Somewhat more than five millennia ago, a human hand first carved a written word, and so initiated history, mankind’s recorded story. This happened in Sumer, probably in a warehouse of Uruk, perhaps the earliest human habitation to deserve the name of “city,” massed along the Euphrates River in ancient Mesopotamia—modern Warka in present-day Iraq. The written word was an invention born of necessity: how else were the Sumerians to keep their accounts straight? The novel agglomeration of human beings and their possessions into a city such as Uruk—a mind-defeating jumble of temples, dwellings, storerooms, and alleyways, an agglomeration soon to be imitated throughout the ancient world—cried out for a new way of counting shipments and recalling transactions, for a man’s memory was no longer sufficient to encompass such immensities. The human mind wearied before the task, growing resistant and uncooperative—and, at last, alarmingly error-prone—but human ingenuity proposed a damnably clever solution: enduring written symbols to replace fallible human memory.
This innovation, which would change forever the course of the human story, making possible fantastic feats of information storage and retrieval and wholly new forms of communication, both interpersonal and corporate, had been prepared for by other innovations that had preceded it over the long centuries of the Sumerians’ trial-and-error ascent to urbanization. The invention of agriculture—the discovery that one need not wait upon the bounty of nature but can organize that bounty more or less predictably through the seasonal planting of seed—had greatly lessened man’s reliance on the uncertain harvests of hunting and gathering and had made possible the first settled communities, organized around a dependable grain supply. The domestication of flocks and herds for predictable yields of eggs, milk, flesh, leather, and wool soon followed (or may even have occurred earlier). The invention of the hoe and the further invention of the plow—which probably occurred when some lazy but sly farmer thought to tie his hoe to a rope hitched to the horn of an ox, thus giving himself considerably more muscle power through the ox’s strength and enabling him to farm a far larger territory—went a long way toward creating stable farming communities throughout the Fertile Crescent, that great arch of watered land stretching north from the Tigris-Euphrates plain, turning south through the Jordan valley, and ending at the Sinai. Someone’s brilliant idea to dig trenches (and then to fashion canals and reservoirs) so that river water could run controllably from higher embankments to lower fields meant that the farmer no longer had to wait for the uncertain rains of the Middle East but could now farm fields he would once have looked on as useless. This technique, refined to exquisite perfection over many centuries, would at last make possible along the broad steppes of the Tigris-Euphrates plain the Hanging Gardens of Babylon (Babylonia being the direct successor to Sumer), that stupendous wonder of the world, a detailed description of which became the favorite party piece of ancient tourists, thus enabling them to bore their friends to death long before the invention of photography.
Then, the period just before the invention of written language saw in Sumer an explosion of technological creativity on a scale that would not be matched till the nineteenth and twentieth centuries of our era. For this period witnessed not only the sudden expansion of farming communities with their growing inventory of agricultural and pastoral innovations, but wheeled transport, sailing ships, metallurgy, and wheel-turned, oven-baked pottery—all appearing, as it were, within weeks of one another. The Sumerians were the first to hit upon the methods of construction that enable human beings to go beyond the simpler feat of providing comfortable shelter for themselves and to erect vastly impressive, even overwhelming enclosures for business and ritual: monumental stone sculpture, engraving, and inlay, the brick mold, the arch, the vault, and the dome all first came to light under the dazzling Sumerian sun. Cumulatively, this unique series of creations made possible for the first time ecumenical trading and, thence, great concentrations of people and possessions and, particularly, the gigantic storage facilities that would encourage our unknown inventor to dream up writing.
By the time the first word was incised on a small clay tablet (which would for many centuries remain the common medium of record), Sumer had risen to dominate all Mesopotamia and had strong trading links and occasionally even political suzerainty as far away as the Nile valley in northern Africa and the Indus valley in the Far East. To the ever-circling vultures, who no doubt took a dim view of civilization and its unfortunate paucity of easy victims, Sumer appeared a collection of some twenty-five city-states, remarkably uniform in culture and organization. But to the human hordes of Amorites—Semitic nomads wandering the mountains and deserts just beyond the pale of Sumer—the tiered and clustered cities, strung out along the green banks of the meandering Euphrates like a giant’s necklace of polished stone, seemed shining things, each surmounted by a wondrous temple and ziggurat dedicated to the city’s god-protector, each city noted for some specialty—all invidious reminders of what the nomads did not possess.
THE FERTILE CRESCENT IN THE THIRD MILLENNIUM
This most ancient cradle of civilization was a great arc of richly irrigated land stretching from the Persian Gulf northwest across the whole Tigris-Euphrates plain, then southwest along the Levant—Jordan River valley and ending at the Sinai. The principal Sumerian-Akkadian city-states are shown (including Babylon, which belongs to a later period). The broken line indicates the shore of the Gulf in the third millennium B.C.
What the nomads did not possess is nicely enumerated in this Sumerian description of a typical Amorite:
A tent-dweller buffeted by wind and rain, he knows not prayers,
With the weapon he makes the mountain his habitation,
Contentious to excess, he turns against the land, known not to bend the knee,
Eats uncooked meat,
Has no house in his lifetime,
Is not brought to burial when he dies.
This is almost a description of an animal: without manners or courtesy—even toward the dead—without religion or even cooking fire, the nomads were always getting themselves into bloody disputes with more “civilized” landowners. Behind the description we can detect the prejudice of imperialists throughout history, who blithely assume their superiority, moral as well as technical, over those whom they have marginalized and therefore their divine right to whatever is valuable, especially the land.
Thanks to the work of pioneering archaeologists, who have dug up many Sumerian cities during this century and painstakingly translated their abundant clay treasures, there is much we now know of Sumer, the world’s first civilization. Sumerian techniques of farming and husbandry were extraordinarily sophisticated (the Sumerians had two hundred words just for varieties of sheep); their mathematics enabled them to do square roots and cube roots and to calculate accurately the size of a field or a building and to excavate or enlarge a canal. Their medicine was practical, not magical, and their pharmacopoeias prescribed remedies for everything from battle wounds to venereal disease (called “a disease of the tun and the nu”—and though the experts tell us they cannot be sure of the meaning of these two words, the layman will have little trouble identifying them).
