Any attempt to describe the magnificent collection of literary works that has come down to us from ancient Mesopotamia almost inevitably becomes an attempt to describe an embarrassment of riches. The Mesopotamians have given us a myriad of superb mythological compositions, such as the creation story called the Enuma Elish and several different precursors to the biblical story of the flood. They have given us a corpus of the world’s oldest legal codes, including, most famously, the Code of Hammurapi, dating from ca. 1750 BCE and thus predecessor to the law codes that the Bible attributes to Moses by at least five hundred years (and almost certainly, according to modern biblical scholars, by several centuries more). The ancient Mesopotamians have also bequeathed to us numerous hymns, prayers, lamentations, ballads, and love songs, as well as collections of precepts and proverbs, accounts of oracles and prophecies, catalogs of omens, texts of magical incantations, historiographic narratives, treaty records, and royal, building, and other types of inscriptions. But arguably more notable than any one of these compositions, and perhaps more notable than all of them put together, is the Epic of Gilgamesh, which is considered by many to be the greatest literary masterpiece known to us from ancient Mesopotamian civilization and, moreover, one of the greatest masterpieces of all of world literature.1
The Epic’s origins are ancient indeed, probably belonging to the oldest period of Mesopotamian history, an era scholars call the Early Dynastic, which lasted from ca. 2900 to 2350 BCE. During this time a people known as the Sumerians thrived in what is today southern Iraq, living in some thirty or so independent city-states under priest-king rulers called ensis.2 But the Gilgamesh Epic really began to come into flower only in the early second millennium BCE, after Mesopotamia’s Sumerian rulers were supplanted by Semitic-speaking Akkadians, who immigrated into Sumer from the north. These Akkadians determinedly asserted their political hegemony over the Sumerians, yet at the same time readily absorbed and even elaborated upon earlier Sumerian cultural traditions, including many of the Sumerian cultural traditions about Gilgamesh. By the middle of the first millennium BCE, some one thousand years or so later, the Akkadians’ reworking of these older Gilgamesh traditions was complete, and we can speak of what we know today as the Epic of Gilgamesh, a long and integrated piece of narrative poetry consisting of about three thousand lines, which Mesopotamian scribes recorded on twelve clay tablets using cuneiform script.
The Epic’s main characters are Gilgamesh, a mighty hero and also king, and the equally mighty Enkidu, specially created by the gods, according to the text, to be Gilgamesh’s comrade in adventure and, more important, his bosom friend. The poem’s action takes place in many different settings, initially, Gilgamesh’s royal fief, the Mesopotamian city-state of Uruk, known to readers of the Bible as Erech (Gen 10:10) and to moderns as the southern Iraqi city of Warka. But as the story proceeds, Gilgamesh and Enkidu go forth from Uruk to the Cedar Forest, faraway in the west, to slay the ferocious monster who guards that domain, Humbaba (in earlier tradition, Huwawa).3 After the two heroes return to Uruk and triumph there over another ferocious monster, the Bull of Heaven, Gilgamesh goes out from the city again to undertake another lengthy journey, one that takes him east through long stretches of the wilderness until he reaches the very ends of the earth.
Yet while the journey to the Cedar Forest was embarked upon in a spirit of adventure, this second journey is marked by a spirit of despair, as between the two journeys, just subsequent to the victory over the Bull of Heaven, Gilgamesh’s beloved Enkidu has died. It is his grief over this loss that in part drives Gilgamesh’s second journey, but even more so he is driven by his fears that he too will die. His goal in his travels is thus to seek out Utnapishtim, the hero of the Mesopotamian story of the flood, who as a result of surviving the great deluge was granted immortality by the gods. Gilgamesh’s aim is to achieve that same immortality for himself.
