Sumerian hunter-hero (engraving from a cylinder seal)
“People lived in a lawless manner like the beasts of the field. Then one day a beast emerged from out of the sea which borders Babylonia. The beast was called Oannes. The body of Oannes was that of a fish, but under his fish’s head he had another head, like a man’s head, and his feet were like a man’s too, joined to a fishy tail. He was able to speak like a man, and he talked to the people living by the sea, teaching them how to distinguish the different seeds of the earth and which fruit to pick. He taught them writing and mathematics. He showed them how to use geometry to build cities and to found temples, and also gave them a body of law—everything they would need for city life.
Every evening Oannes would stop talking and return to the sea, because he was amphibious.”
This fragment, from the ancient Near East, is an account of the founding of the first city, Uruk, in about 3000 BC in what is today southern Iraq, an area between Basra and Baghdad. It clearly means to say that the transition from tribal society to cities was brought about by superhuman intelligence.1
The later story of Gilgamesh, the fourth king of Uruk, is in part about what people felt as they adapted to city living. This strange and wonderful story was lost for thousands of years until 1872, when George Smith, a scholar at the British Museum, announced he had deciphered tablets excavated in the library of the last Assyrian king. Inscribed on lapis lazuli, it had been locked up in the temple of Venus inside a copper box . . .
Sumerian hunter-hero (engraving from a cylinder seal)
Gilgamesh was a young buck. He was taller and stronger than everyone else, lion-chested and very handsome, with beautiful curly hair. His restless energy, his voracious appetite for life, drove him to charge around hunting, clearing mountain passes, digging wells, building up the city walls—and seducing young women. And still he was restless. He wanted to compete, to wrestle, to test his strength, but there was no one to stand up to him, and this made him lonely.
Then a trapper who worked in the nearby forests noticed that something or someone was disabling his traps, filling in all his pits and helping the game to escape.
One day at a watering hole used by gazelles, this trapper saw a strange, wild, hairy man and he watched as this apelike creature drank then ambled off in the company of the gazelles.
Meanwhile Gilgamesh had been having dreams of a friend who would be coming his way with the impact of a meteor, and when the trapper told him what he had seen, he thought, This must be the one—this must be the friend I’ve been waiting for! and a plan was devised to lure the wild man to the city.
The trapper returned to the watering hole with one of the temple prostitutes. They lay in wait for a while, seeing only small creatures drinking at the watering hole, but on the third day the gazelles returned and the trapper saw that the wild man was still with them. He said to the girl, “Go to meet him and bare your breasts. You can tame the savage man.”
So the wild man saw what he had never seen before—a naked woman. She spread her cloak on the ground and they made love for seven days and seven nights. Then the wild man, who was called Enkidu, tried to leave and run with the animals again. But he found that he could no longer run fast enough and, besides, they had become afraid of him.
The woman said, “Enkidu, why do you run with the wild beasts? You are beautiful, like a god. Come with me to the city.”
She took him first to a cottage, where she washed and clothed him and taught him to eat bread and other cooked food and he drank seven jugs of beer, which made him sing with joy!2
She told him more about life in the city—the crowds, the fine clothes, the great buildings, the festivals and the music. She told him more about the tall, handsome young king, Gilgamesh, but when she told him about his ruthlessness with women, about how he took the women of the city as if by right, Enkidu resolved to challenge him and stop him.
The long-awaited clash between Gilgamesh and Enkidu happened in the market square. Gilgamesh was taller than Enkidu, but Enkidu was thicker-set. Enkidu blocked Gilgamesh’s way, and the walls and timber of the buildings shook as they wrestled for four days. They were nearly evenly matched, but in the end Gilgamesh was able to throw Enkidu onto his back and pin him to the ground.
Then they felt a brotherly love for each other. They hugged, and from then on they were seldom out of each other’s company.
But after a while Enkidu began to miss life in the wild. He complained of feeling listless and lazy. He said his arms were losing their strength. Gilgamesh proposed they go on an adventure together. They would slay a monster called Humbaba, who preyed on travelers passing through the cedar forests of Lebanon. It was said that his hideous face, a labyrinth of wrinkles and ridges, was as ugly as a plate of guts.
Gilgamesh and Enkidu crossed the mountains, tracked him down in the forests and sliced off his head.
Scarcely had they arrived back in Uruk, however, than a giant bull began ravaging the countryside. Soon it had killed 300 men. Some people said that the very gates of hell were being shaken down, and that the dead would emerge and start eating the living.