We even know much about Sumerian imagination. Manuals of instruction were often written in the name of a god: a manual on farming (a perennial best-seller, since copies of it have turned up everywhere in the Sumerian ruins) claims to be authored by the god Ninurta, “trustworthy farmer of Enlil”—the great god of the Sumerian pantheon. The human farmer is advised to watch carefully over his crop and to take all precautions, both human and superhuman: “After the sprout has broken through the ground” he is to scare off the flying birds, but he is also to pray to Ninkilim, goddess of field mice, so that she will keep her sharp-toothed little subjects away from the growing grain. Even the process of brewing (the Sumerians were great beer drinkers) had a sponsoring divinity, Ninkasi, a goddess born of “sparkling-fresh water,” whose name means “the lady who fills the mouth.” On this subject the Sumerians would wax poetic: Ninkasi was brewer to the gods themselves, she who “bakes with lofty shovel the sprouted barley,” who “mixes the bappir-malt with sweet aromatics,” who “pours the fragrant beer in the lahtan-vessel which is like the Tigris and Euphrates joined!”
We mustn’t take too seriously every mention of the gods in the Sumerian tablets, any more than we take seriously the pious invocation of our own God by today’s public figures. The Sumerians were practical, down-to-earth businessmen, more interested in calculating the extent of their fields and the capacity of their warehouses than they were in anything else. But this does not mean that they had no worldview beyond the steady acquisition of possessions.
The worldview of a people, though normally left unspoken in the daily business of buying and selling and counting shekels, is to be found in a culture’s stories, myths, and rituals, which, if studied aright, inevitably yield insight into the deepest concerns of a people by unveiling the invisible fears and desires inscribed on human hearts. The stories of Sumer, as resurrected from its plain clay tablets, possess a burnished splendor that cannot but affect contemporary readers, giving us flickering glimpses into the childhood of human imagination. Virtually all the tablets are damaged, leaving us with holes in every narrative. But many of the stories exist in several versions (so that the holes in one version can sometimes be filled in with passages from another) and even in different languages, allowing us to reconstruct, at least partially, a process of dynamic development that took place over many centuries. For the process of Sumerian storytelling itself we may be partly indebted to the wandering Semitic tribes, who, being illiterate, possessed the inexhaustible narrative memory of illiterate peoples and sometimes earned their keep by telling stories to the settled folk. These tales, whether from nomadic minstrels or from the oral traditions of the city-dwellers themselves, were eventually written down by Sumerian scribes, who did their best to categorize the wayward material into orderly groupings, thus creating “books”—in actuality, uniform series of tablets—of continuous narrative, episodic and sometimes intergenerational.
Sometimes too orderly. The Sumerian grouping of the narratives of their kings—the so-called King List—is completely useless to modern historians. These thumbnail sketches of each reign are arranged according to principles of symmetry and numerology to please the eye and ring satisfyingly on the ear, but without the least regard for what may in fact have occurred in Sumerian history. Some of the kings are said to rule for thousands of years, others for mere centuries; and recent studies, comparing these lists with other ancient records, have found that kings whose reigns are listed in sequence were actually contemporaries or near contemporaries, ruling neighboring Sumerian city-states.
The purposes of a modern historian would indeed have had no meaning in Sumer, for Sumerians—paradoxically, since they invented writing, the instrument that makes history possible—had no sense of history. The city-states had been founded by gods in time immemorial; and it was the gods who had given the Sumerians, “the black-headed people” (as they called themselves), all the tools and weapons and marvelous inventions that we know were the products of their own ingenuity. “Development” and “evolution”—words of such importance to us—would have meant little in the timeless culture of Sumer, where everything that was—their city, their fields, their herds, their plows—had always been.
Even their stories miss a sense of development: they begin in the middle and end in the middle. They lack the relentless necessity that we associate with storytelling, from which we demand a beginning, a middle, an end: a shape. When reading a book or watching a movie that seems to wander without direction, we ask impatiently, “Where is this going?” But all Sumerian stories are shaggy-dog stories, sounding sometimes like the patter of small children who imitate the jokes they have heard from older children without realizing that there has to be a punchline. When perusing Sumerian literature, the modern reader is often left waiting for the punchline. Despite this, the tales of ancient Sumer are full of pleasure for us, both because of their archaic strangeness and because of the occasional mirror-moments in which we are startled to glimpse something of ourselves: an image or emotion that we have in common with this people of the dim past.
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The Sumerian work that has left the greatest impress on contemporary imagination is the Epic of Gilgamesh, the story of a legendary hero who probably flourished toward the middle of the third millennium B.C. as king of Uruk, the very city where writing was likely invented. He may have been of Semitic, rather than Sumerian, stock because, at least according to one translation of the notoriously unreliable King List, Lugalbanda, Gilgamesh’s father and king before him, “was a nomad.” If so, the nomadic minstrels would have had much reason to celebrate his exploits; and Gilgamesh’s kingship would represent an early power grab by the wandering Semitic tribes, who by millennium’s end would wrest power throughout Sumer and establish their languages at the expense of Sumerian. Sumerian, a language for which no cognate tongues have been found, was replaced early in the second millennium by Akkadian (or Old Babylonian) as the lingua franca of Mesopotamia, after which Sumerian lived on only as a literary language employed by learned scribes for special documents. But the new Semitic rulers took up not only cuneiform writing but the mythology and beliefs of their Sumerian predecessors in seamless continuity, which is why we have found stories of Gilgamesh not only in Sumerian but in Akkadian and other ancient languages.
The Epic opens on a charming description of ancient Uruk, with the poet acting as tour guide to a first-time visitor:
See its wall, which is like a copper band,
Survey its battlements, which nobody else can match,
Take the threshold, which is from time immemorial,
Approach Eanna, the home of Ishtar,1
Which no future king nor any man will ever match!
Go up on the wall of Uruk and walk around!