It is in this part of the Epic that the poem displays its greatest genius, as it chronicles with almost unbearable pathos Gilgamesh’s despondency over Enkidu’s demise, his near desperate attempts to stave off his own death, and the heartbreaking understanding to which the hero finally must come regarding his mortality. One of the most famous interpreters of the Gilgamesh Epic, Thorkild Jacobsen, has called the tale a story about “growing up,” arguing that Gilgamesh by the end of the Epic is one who has left behind the naive sensibilities of a child in order to achieve the maturity of an adult.4 There is much that can be said in favor of this understanding:5 Gilgamesh, for example, is twice described in the Epic as “young” (ṣeḫēru; Tablet II, line 251, Tablet V, line 128); he is once said to count himself among the eṭlū, or “young men” of Uruk (Tablet VI, lines 176 and 178); and during their interactions, Utnapishtim also speaks of him at one point as an eṭlu, or a “young man” (Tablet XI, line 211).6 Certainly, moreover, one of the primary lessons of life that the young need to learn is the same lesson Gilgamesh must apprehend: the fact of his own mortality and, more generally, an acceptance of human limitations.7
Still, the longer I have lived, and especially the longer I have spent teaching young adults and listening to them speak with almost unabashed optimism about their aspirations and life ambitions, the more I have come to think that the Epic of Gilgamesh is not so much a story about growing up as it is one about growing old.8 The story, it increasingly seems to me, is about reaching the sort of resigned understanding that comes only after being beaten down by decades of life, the resigned understanding that, even for those of us who lead the most privileged of existences, all of the promises that life seemed to hold when we first went forth to make our way in the world can never be realized and that we, like Gilgamesh, are doomed to end up with considerably less than we had expected and for which we had hoped. Much of the Gilgamesh story is told using imagery that is rooted in and distinctive to a Mesopotamian worldview, including the images of sex and gender on which I will focus in the chapters that follow. But what makes the Epic of Gilgamesh a masterpiece is its ability to speak across the ages and across the globe to each of us as we attempt to make peace with the knowledge that we can have only a fraction of that which, in our youth, life had seemed to offer and which, in our youthful insouciance, we had childishly assumed we could achieve. This is the “tragedy,” as the distinguished Assyriologist Wilfried G. Lambert writes, that renders the Gilgamesh Epic “still moving for any human heart.”9
The Historical Gilgamesh and the History of the Gilgamesh Epic
As I have just suggested, Gilgamesh’s significance for us today lies in his role as a literary character whose tale of hope and despair reaches across the cultural divide that separates us from the ancient Mesopotamians in order to address some of the fundamental questions of human existence that all of us face. There does seem, however, to have been a historical Gilgamesh, although our evidence is admittedly somewhat circumstantial.10 The so-called Sumerian King List, which dates from the early second millennium BCE (ca. 2000–1700 BCE) and claims to catalog all the kings who had ruled over the Sumerians since the beginning of time (“when kingship was lowered from heaven”), lists Gilgamesh (or, as he would have been called in Sumerian tradition, Bilgames) as the fifth king of the first dynasty of the Sumerian city-state of Uruk.11 This would place Gilgamesh’s rule some time during the second phase of the Early Dynastic era (ED II) of Sumerian history, which lasted from ca. 2700–2500 BCE. Unfortunately, there are no historical texts confirming the existence of a King Gilgamesh of Uruk that date from this ED II period, although we do have an Early Dynastic votive inscription that bears the name of a King Enmebaragesi of the city-state of Kish. This same King Enmebaragesi is also referred to in later Sumerian texts in conjunction with Gilgamesh: in a late third-millennium BCE hymn composed in praise of Gilgamesh, for example, and in an epic text, probably of about the same date, that tells the story of a battle between Gilgamesh and Enmebaragesi’s son and successor Agga (or Akka).12 Most scholars suppose that since the King Enmebaragesi of these late third millennium BCE hymns and epics is a known historical figure, so too must be his hymnic and epic counterpart Gilgamesh.
