TABLE OF CONTENTS    

Part I: El and Baal, the Shepherd and the Hunter

9. The Gilgamesh-epos

In this epos Gilgamesh is king & builder of the wall of Uruk. Enkidu a man of nature.

At the beginning of the epic G. is depicted as having "no rival" to balance his rough and violent behavior.

We are here able to detect remnants of the old myth of the primeval twins: a) The man of nature = the shepherd and b) the first founder of a city = the bringer of civilization, often identified with the great hunter, the violent one. As the Assyrian palaces are guarded both by the great winged a) bull-men and the b) lion-men representing both the a) life-giving forces and the b) demonic, violent forces, so life is in some kind of balance when the extreme violent nature of Gilgamesh is tied in strong friendship to the unspoiled Enkidu. Enkidu is one with the cattle, "with the cattle he eats vegetation" "dressed as cattle are" with long tresses "like a woman".

The motif so common on Mesopotamian seals of a bull-man fighting a naked man with 6 great curly locks of hair cannot be proved to be Gilgamesh and Enkidu. Perhaps they are much older. But Gilgamesh and Enkidu can be proved to be a variant of the older motif the shepherd/bull-man and the great hunter.

Enkidu is closely connected to the herd: "He kept pulling out the traps laid by the hunter". "He kept helping the cattle". Enkidu is the good shepherd guarding the animals against the hunter killing the animals. He is androgynous and thereby one with the great nature. But when he meets the harlot "for six days and seven nights Enkidu poured himself into Shamhat" The result is a loosening of ecstatic strength: "Enkidu had been diminished, he could not run as before". In the episode with the harlot Enkidu loses androgynous strength and drops to the level of normal male consciousness: "Knowing his own mind (now), he would seek for a friend". Enkidu is not the noble savage, he is the primeval ecstatic.

Religion in these early days was not so much dogma as it was feeling, ecstasy and mystical experience. Gilgamesh is Lord of the underworld. In the Sumerian version we find a text celebrating the death of the "Great Wild Oxe". Each year in the month of izi-izi-gar ("Lighting the Bonfire") the Babylonian month of abu (July-August) there shall be a feast for the dead spirits. The young men and the warriors shall come out in the open and before the city gate they shall do wrestling-competitions and fist-fighting. In their translation of the epos into Danish, the translators U. & Aa.Westenholz also mention an astronomical text (8th cent. BC) where it is written about the month abu: "Its star is the Arrow (= Sirius), fire pans are lit, a torch lifted for Anunnaki. Fire comes down from heaven and competes with the sun. It is also the month of Gilgamesh. On the 9th day they shall bring the young men out from the town to wrestle"^[1].

As Gilgamesh prepares to travel to the Cedermountain to cut down ceders, Utu, the sun god gives him seven demons to accompany him. Baal is followed by his "7 servants, 8 pigs", where pig certainly is not the pink fellow we know, but a demonic animal with tusks and black mud-stained fur, shortsighted and with bad temper, and used as an offering to chthonic gods. Dumuzi is killed by seven demons rising from the underworld. The great God from Sidon, Eshmun, is in his myth pictured as a hunter and carries a name meaning "the 8th". He is followed by the 7 kabirs, himself being the 8th.

Gilgamesh going to cut down the cedars is followed by a mixed company of 7 demons and 50 young men. The attack of men and demons on the god of vegetation is a motif inherited from Catal Hüyük. This wild hunt has some death-transcending meaning, and even in Hellenistic time motifs of hunting are everywhere on the sarcophagi. This conquering-death-motif is also felt in the Sumerian version of the epos. It starts with Gilgamesh seeing people dying all over Uruk and corpses floating down the river outside. But the hope is not for eternal life, but to be lord of the underworld among the spirits and judging the dead (just like Osiris), as a prayer to Gilgamesh from 8th-7th cent. B.C. proves^[2]. Not eternal life, but "to be a light to man in the darkness has become your lot, fighting without defeat, victorious attack". Therefore the wrestling competitions are a tribute to Gilgamesh "the strong one, in battle like a devastating storm-flood, you are the one, who smashes sculls in multitudes".

The background of the Gilgamesh-figure is the faint memory of an ecstatic warrior-ideology where the ideals are: letting go of oneself, feeling the "kick of adrenaline", enjoying the ecstasy of violence, letting the fire burn.