Inspect the foundation platform and scrutinize the brickwork!
Testify that its bricks are baked bricks,
That the Seven Counselors must have laid its foundations!
One square mile is city, one square mile is orchards, one square mile is claypits, as well as the open ground of Ishtar’s temple.
Three square miles and the open ground comprise Uruk.
The poet’s pride in the splendor and extent of his city is unmistakable. Uruk is “from time immemorial,” its foundations laid by the Seven Counselors, the gods who brought the black-heads all the special skills and crafts that have made them great. True greatness belongs exclusively to this “time immemorial,” and “no future king nor any man will ever match” such primeval achievements as the Eanna, Uruk’s temple to Ishtar, goddess of love and war. Then, as if he were working from a shooting script for a movie, the poet, having given us his establishing shots of the ancient city, invites us to have a closer look at one of the wonders it contains, a secret document preserved on a slab of Sumer’s most precious material:
Look for the copper tablet-box,
Undo its bronze lock,
Open the door to its secret,
Lift out the lapis lazuli tablet, read it,
The story of that man, Gilgamesh, who went through all kinds of sufferings.
He was superior to other kings, a warrior lord of great stature,
A hero born of Uruk, a goring wild bull.
He marches at the front as leader,
He goes behind, the support of his brothers,
A strong net, the protection of his men,
The raging flood-wave, which can destroy even a stone wall.
Son of Lugalbanda, Gilgamesh, perfect in strength,
Son of the lofty cow, the wild cow Ninsun.
He is Gilgamesh, perfect in splendor,
Who opened up passes in the mountains,
Who could dig pits even in the mountainside,
Who crossed the ocean, the broad seas, as far as the sunrise.
Gilgamesh, part human, part divine (since his mother is the wild cow goddess, Ninsun), has all the attributes of a proper mythological figure—fierce as a bull, strong as a wave—but also possesses the practical skills valued by your down-to-earth Sumerian businessman: he is a terrific engineer and an incomparable navigator. And this winning combination of qualities gives us a hint that the story of Gilgamesh is the result of a long process of development and maturation. It may easily have arisen in a past so remote—long before writing, even long before agriculture—that no archaeologist can recapture it. But it has been turned and turned like pottery and elaborately decorated by successive hands, first prehistoric, then Sumerian, then Semitic.
The lines I have quoted come from an unbroken portion of Tablet I. But now I must quote from a portion of the tablet that will give a better idea of the difficulties faced by a translator—lines that also suggest that even in lordly Uruk Gilgamesh was a bit much:
In Uruk the Sheepfold he would walk about,
Show himself superior, his head held high like a wild bull.
He had no rival, at his pukku
His weapons would rise up, his comrades have to rise up.
The young men of Uruk became dejected in their private [quarters(?)].
Gilgamesh would not leave any son alone for his father.
Day and night his [behavior(?)] was overbearing.…
He is the shepherd of Uruk the Sheepfold,
He is their shepherd, yet [ ]
Powerful, superb, knowledgeable, [and expert],
Gilgamesh would not leave young girls [alone],
The daughters of warriors, the brides of young men.
“At his pukku” may mean “alert” or “erect” or it may refer to a kind of hockey game associated with fertility and played at weddings. The translator’s brackets mark places where the tablet is broken or unclear. The young men may have become dejected in their private quarters or in their private thoughts—we can’t be sure. But despite the lacunae and untranslatable words, we can be pretty sure that Gilgamesh was making a nuisance of himself, bullying the boys and bedding the girls. And this seems to be seen by the Sumerians as the necessary excrescence of greatness. Sumerian society, we know from other tablets, was intensely competitive, and Sumerians were swaggerers of the worst kind. Kings indulged in their own constant self-praise without a trace of inhibition. The citizenry often resorted to the law courts, whose “verdicts” fill many tablet collections as one of the most pervasive literary forms. Another pervasive form, which the Sumerians found especially entertaining, is the “contest,” a fanciful public disputation between two rivals—between, for instance, two schoolboys over who is the better student (a disputation replete with such appellations as “dolt,” “numbskull,” “illiterate,” and “windbag”); between two suitors for the hand of a goddess; even between copper and silver, summer and winter. This was a society full of contentiousness and aggression, in which the “good” man—the ideal—was imagined as ambitious in the extreme, animated by a drive for worldly prestige, victory, success, with scant regard to what we would think of as ethical norms. This was also a society that despised poverty.
At any rate, the people of Uruk, for all their pride in Gilgamesh, need some relief, and so they complain bitterly to their gods, especially to “great Aruru,” the universal mother:
“Did [Aruru (?)] create such a rampant wild bull?
Is there no rival? …
You, Aruru, you created [mankind (?)]!
Now create someone for him, to match (?) the ardor (?) of his energies!
Let them be regular rivals, and let Uruk be allowed peace!”
So Aruru creates “inside herself the word of Anu,” the father god. Then, washing her hands, she pinches “off a piece of clay, cast[s] it out in open country,” where it becomes “Enkidu, the warrior, offspring of silence, and sky-bolt of Ninurta”:
His whole body was shaggy with hair, he was furnished with tresses like a woman,
His locks of hair grew luxuriant like grain.
He knew neither people nor country; he was dressed as cattle are.
With gazelles he eats vegetation,
With cattle he quenches his thirst at the watering place.
With wild beasts he satisfies his need for water.
Enkidu, the ultimate “natural man,” at one with animals rather than humans, foils the strategies of the local hunters, one of whom brings the hunters’ complaints to Gilgamesh:
“I am too frightened to approach him.
He kept filling in the pits that I dug [ ],
He kept pulling out the traps that I laid.
He kept helping cattle, wild beasts of open country, to escape my grasp.”
Gilgamesh’s solution is remarkable:
“Go, hunter, lead forth the harlot Shamhat,
And when he approaches the cattle at the watering place,
She must take off her clothes, reveal her attractions.
He will see her and go close to her.
Then his cattle, who have grown up in open country with him, will become alien to him.”