The existence, though, of hymnic and epic texts celebrating Gilgamesh that date from the late third millennium BCE suggests that very early on in the course of Sumerian tradition Gilgamesh began to be transformed from a character of history into a character of legend and even of myth. Indeed, already by ca. 2500 BCE Gilgamesh’s name shows up on a list of the gods of the Sumerian pantheon, along with the name of his father, Lugalbanda. Temple records from ca. 2500–2100 BCE similarly indicate that, as a god, Gilgamesh received cult offerings. By ca. 2050 BCE Gilgamesh was so firmly enshrined in the Sumerian pantheon that Shulgi (ca. 2094–2047 BCE), the second king of the third dynasty of the city-state of Ur (which had its origins in Gilgamesh’s city-state of Uruk), claimed Gilgamesh, along with the other gods of Uruk, among his royal ancestors. Many scholars suggest, moreover, that it is at this time, and on account of the interest of Shulgi and other Ur III kings, that Sumerian epic accounts about Gilgamesh were first composed or at least first rendered in their present form. These include the previously mentioned tale of “Gilgamesh and Agga (Akka)” and four other Sumerian texts: 1. “Gilgamesh and Huwawa” (also known as “Gilgamesh and the Cedar Forest” and as “Gilgamesh and the Land of the Living”), which describes the journey Gilgamesh and Enkidu made to the faraway Cedar Forest in order to kill the mythological monster Huwawa (later Humbaba); 2. “Gilgamesh and the Bull of Heaven,” which tells of the confrontation between Gilgamesh and Enkidu and the equally monstrous Bull of Heaven; 3. “Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the Netherworld” (also known as “Gilgamesh and the Netherworld”), which recounts a tale of Enkidu’s descent into the netherworld; and 4. “The Death of Gilgamesh,” which relates the story of Gilgamesh’s eventual death.13
It was not, however, until the subsequent Old Babylonian period (ca. 2000–1600 BCE) that some of these originally unconnected Sumerian epic texts—now rendered in the Akkadian language of the Sumerians’ Semitic supplanters—began to be brought together to form a larger literary composition.14 At this point also other tales accrued to this complex, most famously, perhaps, some elements from the Sumero-Akkadian story of the flood.15 During this process of compilation, the corpora were adapted and reshaped, sometimes substantially.16 Important new materials, especially regarding Enkidu’s origins and the beginnings of his relationship with Gilgamesh, were added. Ultimately, all these components were integrated into a literary whole, “with a unified theme and meaningful plot.”17 It is this Old Babylonian period compilation that we can begin to describe as the Gilgamesh Epic.
By the second half of the Old Babylonian period, the form of the Old Babylonian version of the Epic was, as far as we can tell, generally fixed.18 Unfortunately, archaeologists have not (yet) recovered the complete text of this Old Babylonian account, but scholars have found tablets that relate several of its major episodes: 1. the initial meeting of Gilgamesh and Enkidu;19 2. the journey to the Cedar Forest and the struggle against Huwawa (later Humbaba);20 and 3. the encounters Gilgamesh has during his wilderness wanderings with the sun god Shamash, with an alewife named Siduri, who lives on the shores of a sea that has in its midst the ominous “waters of death,” and in addition with a ferryman named Sursunabu (later Urshanabi), who is to take Gilgamesh across this sea and these waters of death to the home of the flood hero Utnapishtim.21 When taken together these Old Babylonian texts “parallel or refer to the contents of most of the tablets of the late [that is, the first-millennium BCE] version,”22 focusing on Enkidu’s origins, his role as Gilgamesh’s bosom friend and even second self, Enkidu’s eventual death and how deeply it affected Gilgamesh, and the despairing journey to the dwelling place of the immortal Utnapishtim that Gilgamesh undertook in response.23
As I have already intimated, however, this Old Babylonian version, although it contained most of the content found in the first-millennium BCE form of the Epic, continued to develop through the next one thousand years, through the Middle Babylonian and Neo-Babylonian periods (ca. 1600–1000 BCE and ca. 1000–400 BCE, respectively), eventually giving rise to what is commonly referred to as the Epic’s Late or Standard version. Archaeologists first discovered the text of this Standard version in the nineteenth century among the remains of a great library that was assembled in his capital city of Nineveh by King Ashurbanipal of Assyria (the northern region of Mesopotamia), who ruled from ca. 669–627 BCE. Other copies of this first-millennium BCE text were subsequently found in the earlier Assyrian capital cities of Assur and Calah (biblical Nimrud); in the city of Sultantepe, in the far north of Mesopotamia; and in the cities of Babylon and Uruk, in the south.