In the Gilgamesh epos "the bull of heaven" cannot be given to Ishtar, because this would result in great hunger in Uruk. But Ishtar tells her father Anu that she has arranged a great storing up of food, so finally she gets the bull. But it is killed by Gilgamesh about whom it is said (many times) "clad only in a lion's-skin". About Enkidu it is told "Your mother a gazelle... and cattle made you familiar with all the pastures". As Gilgamesh is the great hunter is Enkidu the young calf erecting the sun's gate:

"I made a door six poles high and two poles wide", says he at the end of tablet V (SBV): "Let the Euphrates carry it to Nippur"^[3].

The divine bull, the great hunter and the bull-man as the guardian of the gate are types well known from the iconography of the Near East.

A very important motif in early religion is primeval unity dissolved into duality and reestablished. With his 7 glories Huwawa is the 7-fold light, unified vision before creation of a structured universe. His head is the terrifying Babylonian version of the head of Medusa and like this it has to be kept in a bag. The high gate erected in Nippur is fatal to poor Enkidu. He is wild nature, before the traveling of the two to the Cedar-mountain creates an ordered path for the sun to follow and a gate securing its free entrance into the universe. He knows the paths of Huwawa and Huwawa knows him from his childhood. He is the mystical creation "of silence". He is wild nature stiffened to an ordered universe by the erection of the gate of the sun and finally he dies.

The creation of order means death to both Huwawa and Enkidu, both symbols of primeval unity with wild nature.

Creation as duality (twins or two warriors) killing the naked god of primeval unity - marked by 7-fold light + sun & moon or the tree of life, is a motif often shown on the seals. G.Widengren has shown that the king is often pictured on seals with a tree of life with 7 globular lights on its 7 branches in his hand.^[4]

Frankfort, fig 52

The way of Gilgamesh is the way of the sun, he is under special protection of Shamash, he is the solar hero: "By the road of the sun" X, 135 Gilgamesh is travelling through thick darkness, until he feels the North-wind, shortly after he comes out of the tunnel to the garden "of the gods" X, 172.

The man on the picture below is the sun-hero travelling/running with the light in the course of the sun, thereby making space for the light to shine and the rain to fall in a primordial universe dominated by chaotic primordial waters. Cf. that Gilgamesh on his long journey to the Cedarmountain is digging wells, IV, 6+39+120.

Lajard, Introduction á l´etude de culte public et des mystères en Orient et en Occident, 1847, pl.XXX, no.7

Another seal shows the sun-god coming out between two mountains or sitting enthroned between two pillars of incense. These two pillars are the gate of the sun. The two helpers of the sun hero Mithras are Cautes and Cautopates. They are personifications of the two world pillars seen as pillars of incense. Mithras is the triple (triplasios) Mithras. On the third picture the divine bull is a mean to ascend to the heavenly gate (marked with wings). The high god ruling over this mysterious ascension is seen sitting with the drink of immortality in one hand. That it is the heavenly drink of life is seen from the fact that it is one with the drink being contained in the bowl of the crescent moon.

Ward, The seal cylinders of Western Asia, Publications of the Carnegie Institution, no.100 p.97, no.273 & p.90, no.255. Lajard, Introduction pl.XVIII, no.2.

Most rewarding is S.Parpola´s interpretation of the Gilgamesh Epos^[5]. We are not able to follow him in detail, but the main idea worked out by Parpola that the Epic wants to communicate some kind of secret lore discovered by Gilgamesh developing from a man with strong passions almost like a beast of prey to the perfect sage being at rest with himself and being able to attain supernatural information through his dead friend's spirit, is certainly worth consideration. The Epic can be viewed as a mystical path of spiritual growth culminating in the acquisition of esoteric knowledge. To Parpola´s opinion the epithet "perfect" accorded to Gilgamesh in Tablet I qualifies him as a Kabbalistic "Zadiq" ("a just man"). The special technique of the Kabbalistic ecstatic "the posture of Elijah" – putting one´s head between the knees – is used by G. for attaining dreams, IV 3,6.

The Mesopotamian Gilgamesh can be pictured as a one-eyed cyclops.^[6] One of the earliest examples is a seal from about 3000 B.C. The one-eyed is seen dangling with two lions and over his head a goat is chased by a lion. Porada suggests that "perhaps the rather frequent third hollow on the forehead of the hero with upright curls in cylinders of the Fara style (3000-2500 B.C.) … was meant to indicate a third eye"^[7]. Porada is cautious in her interpretation, but we think we can say for sure that the cyclopian eye = the third eye marks him out as an ecstatic.