The hunter does as Gilgamesh bids, bringing Shamhat to the watering place; and when Enkidu, “the murderous youth from the depths of open country,” arrives to drink with the wild beasts:
Shamhat loosened her undergarments, opened her legs and he took in her attractions.
She did not pull away. She took wind of him,
Spread open her garments, and he lay upon her.
She did for him, the primitive man, as women do.
His love-making he lavished upon her.
For six days and seven nights Enkidu was aroused and poured himself into Shamhat.
When he was sated with her charms,
He set his face towards the open country of his cattle.
The gazelles saw Enkidu and scattered,
The cattle of open country kept away from his body.
For Enkidu had become smooth; his body was too clean.
His legs, which used to keep pace with his cattle, were at a standstill.
Enkidu had been diminished, he could not run as before.
Yet he had acquired judgment (?), had become wiser.
Dumbfounded by this transformation, Enkidu returns to the harlot to find out what this is all about. She tells him that he has “become like a god” and urges that his proper place is now in Uruk,
“Where Gilgamesh is perfect in strength,
And is like a wild bull, more powerful than (any of) the people.”
She spoke to him, and her speech was acceptable.
Knowing his own mind (now),2 he would seek for a friend.
Of course, Enkidu’s way of “seek[ing] for a friend” is unusual:
“Let me challenge him, and [ ]
(By saying:) ‘In Uruk I shall be the strongest!’
I shall go in and alter destiny: One who was born in open country has [superior (?)] strength!”
But Gilgamesh has already been alerted to the coming of Enkidu by symbolic dreams, which have been interpreted for him by his mother, Ninsun:
“… a strong partner shall come to you, one who can save the life of a friend,
He will be the most powerful in strength of arms in the land.
His strength will be as great as that of a sky-bolt of Anu.
You will love him as a wife, you will dote upon him.
[And he will always] keep you safe (?).”
Shamhat knows of Gilgamesh’s dreams and their interpretation and relates these to Enkidu, concluding:
“[The dreams mean that you will lo]ve one another.”
Tablet II, on which the story continues, is full of gaps, but it is clear that Enkidu, on arriving in Uruk, does challenge Gilgamesh and “they grappled,”
Wrestled in the street, in the public square.
Doorframes shook, walls quaked.
Then, upon the intervention of Ninsun, a weeping Gilgamesh makes a speech that is, given the present state of the text, largely incomprehensible. But
Enkidu stood, listened to him speaking,
Pondered, and then sat down, began to cry.
His eyes grew dim with tears.
His arms slackened, his strength [( )]
(Then) they grasped one another,
Embraced and held (?) hands.
The mystery of this long-departed people is made even more mysterious by the lacunae in this text. But a couple of things are clear: as in all warrior societies of the Bronze and Iron Ages, the most valued human relationships are between males (and, whether or not such relationships are actively sexual, they must surely be deemed, precisely, homosexual—that is, of the same sex); for all this, congress with a woman is, somehow, civilizing—that is, anti-animalizing, rendering a man ready for the life of the city—for it is because of his encounter with Shamhat that Enkidu is alienated from nature and made ready for entry into Uruk.3 As for Shamhat’s harlotry, she is obviously not a common harlot: she is given far too much prestige, being party to the king’s dreams and his most intimate conversations with his mother. Most likely, she is one of the company of holy harlots, sacred prostitutes consecrated to the worship of one of the gods and ritually (and regularly) ravished by a high priest within the temple pre Likewise, the repeated epithets used to describe Enkidu—“word of Anu,” “sky-bolt of Ninurta,” “axe”—appear to be, as the translator Stephanie Dalley puts it delicately, “puns on terms for cult personnel of uncertain sexual affinities who were found particularly in Uruk, associated with Ishtar’s cult”—in other words, sacred male prostitutes.
Gilgamesh and Enkidu, now fast friends, more closely bound than husband and wife, having vowed to defend each other even to death, set out to slay the monster Humbaba, an almost unimaginably terrifying creature whose face looks like coiled intestines and
… whose shout is the flood-weapon, whose utterance is Fire, whose breath is Death,
Can hear for a distance of sixty leagues through (?) the … of the forest, so who can penetrate his forest?
But, coos the mighty warrior Gilgamesh,
“Hold my hand, my friend, let us set off!
Your heart shall soon burn (?) for conflict; forget death and [think only of] life (?).
Man is strong, prepared to fight, responsible.
He who goes in front (and) guards his (friend’s) body, shall keep the comrade safe.
They shall have established fame for their [future (?)].”
With Enkidu’s help, Gilgamesh slays the monster—very dirty work—after which the king cleans himself up and attires himself in robes, “manly sash,” and crown. Looking good, he attracts the attention of Ishtar, goddess of love and war:
“Come to me, Gilgamesh, and be my lover!
Bestow on me the gift of your fruit!
You shall be my husband, and I can be your wife.”
But Gilgamesh knows that the goddess has had many mates, all of whom she eventually disposed of. “Which of your lovers lasted forever?” asks Gilgamesh.
“Which of your masterful paramours went to heaven?
Come, let me [describe (?)] your lovers to you!”
Gilgamesh then catalogues Ishtar’s many companions and their sad fate at her hands (she is, after all, the goddess of love and war), starting with the shepherd Dumuzi, with whom Gilgamesh feels a close identification:
“For Dumuzi the lover of your youth
You decreed that he should keep weeping year after year.”
Dumuzi, Sumerian mythology’s great dying god—like Osiris in Egypt, Adonis in Greece, and many others—was particularly beloved of ordinary people, who interpreted the dramatic cycle of the seasons as his annual death (his “weeping year after year”) and resurrection. So moved were they by his fate that they would sit and weep for him during the rains of winter. It may well be that Dumuzi’s story is a faint memory of a time when Sumer’s kings, imagined as consorts of a goddess, were periodically sacrificed to ensure fertility, as were kings in other ancient societies.
Gilgamesh ends his catalogue of Ishtar’s lovers with a story similar to Dumuzi’s, that of another force of fertility, the garden god Ishullanu, whose inventions were responsible for much of the beauty of Sumer’s cities:
“You loved Ishullanu, your father’s gardener,
Who was always bringing you baskets of dates.