Yet while widespread in their distribution, all these copies seem standardized in terms of their overall structure and content, and even standardized in terms of the wording of individual lines; hence their designation as the Epic’s Standard version. This Standard version, however, “although its basic form [and] plot” and key aspects of its message (most notably its stress on the futility of Gilgamesh’s search for eternal life) “do not differ from those of the Old Babylonian version,” does display “considerable divergence” from the Old Babylonian in that “lines are reworked in degrees varying from negligible to complete … entire sections or episodes are restructured … certain theological changes occur.”24 Also, three major sections are added: 1. a hymnic prologue that praises Gilgamesh for the great knowledge he had acquired during the course of his journeys, 2. a much lengthier set of materials concerning the story of the flood, and 3. the older Sumerian tale of Enkidu’s descent to the netherworld. It is generally presumed that this transition took place during the Middle Babylonian period.25 It is most commonly attributed to one Sîn-leqi-unninnī, described in Mesopotamian tradition as an exorcist-priest who was a contemporary of Gilgamesh’s but who is assumed by scholars to have lived in Uruk at least a thousand years later than Gilgamesh allegedly lived and to have produced “some important Middle Babylonian Version or … the late version … some time in the last half or quarter of the second millennium.”26 I have already briefly summarized this Late or Standard version above, but because the analysis I will offer in subsequent chapters depends so heavily on a close reading of both the Standard and the Old Babylonian accounts, let me now turn to describe these narratives—and at least some of the difference between them—in more detail.
The Epic of Gilgamesh
The twenty-six lines of the hymnic prologue that opens the Epic’s Standard version are proleptic, written from the perspective of a Gilgamesh who has already “seen everything” (Tablet I, line 1), a Gilgamesh, that is, who has already made his “distant journey” to the dwelling place of Utnapishtim (Tablet I, line 7) and has brought back a great secret, “a tale of the time before the flood” (Tablet I, line 6). Moreover, the prologue claims, Gilgamesh, upon his return, wrote down the story of his adventures—“on stone chiseled each wearying toil” (Tablet I, line 8)27—and, as the prologue continues, we, the prologue’s audience, are exhorted to seek out the king’s inscribed tablet and read it (Tablet I, lines 22–26). As William L. Moran explains, the poet’s point here is twofold: first, to demonstrate the authenticity of the text that follows by suggesting that its source was the autobiographical narrative authored by Gilgamesh himself; second, to instruct us as readers to partake of the Epic in a certain way, one that furthers our own knowledge by “learning what the life of Gilgamesh has to teach us.”28
The Standard version then begins to tell the story of the Epic proper, using material it basically takes over without considerable thematic change from the Old Babylonian account. This includes, somewhat paradoxically, material it takes over without considerable thematic change from the Old Babylonian account’s introductory lines, which, differing from the Standard version, laud Gilgamesh not for his superior knowledge but as one who is “the greatest among kings” (Tablet I, line 27) because he, who is described as being two-thirds divine and one-third human, surpasses all other rulers in heroic stature, in bravery, and in strength. In fact, in the Standard version, as apparently in the Old Babylonian, Gilgamesh is initially portrayed as a hero who seems not to know his own strength, so that his relentless energy and vigor, and the excessive demands that this energy and vigor fuel, come to bear oppressively upon his own people: “he does not leave a son to his father,” we are told, nor “a girl to [her mother]” (Tablet I, lines 57, 62, 69, and 74).29 The people thus pray to the gods for respite, and the gods respond by having the birth goddess, Aruru, create Enkidu, a creature of comparable strength and energy who can occupy Gilgamesh’s attentions.
