midst of his glory by afflicting Engidu with a mortal illness.
Mourning over the corpse of his friend, whom he has loved more than any woman, Gilgamesh wonders over the mystery of death. Is there no escape from that dull fatality? One man eluded it—Shamash-napishtim; he would know the secret of deathlessness. Gilgamesh resolves to seek Shamash-napishtim, even if he must cross the world to find him. The way leads through a mountain guarded by a pair of giants whose heads touch the sky and whose breasts reach down to Hades. But they let him pass, and he picks his way for twelve miles through a dark tunnel. He emerges upon the shore of a great ocean, and sees, far over the waters, the throne of Sabitu, virgin-goddess of the seas. He calls out to her to help him cross the water; “if it cannot be done, I will lay me down on the land and die.” Sabitu takes pity upon him, and allows him to cross through forty days of tempest to the Happy Island where lives Shamashnapishtim, possessor of immortal life. Gilgamesh begs of him the secret of deathlessness. Shamash-napishtim answers by telling at length the story of the Flood, and how the gods, relenting of their mad destructiveness, had made him and his wife immortal because they had preserved the human species. He offers Gilgamesh a plant whose fruit will confer renewed youth upon him who eats it; and Gilgamesh, happy, starts back on his long journey home. But on the way he stops to bathe, and while he bathes a serpent crawls by and steals the plant.*
Desolate, Gilgamesh reaches Uruk. He prays in temple after temple that Engidu may be allowed to return to life, if only to speak to him for a moment. Engidu appears, and Gilgamesh inquires of him the state of the dead. Engidu answers, “I cannot tell it thee; if I were to open the earth before thee, if I were to tell thee that which I have seen, terror would overthrow thee, thou wouldst faint away.” Gilgamesh, symbol of that brave stupidity, philosophy, persists in his quest for truth: “Terror will overthrow me, I shall faint away, but tell it to me.” Engidu describes the miseries of Hades, and on this gloomy note the fragmentary epic ends.140