They brightened your table every day;
You lifted your eyes to him and went to him
‘My own Ishullanu, let us enjoy your strength,
So put out your hand, touch our vulva!’
But Ishullanu said to you,
‘Me? What do you want of me?
Did my mother not bake for me, and did I not eat?
What I eat (with you) would be loaves of dishonor and disgrace,
Rushes would be my only covering against the cold.’
You listened as he said this,
You hit him, turned him into a frog (?),
Left him to stay amid the fruits of his labors.
But the pole (?) goes up no more, [his bucket] goes down no more.4
And how about me? You will love me and then [treat me] just like them!”
Ishtar, furious at Gilgamesh, who has “spelled out to me my dishonor, my dishonor and my disgrace,” ascends to heaven and convinces the father god to send down the Bull of Heaven to destroy Gilgamesh. But together Gilgamesh and Enkidu overcome the unconquerable Bull and butcher it. For this impiety, one of the friends must die, and Enkidu is chosen by the Council of Heaven. Why Enkidu? The text of the tablets, so often repetitive and meandering (much more so than is apparent from my terse summaries), turns uncharacteristically compact and understated. But there may be a suggestion that Gilgamesh deflects the malign attention of the gods because he has a patronal god all his own—his dead father Lugalbanda, whose portable effigy he anoints while dedicating to him the spoils of the Bull’s enormous horns, now splendidly decorated with “thirty minas of lapis lazuli” and sheathed with “two minas of gold.” This homage to an ancestor or other household god, whose presence was localized in a small image, was a ritual of many ancient societies.
At Enkidu’s death, Gilgamesh sets up a wailing hymn of mourning, more tender than we might think this earliest civilization capable of, asking for tears from all the orders of human beings that make up the city of Uruk, from the wild beasts and even from the trees, thus exalting Enkidu to the status (and even, to some extent, to the identity) of the pathetic, beloved Dumuzi. Gilgamesh ends with the same gesture Achilles will make many centuries later in the Iliad on the death of his companion-in-arms Patroclus:
“Turn to me, you! You aren’t listening to me!
But he cannot lift his head.
I touch his heart, but it does not beat at all.”
Gilgamesh weeps over the body of Enkidu for six days and seven nights, allowing him to be buried only after “a worm fell out of his nose.”
Enkidu, like all who die, has gone down to Kur, a dark, dreary, pleasureless place on the far side of a river where a ferryman—just like Charon in the later Greek myth of Hades—transports the naked and enervated souls of the dead to their final haunt, where “vermin eat [them] like an old blanket,” where one “sits in a crevice full of dust.” (The picture is not unlike the one that medieval artists will paint of hell.) Gilgamesh resolves to avoid the common human fate by obtaining the secret of immortality. But only one mortal man has been granted immortality: Ut-napishtim. This figure of Sumerian mythology, the model for Noah in the later biblical narrative, was found virtuous enough to be given the divine guidance to save his family and a remnant of all living things by building an ark in the primordial time of the universal flood, when the gods decided to destroy the human race.
After horrifying adventures among the Scorpion-men, “whose aura is frightful and whose glance is death,” great Gilgamesh succeeds in reaching an alewife who can give him directions to the paradise of Dilmun, where “Ut-napishtim and his woman are as gods,” living forever. But in one especially well-preserved version, the alewife has her own sage advice to give:
“Gilgamesh, where do you roam?
You will not find the eternal life you seek.
When the gods created mankind
They appointed death for mankind,
Kept eternal life in their own hands.
So, Gilgamesh, let your stomach be full,
Day and night enjoy yourself in every way,
Every day arrange for pleasures.
Day and night, dance and play,
Wear fresh clothes.
Keep your head washed, bathe in water,
Appreciate the child who holds your hand,
Let your wife enjoy herself in your lap.”
After battling “the things of stone,” Gilgamesh finally reaches Ut-napishtim “the far-distant”; and this Sumerian Noah has even blunter advice:
“[Why (?)] have you exerted yourself? What have you achieved (?)?
You have made yourself weary for lack of sleep,
You only fill your flesh with grief,
You only bring the distant days (of reckoning) closer.
Mankind’s fame is cut down like reeds in a reed-bed.
A fine young man, a fine girl,
[ ] of Death.
Nobody sees Death,
Nobody sees the face of Death,
Nobody hears the voice of Death.
Savage Death just cuts mankind down.
Sometimes we build a house, sometimes we make a nest,
But then brothers divide it upon inheritance.
Sometimes there is hostility [in the land],
But then the river rises and brings flood-water.
Dragonflies drift on the river,
Their faces look upon the face of the Sun,
(But then) suddenly there is nothing.
The sleeping (?) and the dead are just like each other,
Death’s picture cannot be drawn.…
The Anunnaki, the great gods, assembled; …
They appointed death and life.
They did not mark out days for death,
But they did so for life.”
On these sober words, which appear to constitute the main lesson of the Epic, we take our leave of Gilgamesh, but not without drawing some conclusions from what we have read. Though the casual reader may easily identify certain Sumerian qualities—such as love of invention and admiration of those who are unabashedly competitive—as qualities that are valued in our own society, one misses much if one fails to notice how differently these qualities play in the ancient context. Inventions are the property of the gods—as are human beings, who have been created to be servants of the gods and to offer them assuaging sacrifices. The aggression of the great warrior lords, like Gilgamesh, and the strong bonds of solidarity between warriors are supremely necessary to the city-states of Sumer, which, though they belong to a single, unified culture, war with one another constantly, as will the later city-states of Greece, always jockeying for some advantage one over the other. But there can be no permanent victory, for either city or warrior. Even the gods are often at odds with one another; and Gilgamesh survives despite the wishes of outraged Ishtar probably because he has the protection of two gods, the wise wild cow who is his mother and the now-deified Lugalbanda, his father. But who can say when a human being will trespass against one of the many gods and incur doom? And even if one should escape such a fate, Death, the end of happiness, is inescapable.