These two heroic characters, however, do not immediately meet, as the Enkidu created by the gods is a wild man of the steppe, an exemplar, as Mesopotamian tradition would have it, of humanity in its originally savage and primal state.30 This primitive and uncivilized Enkidu’s body is covered with shaggy hair, like an animal’s, and the tresses on his head are long, “like a woman’s.” He eats wild grasses “alongside the gazelles,” and he jostles with the other animals as they drink at their watering holes (Tablet I, lines 88–95). He abets his animal companions, moreover, by filling in a local hunter’s pit traps and pulling out the snares this trapper has set. Desperate to defend his livelihood against Enkidu’s provocations, the huntsman, as advised by his father, goes to Uruk to ask Gilgamesh to send a prostitute from the city who might accompany him back into the wilderness and seduce Enkidu. Gilgamesh agrees, the plan is put into action, and it works perfectly. Upon seeing the prostitute, whose name is Shamhat,31 Enkidu is indeed seduced, and six days and seven nights of ardent and uninterrupted lovemaking follow. Immediately thereafter, Enkidu’s animal nature leaves him (“Enkidu was diminished, he could not run as before”; Tablet I, line 184), and the transformation that makes him human begins (“he had grown in broad understanding”; Tablet I, line 185).
This process of humanization continues as Shamhat leads Enkidu to join the hunters’ camp (although the Standard version becomes fragmentary at this point, and we are reliant on the Old Babylonian to fill in the gaps). Assuming, though, that the Standard version followed its Old Babylonian prototype, the story recounts how Enkidu anoints himself with oil, dons clothes, and learns to eat the food of humans—according to Mesopotamian custom, bread and beer. During this time, as described in a portion of the Standard version that is extant, he also learns from Shamhat some things about Gilgamesh, most notably, that Gilgamesh has had two dreams, one of a meteor and the second of an axe, that presage Enkidu’s coming (these dreams are recounted as well in the Old Babylonian, although in a somewhat different context). Enkidu learns even more about Gilgamesh according to a passage we again know only from the Old Babylonian, when he hears from a passing stranger that a marriage is about to take place in Uruk in which, it seems, Gilgamesh is to bed the bride before her husband is allowed to do so.32 Outraged, apparently, by this idea (because it violates the standards of human community that Enkidu, with the zeal of a convert, has recently come to embrace?), Enkidu goes off to Uruk to confront Gilgamesh and stop him. Yet despite the fact that, according to a passage preserved for us in both the Old Babylonian and Standard versions, the two initially encounter one another as combatants, the wrestling match in which they engage ends, according to the better-preserved Old Babylonian (at what would be about midway through the Standard version’s Tablet II), with them as fast friends, the bride’s marriage bed forgotten as they become completely absorbed in their interactions with one another.
Soon, in fact, these two restlessly energetic souls are off on the first of their great adventures together, the confrontation with the monstrous Huwawa/Humbaba in the Cedar Forest. Again, the Standard version, which tells the tale in its Tablets III, IV, and V, follows basically the account found in the Old Babylonian, although Gilgamesh’s motivation for undertaking the journey is different in the two editions and the role of the sun god Shamash is changed.33 Nevertheless, the outcome is certainly the same: Huwawa/Humbaba is killed, Gilgamesh and Enkidu fell many of the forest’s great cedars, including one with which they plan to make a door for the temple of the god Enlil in his cult city of Nippur. Next, according to an episode in Tablet VI of the Standard version for which there are no Old Babylonian parallels (and which may not have been a part of the Old Babylonian version at all),34 Gilgamesh, having returned to Uruk triumphant after the battle and having reclothed himself in his resplendent royal robes, attracts the attention of the Mesopotamian goddess of sex and love, Ishtar. Smitten, she extends to him an offer of marriage. Gilgamesh, however, rejects her, and in scathing terms, rehearsing at length a list of others to whom she has similarly proffered her affections and then betrayed. Ishtar, insulted and enraged, storms off to see her father, the sky god Anu, who eventually is persuaded to release to his daughter the vicious Bull of Heaven so that this animal might kill Gilgamesh and give the goddess her revenge. But Enkidu and Gilgamesh, working in tandem, are able to kill the Bull instead, and as Ishtar looks on from atop Uruk’s city walls, Enkidu hurls the haunch of the Bull at her, literally throwing in her face the evidence that he and Gilgamesh have gotten the better of her.