The scene also shows a grotesque man bending a branch (the Lycourgos motif, see below the chapter on a North Syrian temple & the Nimrud-ivory) and birds of ecstasy sitting between the mighty horns of a goat housing in a pen between two big jars. The other pen is laid waste by "Lycourgos", and the poor goat thrown out.

To understand the two figures of Mesopotamian iconography mostly called Gilgamesh and Enkidu we have to go back to the beginning. Early Sumerian iconography was to a certain degree taken over from Proto-Elamite, and here we find a couple who must have been the forerunners of "Gilgamesh and Enkidu". The pictures below are seal impressions from about 2900 B.C.^[8].The first shows the fight between bull and lion. The lion shooting at the bull and the bull striking the lion on the head with a club. The second shows the bull and the lion standing upright on hind legs in a human posture, each forcing two members of the opposite species into some kind of submission. It is clear from the Susa-parallels that the bull man´s partner is a lion man and that this is the reason for his curly hair.

Leon Heuzey^[9] has drawn attention to a cult device often seen in the hands of Gilgamesh: a staff with a spike at the end to plant it in the ground and at the other end a button or small disc. See the illustrations from the art. by Heuzey:

What is the meaning of this instrument? Gilgamesh is often standing behind the throne of Ea with this staff. And it can even be doubled into two, something so important for the motif that also Gilgamesh has to be doubled. The result is a gate through which Ea can show himself in much the same way as Shamash (= the Sun) appears through the gate of the sun. The two staffs can also form a portico to a cult hut; they are, as seen by Heuzey, the two "Heracles columns" building the gate through which the sun leaves at sunset, and behind which the great Ocean has its domain. In Mesopotamian religion there was no knowledge of the Straits of Gibraltar. Here the two columns are seen as the columns which keep the upper and nether waters apart and create open space in a universe where the periphery is water. Gilgamesh is the Mesopotamian Heracles, putting up the columns that separate heaven and earth and create open space for the sun to run its course.

The gate motif from prehistoric Susa and Egypt:

On the slab below we can see the two bull men as guardians of the gate.^[10]

Orthostat relief Kargamis, about 1050-850 B.C. Archäol. Mus. Ankara.

Just as the sign  is the sign for the divided world pillar, the split world-mountain and duality, so is the sign to the right the sign of the undivided world-pillar, which through 3 stages leads to heaven. This sign is therefore regarded as a very holy symbol and often seen on the top of the earliest bull temples. But the latent duality is also marked by some kind of trinity-symbol: the two Heracles pillars with the "ladder to heaven" in the centre. The two Heracles pillars are often guarded by the son(s) of the bull god. The pictures below show lots of bulls but only calves as guardians of the two columns. All the motifs are from the Jemdet Nasr period (after Halaf, before the Old Sumerian). The pictures are from P.P.Delougaz, "Animals emerging from a Hut"^[11]. He thinks that the huts/temples are symbols of cows giving birth to calves. But the explanation of the calves emerging from the side of the huts is the above-mentioned: the calf as the guardian of the sun gate, the temple gate.

From prehistoric Mesopotamia (Tello, RA V, fig.36) comes this tablet with archaic inscription and the hunter with long hair, two feathers and the heavy kilt with chess-board pattern, the substitute for the leopard's hide. Rawhide kilts are still worn by the priest officiating in a cultic scene on the famous Hagia Triada sarcophagi.

---

^[1] Gilgamesh*Enuma Elish, 1997, pp.45f., cf. 34f.

^[2] Westenholz pp.44f., W.G.Lambert, "Gilgames in Religious, Historical and Omen Texts", in: P.Garelli (ed.), Gilgames et sa legende, 1990, p.40

^[3] ibd.

^[4] The King and the Tree of Life, UUA 1951, 4.

^[5] "The Assyrian Tree of Life", JNES 52, 1993, pp.192-5

^[6] E.Porada, "Sumerian Art in Miniature", in: The legacy of Sumer, ed. D.Schmandt-Besserat, 1976, pp. 107-18, M.Knox, "Polyphemus and his Near Eastern relations", JHSXCIX, 1979, pp.164f.

^[7] pp.115f.

^[8] Amiet, ill.55f., pl.100f.

^[9] "Le Sceau de Goudéa", RA V, 1902, pp.129ff.

^[10] About the bull man as "Atlas" P.Amiet, RA 50, 1956, pp.116f. with the picture of the bull-man, right.

^[11] JNES 27, 1968

    TABLE OF CONTENTS    

About | Contact | Privacy Policy | Site Map | Search