There are faint echoes in the Epic of Gilgamesh of notes that will sound more forcefully and coherently in the Epic of Israel, the early books of the Hebrew Bible, which, though they will be written down in a later time and in a somewhat different place, grow out of this time and place. The strongest of these is the theme of the primordial flood and the ark, which saves from destruction the just remnant of the living.5 Ut-napishtim and his wife, who have become “as gods” in the garden paradise of Dilmun, may also remind us of Adam and Eve, whose desire to become “as gods” precipitates their exile from a garden called “Eden”—a name which may itself be a borrowing from the Sumerian. And Shamhat’s reassurance to Enkidu that his humanization has made him more “like a god” reminds us of the assertion in the Book of Genesis that humans are created, unlike animals, “in the image of God.” And Enkidu was created, like the creation in Genesis, by the word of the father god and, like Adam, was molded from clay.
Among the fainter echoes of our Bible that we may discern in these most ancient records is the language of love that Ishtar employs, not unlike the language of the Song of Songs. The “Council of Heaven” reminds us of many biblical phrases in which God seems to take counsel with other divine beings or with angels and in which heaven is envisioned as a royal court. The descriptions of the realm of the dead are reminiscent not only of the Greek Hades but of the Jewish Sheol. The waters of the flood are described as rising up from the primordial Chaos that surrounds the Heaven-Earth, the universe laid out by the gods, in a manner very like the Chaos that surrounds God’s emerging creation at the outset of Genesis. And the worldly-wise advice of Ut-napishtim and the alewife must prompt us to think of the Bible’s Wisdom books, especially Ecclesiastes with its cynical, world-weary tone.
One theme that belongs to Gilgamesh but is nowhere to be found among the books of the Bible is fertility—or, rather, its timbre is so different as to make it unrecognizable. The temple of Ishtar, awesomely dominating the heights of Uruk, scene of sacred sexual rites involving orders of prostitutes both male and female, harks back to a world even older than Uruk, a world in which human copulation was seen as the localized expression of the cosmic Heaven-Earth, the great fertility machine created by the gods, who were themselves the archetypal—and highly sexed—engenderers of all that is.
We have looked on Uruk, this city of baked brick rising from the banks of the Euphrates in the intense heat of the Mesopotamian sun, we have imagined its society and listened to some of the many-told tales that were the staple of its entertainment. Now let’s delve into the deepest level of the Sumerian psyche—to the ultimate beliefs that held this society together, to the spiritual matrix that created the Sumerian worldview. In order to delve deeper we must, paradoxically, climb higher. For we must ascend the lofty stair and enter the great temple overlooking the heights of another Sumerian city—the Temple of the Moon, acropolis of the city of Ur, ancient imperial capital of Sumer. As we make our way to the center of mystery, we need to ask some basic questions about this place.
Why were all early temples and sacred places built at the highest point available to the builders? Because this is the place nearest the sky. And why is the most sacred space nearest the sky? Because the sky is the divine opposite of life on earth, home of all that is eternal in contrast to the mortal life of earth. When primitive man looked up at the heavens, he saw a vast cavalcade of divine figures regularly passing before his eyes—the cosmic drama, breathtaking in its eternal order and predictability. Here are the eternal prototypes and models for mortal life; but a great gulf yawns between the two spheres, for the life of the heavens, the life of the gods, is immortal and everlasting, while life in the earthly sphere is mortal, ending in death. For the earliest human beings—the first creatures to look upon the drama of the heavens with comprehension—these insights required little reasoning and no discussion; they were immediate and obvious, self-evident truths. This meditation on the heavens was the aboriginal religious experience. In the words of the preeminent modern scholar of religion Mircea Eliade: “The phrase ‘contemplating the vault of heaven’ really means something when it is applied to primitive man, receptive to the miracles of every day to an extent we find it hard to imagine. Such contemplation is the same as a revelation. The sky shows itself as it really is: infinite, transcendent. The vault of heaven is, more than anything else, ‘something quite apart’ from the tiny thing that is man and his span of life. The symbolism of its transcendence derives from the simple realization of its infinite height. ‘Most high’ becomes quite naturally an attribute of the divinity. The regions above man’s reach, the starry places, are invested with the divine majesty of the transcendent, of absolute reality, of everlastingness. Such places are the dwellings of the gods; certain privileged people [like Lugalbanda] go there as a result of rites effecting their ascension into heaven.… The ‘high’ is something inaccessible to man as such; it belongs by right to superhuman powers and beings; when a man ceremonially ascends the steps of a sanctuary, or the ritual ladder leading to the sky, he ceases to be a man.”
As we continue to climb to the sanctuary, the primeval worldview of the people who built the steps we tread becomes ever more evident. The cosmology of the Sumerians was based on perceptions of societies, now irretrievably ancient, that had preceded them; and, with a few adjustments, it would be received as truth by almost all societies that followed the Sumerians, right down to the threshold of modern times. Earth was a flat circle, attached at its perimeter to the dome of Heaven. Between Earth and Heaven was the element of Air, in which, high up, hung the astral bodies passing before the eyes of Earth-dwellers, pictorial projections of the drama of Heaven, which was also of course predictive of life on Earth, itself a kind of weak imitation of the heavenly drama. Just beneath the circle of Earth was the realm of Death—Hades, Sheol, the shadowy hell to which the dead were consigned—a sort of basement of the Sea of Chaos that surrounded the Earth-Heaven on all sides, whence rain fell and flood rose. Each of these great elements was a god: Heaven was father; Earth was mother; Air, which contained the eternal but ever-revolving pictures of the cosmic drama and clues (for the insightful interpreter) to our life on Earth, was mediator between Heaven and Earth and therefore the most important god in the Sumerian pantheon; and the Sea was necessarily an unpredictable and troubling ally, to be treated with caution.