But, from the gods’ point of view, all of this—the killing of Huwawa/Humbaba and the slaying of the Bull of Heaven—is too much, hubris that oversteps Gilgamesh’s and Enkidu’s proper place in the cosmic order. The heroes must therefore be punished, and as Tablet VII of the Standard version begins, Enkidu tells Gilgamesh of an ominous dream he has had that reveals the decision reached by the gods’ divine council: that one of the two—ultimately decreed to be Enkidu—must die. Shortly thereafter Enkidu becomes ill and, after twelve days, he succumbs. Gilgamesh is devastated by the loss of his friend, but, more important in terms of the story the Epic seeks to tell, he is devastated by the realization that despite the fact that he is two-thirds divine, he too could someday die. Determined to avoid this fate, he abandons Uruk at the beginning of the Standard version’s Tablet IX in order to journey across a vast wilderness to the ends of the world, there to learn the secrets of eternal life known to one of the denizens of that region, the flood hero Utnapishtim, the only human ever to have been granted immortality by the gods.35
The story of the journey to Utnapishtim’s is again preserved both in the Standard version and (partially) in the Old Babylonian, although the Standard version (as is often the case) is more homogenized and repetitive than the Old Babylonian, with Gilgamesh in Tablet X giving basically the same speech about his grief to each of the three characters he encounters at the world’s edge, the alewife Siduri, Utnapishtim’s ferryman Urshanabi (earlier Sursunabu), and Utnapishtim himself.36 The Standard version, as I have already noted, also adds to the Old Babylonian Epic a much more extensive set of materials relating to the story of the flood, in particular a long (188-line) recitation of the actual flood story, narrated in Tablet XI by Utnapishtim. Yet, despite these differences, the point the two versions seek to make is surely once more the same: that the immortality the gods granted to Utnapishtim on account of his surviving the great flood will not be granted to Gilgamesh. Nor is Gilgamesh able to gain immortality through the alternate means Utnapishtim offers him: by staying awake for six days and seven nights. Instead Gilgamesh falls asleep immediately and does not awaken until this weeklong trial is over. Moreover, according to at least the Standard version (the Old Babylonian version seems to have ended shortly after Gilgamesh wakes up from his six-day sleep),37 Gilgamesh fails at one final chance to claim some sort of eternal life, which is to secure and eat a magical “Plant of Rejuvenation.”38 At this point, according to the Standard version, Gilgamesh finally gives up on his quest to gain immortality and returns to Uruk.