As Gilgamesh and Enkidu went out to meet the bull, a great chasm opened up in front of them. Enkidu was tipped in, but managed to hang on to the edge. Then he jumped up and grabbed the bull by the horns. He yelled to Gilgamesh to insert his sword between the nape of the neck and the horns—the place that matadors use today. They cut off the horns to hang on the wall back home.
But when they returned again to Uruk, they found the city had been struck by plague. People said that the bull had been sacred to Enlil, the king of the gods, and that now he was angry.3
Enkidu fell ill. Gilgamesh wept and prayed over him. Enkidu cursed the trapper who had found him and the temple prostitute who had tamed him and trained him to enjoy civilized life. His eyes began to dim. He had a dream in which he was led along a road of no return to a House of Dust, where people only ever ate dust and drank dust. He could not see Gilgamesh and believed his old comrade had deserted him. In his dream he cried out in agony.
A worm slipped out of his nose and Gilgamesh let out a shriek. He pulled a sheet over his friend’s face. Enkidu, who had been as swift as the panther, would move no more.
Pacing backward and forward, Gilgamesh tore off his fine clothes and cut off his beautiful curly hair. “He was my axe, always in my hand,” he cried out. “He was the dagger in my belt.”
He ordered a statue to be made of Enkidu, then he left the city and began roaming the wilderness, grieving for his friend. Then a terrible new thought struck him: If Enkidu could die, then so too could he.
As men sank deeper into their bodily, animal natures, as their experience and memory of the spiritual realms grew fainter and dimmer, so their dread of death grew greater.
Gilgamesh remembered stories he had been told of his ancestor who had survived the Flood by building an ark. It was rumored that this ancestor had never really died and that he lived on a sacred mountain to the east. Gilgamesh determined to go and find him to discover the secrets of life and death.
He crossed the wilderness. He killed lions and took their skins for his clothes. He entered gates guarding a narrow pass to a mountainous realm. The light on the mountain pass grew darker, until he came to a brilliantly lit plain, where the trees were made of gold and their fruits were rubies, emeralds and other precious stones. From among the trees his ancestor came to greet him.
Gilgamesh said, “I was expecting you to look strange, but you look like a man, just like me! I was going to make you tell me your secrets, but now I’ve met you, I find I can’t even raise my arm against you.”
The old man smiled and began to tell Gilgamesh his own story.
“One stormy night,” he said, “when the whole world was roaring like a bull, I heard a voice whispering to me through the reeds of my hut. It said, ‘Pull down these reeds, pull down this hut to build yourself a boat. Give up material things and seek life. Take the seed of all living things and stow them in your boat . . .’ ”
The old man ended his story by explaining how after the Flood the king of the gods had boarded the boat and he and his wife had bowed down before Him. God had touched them on the forehead and blessed them, saying that now they would live for ever.
Then the old man said he was going to give Gilgamesh that same gift. In order to receive it, though, he must neither lie down nor sleep for six days and seven nights.
But Gilgamesh was exhausted by his journey over the mountain pass and he was overcome by sleep the moment he sat down.
When he awoke he knew he had failed the test. “What am I to do?” he pleaded with the old man. “Death is all around me, in my every footstep, my every breath, my clothes, my sheets. It is clutching at my flesh.”
The old man dismissed him angrily, gesturing to him to return the way he had come, but then his wife intervened. She said, “Gilgamesh had been traveling for a long time and was exhausted when he arrived. Give him some hope, something to take back with him.”
So the old man relented and told Gilgamesh where to find a very special plant. “It grows,” he said, “on the bottom of the ocean. This plant is prickly like a bramble, like a rose, but if you can dive down far enough and find it and bring it up to the surface, you need never grow old.”
Gilgamesh went to sea, to the place his ancestor had told him about, and attached stones to his feet to pull him down to the ocean’s floor.
Down, down, down, he sank through the different levels of the sea. At last he found the plant and although it pricked him and tore the flesh of his hand, he was able to pull it free from the seabed. Then he cut himself loose from the stones and swam to the surface with all speed.
While he was lying on the shore gasping for breath, a snake smelled the wonderful scent of the plant. It slithered over and carried the plant away. That is why the snake can slough off its skin and regenerate itself.
And that is why from that day forward Gilgamesh was doomed. He had failed in his quest to find relief from what had been afflicting humankind. He had found nothing to ease his pain or disperse the gathering darkness.
Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, had the wrong idea. He looked in the wrong place. It was another inhabitant of that city, a very different type of man, who set humankind on the right path . . .