But let us approach the sacred precincts of the Moon, the apparition in the night sky that, more than any other, fascinated ancient peoples. Even today, a policeman in any city on earth will tell you that crime increases under the full moon and that “lunatics”—those who are made demented by the moon (luna in Latin)—are then much more active and troublesome. Midwives and veterinarians are convinced that the full moon induces labor, and, even in the most secular of cities, hospital labor rooms are as overwhelmed with females toiling to bring their young to birth on the night of a full moon as are barns in rural hamlets. Nor can anyone deny the awesome power of attraction that the moon exercises over the tides of ocean and sea, as the great body in the night sky beams its ethereal light on the roiling waters.
We climb the last steps to the entrance, passing sculptured serpents with glowing eyes of lapis lazuli. We pass the pillared facade of the vestibule and enter the inner courtyard, where we can see dimly, through a series of archways, the distant image of the Moon god, flickering in the lights of hundreds of votive flames. The walls of the courtyard are decorated with cones of red, black, and tan, which create precise geometric patterns—triangles, lozenges, zigzags, and spirals. At last we enter the sanctuary of Nanna-Sin, Moon god of the Sumerians, whose impassive statue now looms above us, rigid and enormous-eyed, its polychrome pupils emptily burning. Behind the statue a monumental moon is frescoed on the wall, surrounded by a slithering snake. Within the orb of the moon a gigantic black spider spreads its spindly legs. As our nostrils take in the pungent clouds of incense, our ears detect a hissing sound: around the feet of Nanna-Sin, pythons, brightly marked with black and orange lozenge patterns, coil and uncoil their scaly bodies in slow motion. We are distracted from Sin’s unyielding visage by a buzz of movement just in front of us, where on a modest waist-high altar of baked brick, surrounded by a swarm of flies, the largest python is devouring the fetus of a donkey, whose blood runs down in rivulets along neatly scooped-out gutters to collection bowls at the altar’s base. Involuntarily, we take a step backward, as the smell of warm blood and entrails combines with the suffocating incense. Gasping for air, we retreat to the courtyard.
But tonight is the night of the full moon; and, as darkness quickly falls and the moon rises in the heavens, we hear the sounds of hundreds of priestesses, chanting dully and playing primitive pipes and drums. Dressed in elaborate ceremonial garb, they gather solemnly around the terrace on which the temple is built, looking upward to the stepped pyramid beyond the temple, which rises almost in defiance of geometry, almost (it seems) to the sky itself. At the highest platform of this ziggurat (for so the stepped pyramid is called) is a small but glowing altar of lapis lazuli, carved fantastically with snakes and giant spiders, to which an adolescent boy has been bound on his back. He is naked, though his flesh has been decorated in patterns of lozenges and zigzags to resemble the cobra. Priestesses of the highest order, also naked except for their extraordinary rings and spiral bracelets, are massaging the boy with gentle foreplay. As the moonlight illuminates his swelling member, the high priestess appears, as if from nowhere, dressed in a silver garment, which she sheds. Now naked, except for the myriad pearls that decorate her body and the painted spirals that adorn her breasts, she mounts the boy with the assistance of her sisters, who shriek their encouragement in a frenzy that only grows higher as the high priestess rides the boy, at first with rhythmic dignity, then with increasing agitation till her pearls tremble in the moonlight like so many minuscule planets, and the lozenges and spirals glisten, and both bodies, writhing in sweat, appear to be not so much earthly bodies as inhuman forces of the cosmos. All the priestesses, the lowest orders still on the terrace at the ziggurat’s base, the higher orders arranged in ascending importance on the lofty steps of the ziggurat itself, are growing wild and ecstatic. Ripping open their robes and pawing themselves, they bay upward to the event on the ziggurat’s height and to the moon itself.
At such a moment, unnoticed visitors from another time and place might well grow lightheaded and faint. Let us suppose that by the time we revive, we are alone on a terrace illuminated by the ghostly light of the full moon. We look up at the ziggurat, surmounted by its empty altar of vivid blue, and wonder if we have imagined it all.
What I have just attempted is a reconstruction which any scholar could fault in one detail or another. The Sumerian temples and ziggurats, exposed to the wear of millennia, are in far worse repair than the tablets; but taking an extant bit of one sacred precinct and combining it with an extant bit of another, I think I have described fairly accurately a possible Temple of the Moon and its accompanying ziggurat. As for the ceremony of the full moon, we really don’t know much about its details, though we do know that ceremonies were conducted throughout Sumer to celebrate the phases of the moon and that they were conducted with high seriousness. We know also that the Moon cult was centered on Ur, Sumer’s usual capital (though the capital moved around depending on which city was dominant at a particular time), and we know that sacred couplings (or “marriages”) were a staple of Sumerian ritual, that there were sacred priest-prostitutes both male and female, and that the en (or high priest) of a temple and the en’s retinue were always the sex opposite to the sex of the god worshiped there. Nanna-Sin, the Sumerian Moon god, was male, so his temple was staffed by priestesses. At Uruk, where Ishtar, the fickle goddess of love, was especially worshiped, her temple was staffed by male priests, and the king himself (as stand-in for Dumuzi) had congress with a sacred female prostitute or priestess (as stand-in for Ishtar) every New Year to ensure the fertility of the kingdom during the planting, growing, and harvest seasons. To this ceremony all the officials of the city bore witness in serried ranks. Whether the Mysteries of the Moon were public (open to the whole population of the city-state) or semiprivate (as I have described) or carried out in extreme privacy, we cannot say. But there is no reason to think that the Sumerians, who liked to picture the water god Enki rampant, supporting an enormous erection while ejaculating the Tigris, were shy about sexual matters; and it may well be that the rite I have described was far more orgiastic and involved multiple couplings and a large cast of both sexes. What I would really like to know more about is the ravished prostitute: was he/she bred to this fate or taken as a battle hostage? After the event was he/she made a permanent part of the temple priesthood or sacrificed like an animal—as the king of Uruk himself may have been, at least in earliest times, in liturgical imitation of the vegetation god Dumuzi? We just don’t know; but we do know that human sacrifice was not beyond the Sumerians, for archaeologists have dug up the burial chambers of dead kings who were entombed with all their family, household, and retinue.