But although Gilgamesh returns to Uruk in some sense despondent, the story of his homecoming in the Standard version is not meant to be bleak.39 Rather, on his arrival in Uruk at the end of Tablet XI, Gilgamesh urges the ferryman Urshanabi, who has brought him home, to walk the walls of the city and admire their workmanship, exhorting him using language that repeats lines uttered in praise of the walls in the Standard version’s prologue. The point of this repetition is to bring us back to the theme of knowledge that the Standard version’s prologue introduced: what Gilgamesh has learned from his journey is that, rather than strive for things that are beyond human means, the goal to which he should properly aspire is to live as fully as he can within the confines of humanity’s limitations. More specifically, he should give up his quest to escape death and aspire instead to create the greatest monuments of human civilization that he as king is able—walls, and, the prologue adds, temples and great works of literature—for it is through these creations, rather than through any grant of eternal life, the Standard version suggests, that Gilgamesh can gain some form of immortality. In my comments at the beginning of this chapter, I called the Epic of Gilgamesh a tragedy, and I believe it is, tragic in its conviction that there are nearly unbearable losses and failures that Gilgamesh, like all humans, must learn to endure.40 Yet however bitter these lessons are—and the Standard version insists they are bitter indeed—the Epic still maintains that life is bittersweet, for even in the midst of loss and failure there are measures of comfort and contentment. To be sure, these measures are less—far less—than that for which Gilgamesh, and by extension all humans, had hoped, but they are something. While the Epic of Gilgamesh could never be described as having a happy ending, it does offer a degree of solace, and thus Gilgamesh, although beaten down and weary, is nevertheless by the end of his story said to be “at peace” (pašāḫu; Tablet I, line 7).41
Curiously, though, the Standard version, after constructing this rather adroit literary framework that both brings the Epic back to its beginnings and offers at least some resolution to the dilemmas it has raised, does not conclude, but adds a twelfth tablet, a practically verbatim translation of part of the older Sumerian tale of Enkidu’s descent to the netherworld (“Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the Netherworld”). Why this story is included in the Standard version is unclear, and most scholars dismiss it as “an inorganic appendage to the eleven tablets which constituted the original form of the late version.”42 As just suggested, its presence destroys the literary framework effected by the lines Gilgamesh utters in praise of Uruk’s walls at the end of Tablet XI, and the Tablet XII story also contradicts the story of Tablets I–XI in several fundamental ways. Most notably perhaps, when Tablet XII opens Enkidu is still alive! Additionally, in Tablet XII (line 54), Enkidu is at least once called Gilgamesh’s “servant” or “slave” (ARAD, which in logographic writing—that is, writing in which cuneiform signs stand for full words—denotes ardu, “slave” or “servant”), and Gilgamesh is at least once called Enkidu’s “master” (bēlu; line 7).43 This language is the typical way of describing Gilgamesh’s and Enkidu’s relationship in the various Sumerian tales about Gilgamesh: as Moran writes, in Sumerian tradition, as in lines 7 and 54 of Tablet XII, Enkidu is to Gilgamesh “the conventional courtier.”44 But this characterization is otherwise wholly alien to both the Old Babylonian and Standard versions, each of which resolutely replaces the Sumerian language of master and servant with language of comradeship and collegiality.
Indeed, this recasting of the nature of Gilgamesh’s and Enkidu’s relationship is one of the major innovations of the Akkadian Epic.45 From the tradition’s point of view, this innovation is introduced in order to promote the Epic’s larger thematic concern regarding Gilgamesh’s desperate quest for eternal life and its futility, for it is only a loss as great as the loss of Enkidu, his second self, that can arouse in Gilgamesh such irremediable fears about his own death and send him on his vainglorious journey to escape it. As Jacobsen writes, “To bring home to Gilgamesh the full horror of death the author needed the death of someone very near to him and deeply beloved by him. Into that rôle he cast Enkidu, which meant a complete recasting of Enkidu’s traditional [Sumerian] image.”46 Jeffrey H. Tigay concurs:47
To enable Enkidu’s death to turn Gilgamesh … to a literal quest for immortality, the Akkadian author seized upon the sporadic hints of friendship in the Sumerian tales and applied them across the board…. The literary changes which give the Akkadian epic its distinctive features were set in motion by the author’s raising the status on Enkidu from servant to friend.
Yet while this transformation of the nature of Gilgamesh’s and Enkidu’s relationship was, for the Akkadian tradition, only a means toward an end, a way of enabling the Epic to address its larger thematic interests regarding humanity’s coming to terms with its own mortality, for me, in undertaking an examination of the interactions of the hero Gilgamesh and his companion Enkidu, the Akkadian Epic’s reconceptualization of the relationship between these two characters is the primary concern. More specifically, I am interested in just exactly how this reconceptualized relationship is described. As I will explore in detail in the following chapter, at many points the relationship is depicted using language that is highly eroticized and even sexual. Early on in the Epic, for example, Gilgamesh imagines himself “loving” Enkidu “like a wife,” and he is elsewhere said to act toward Enkidu as if Enkidu were a “bride.” Both Gilgamesh and Enkidu, moreover, once they encounter one another, are depicted as abandoning the women who had theretofore been the objects of their sexual interests in order to focus their attentions solely on each other, and never again in the Epic is either portrayed as having sexual congress with a member of the opposite sex. Indeed, Gilgamesh scathingly rejects the goddess Ishtar’s proposal of marriage. For some, all this imagery, and more, suggests that we understand Gilgamesh and Enkidu in the Epic as homosexual lovers who enjoy an intimate and exclusive sexual relationship. Others, however, object to such an interpretation. Such scholars argue, first, that the data their colleagues put forward in support of their homosexual interpretation are not as conclusive as has been claimed. But, even more important, some of these critics raise significant questions regarding the ways in which same-sex erotic and sexual interactions were conceived of in ancient Mesopotamia and the degree to which the descriptions of Gilgamesh’s and Enkidu’s relationship correspond to these Mesopotamian conceptualizations. Yet even these latter interpreters almost unanimously agree with the proponents of the former theory that, whether sexual of not, the language and imagery used to depict Gilgamesh’s and Enkidu’s relationship have to be understood as highly erotic in nature.
It is this last point that seems to me the most salient. As I will suggest more thoroughly in the chapters that follow, to formulate the debate regarding the nature of Gilgamesh’s and Enkidu’s relationship in terms of a question of “were they or weren’t they” quickly falls into the trap about which I warned in chapter 1: to assume that the categories of heterosexual and homosexual that we use today can be used to discuss opposite-sex and same-sex erotic and sexual interactions in the ancient Mesopotamian world. It further seems to me that framing the debate according to the “were they or weren’t they” question comes perilously close to treating the Gilgamesh text as if the interactions between Gilgamesh and Enkidu actually happened, rather than understanding that, whatever we might say about Gilgamesh’s historicity, Gilgamesh and Enkidu as we have them are literary characters whose relationship exists only within the framework of an epic poem. What I thus propose to do in the discussion that follows is, first, in chapter 3, to outline more completely the evidence that speaks to the eroticized and sexualized nature of Gilgamesh’s and Enkidu’s relationship and to consider the strengths and weaknesses of the analyses of this relationship that have been advanced in the past. Then, in chapter 4, I will present a way of understanding the text’s homoeroticized language that I believe both avoids the trap of speaking of same-sex eroticism in the ancient Mesopotamian world as if the Mesopotamian worldview were analogous to our own and also takes seriously the Gilgamesh story as a piece of epic literature.
I should note briefly in this regard that, despite its failure to fit within the literary framework of the Standard version, I will be making occasional reference in my comments to Tablet XII. This is because the Akkadian translation of this tablet, even though it otherwise adheres almost slavishly to its Sumerian prototype, does deviate at points with respect to my primary interest here, meaning it can depict Gilgamesh’s and Enkidu’s relationship as one between closely bonded and loving companions rather than, as in the Sumerian, a relationship between a master and his servant. Thus, while the older Sumerian designations of “master” and “servant” are retained in lines 7 and 54 of Tablet XII, as I noted above, they are more typically changed. For example, in lines 6, 80, and 84 of the text’s Akkadian recension, the epithet of “servant” that is used of Enkidu in the Sumerian is dropped. The Akkadian “also adds two lines [Tablet XII, lines 81 and 87], with no counterpart in the known Sumerian manuscripts, calling Enkidu Gilgamesh’s ‘brother’ (aḫu) and ‘friend’ (ibru).”48
With this caveat in place, I now turn to offer a close examination of the way in which, according to the Akkadian epic tradition, the relationship of Gilgamesh and Enkidu is construed.