If we could go backward in time to ancient Sumer, like characters in a Steven Spielberg film, we would find this culture attractive and even titillating, but then alienating and even repulsive, and finally frightening and even dangerous. Human life, seen as a pale reenactment of the life of the eternal heavens, was ruled by a fate beyond the pitifully limited powers of human beings. The gods decided. The figures in the heavens, if interpreted aright by those who had access to secret priestly knowledge and whom the society supported in leisure, could give some indication of what would happen next in earthly affairs. But one’s fate was written in the stars and could not be changed.
And no figure in the heavens was more important than the moon, that heavenly image of earthly life, which was born, waxed, waned, and died, just as we do, and then returned in new life, just as happens in the earthly realm. But I do not return, do I? This question would have had little meaning in Sumer, even though its great hero Gilgamesh tried to find an answer to the anguish that lies behind the question. There were no rounded individuals in Sumer, just temporary, earthly images of heavenly exemplars, patterns, and paradigms, which is why the two-dimensional characters of Sumerian stories display so little individuality. I do not return, of course, any more than does a stalk of grain. But fields of grain return, and so does human life. This is the reason that the sacred prostitutes, the victims of the rituals, appear so disposable, why we know so little about them or their fate. What did they matter? Their high honor was that they had been chosen to enact the heavenly drama on earth. Like the potent lovers of Ishtar, they had served their purpose.
Long before the cities of Sumer had risen above the Tigris and Euphrates, long before farming and herding had been thought of, the first earthly beings to look up at the sky with attention and intelligence had thought these thoughts. The perception of the contingent life of earth as a fleeting reflection of the eternal life of the heavens, the insight that the moon especially mirrors our earthly condition of birth, copulation, and personal death—and then regeneration of species—such thoughts express mankind’s original religious experience and form the foundation for all the world’s most ancient religions.
For some prehistoric cultures the moon was female, for others it was male, but always was it closely associated with the bodies of women, which like the moon progressed through monthly cycles; and these were cycles of fertility, like those of the earth itself, which many cultures believed was made of the same substance as the moon, was even the moon’s child.6
In order to appreciate the prehistoric worldview, we must start with the limitless sky and the overwhelming impression that its recurring drama, especially in the dreamtime of darkest night (“the nocturnal domain of the mind,” as Eliade calls it), made on primitive people. They wandered an earth sparsely populated by the human species but otherwise teeming with contingent life (and daily reminders of death and regeneration), an earth so obviously coupled with an unattainable and limitless heaven. What their minds saw as self-evidently so were correspondences: women are like the moon and both are like the earth; but women are born and die, whereas the moon lasts forever. The moon is, therefore, the eternal figure of mutability, the exemplar “out there.” Likewise, each of the other heavenly bodies—the sun, the constellations, the constant planets—provides us with some everlasting exemplar of corruptible earthly life, which has its seasons, its predictable deaths, and regenerations. High heaven is the realm of the father god, whose rain fertilizes like sperm. But whereas heaven is the realm of the eternal, earth is the realm of death, the realm not of exemplars but of mortal examples. The seed must die if the wheat is to grow, just as all living things grow out of corruption, just as all future life must begin with the sacrifice of present life, and all earthly life must end in death.
We may consider naive the absolute confidence of primitive peoples in the rightness of their interpretations of reality. But we should not forget that their sense of correspondence is founded on metaphor (as in a poetic phrase like “the vault of heaven”) and that metaphor is the basis of all language and thought, as it is of all religion. Language almost certainly began as a metaphorical enterprise—probably in the human attempt to mimic certain sounds, so that, for instance, the sounds “ma-ma,” a form of which all languages use for “mother,” began as an imitation of the sucking sound a baby makes at the breast. Deep within each of us, the need for correspondence remains—which is au fond the need to perceive ourselves as belonging to the cosmos. This is why something inside us responds spontaneously to metaphor, the heart of all poetry and, finally, of all language and all meaning. When we hear unexpectedly such a phrase as “The silver apples of the moon, the golden apples of the sun” or “My love is like a red, red rose,” we experience a distinctively human thrill, the thrill of hearing language at its most concentrated.
Perhaps the sky no longer seems, to most of us, a revolving picture of the gods; perhaps it is not, except to those who cast horoscopes, exemplary or predictive of life on earth. But it is still our principal metaphor for limitlessness and transcendence. In a fundamental, ineradicable way, we still see with the eyes of our earliest ancestors and our hearts still quicken to the same things theirs did.
1 The great goddess of Uruk is named Ishtar in Akkadian (or Old Babylonian), the Semitic language of the text on which this translation is based, but in earlier records—in the Sumerian language—she is called Innana. This change in the names of the gods from Sumerian to Akkadian is not unlike the change that occurs in the transition from the Greek pantheon to the Roman: from Zeus to Jupiter, from Aphrodite to Venus. Throughout this chapter the gods are invoked by their Akkadian names.
2 In addition to brackets, the translator uses parentheses to indicate where she is making the implicit explicit or engaging in speculative reconstruction.
3 This civilizing, which only contact with a woman can accomplish, has much in common with the civilizing, brilliantly limned by Leslie Fiedler in Love and Death in the American Novel, in which he discerns mythological dimensions in such characters as Aunt Sally in Huckleberry Finn, one of the many “civilizing” women of American literature whom all full-blooded males must escape as they head off for male bonding in the wilderness.
4 Like all early peoples, the Sumerians delighted in puns and double entendre. This reference to the shadoof technique of irrigation is also a reference to sex.
5 The discovery of this earlier Sumerian “Noah” in the first attempts to translate cuneiform tablets toward the end of the nineteenth century raised as much anxiety as Darwin did among Victorians, who had assumed that everything in the Bible was without antecedent because it was the “Word of God.”
6 The theory proposed by Marija Gimbutas and other feminist archaeologists that the Great Mother was the original god of mankind is almost certainly wrong. Heaven and its spectacles were the first objects of devotion and deification. The Earth goddess, though of tremendous importance and always the complement of Heaven, probably came to special prominence with the invention of agriculture.