by Georges Roux
The Story of Gilgamesh
‘He who saw everything to the ends of the world’, as the title of the poem has it, Gilgamesh was two-thirds god and one-third man. He was supremely strong, brave and handsome, and cared much for Uruk, his city. The Babylonians admired in particular the strong wall which he had built around it perhaps the 9.7 kilometre long wall of Early Dynastic times that still encircles the ruins of Warka. Yet his arrogance, ruthlessness and depravity were a subject of grave concern for the citizens of Uruk. They complained to the great god Anu, and Anu instructed the goddess Aruru to create another ‘wild ox’, a ‘double’ of Gilgamesh, who could challenge him and distract his mind from ‘the warrior's daughter and the nobleman's spouse’ whom, it appears, he would not leave in peace. So, out of clay Aruru modelled Enkidu, a huge, brutish, hairy creature who lived in the steppe among the wild beasts:
With the gazelles he feeds on grass,
With the wild beasts he jostles at the watering places,
With the teeming creatures, his heart delights in water.
Now, one day a hunter saw Enkidu at a distance and understood why the traps he was setting were always out of action, and why the game kept slipping out of his hands. He reported the matter to Gilgamesh, who set a trap of another kind against the wild man. A woman, a prostitute, was sent forth to the steppe with orders to seduce Enkidu and convert him to civilized life. The harlot had no difficulty in fulfilling the first part of her mission. She then took Enkidu by the hand ‘like a mother’ and led him to Uruk, where he soon learnt to bathe, anoint himself with perfumed oil, eat bread and indulge in strong drinks. But while in Uruk, Enkidu heard that Gilgamesh was once more going to exercise his ius primae noctis in the communal house and bravely barred his way. A terrible fight ensued which ended in mutual affection and peace, Gilgamesh having found a companion of his own stature and Enkidu a master: ‘They kissed each other and made a friendship.’
The exuberant Gilgamesh, however, was anxious to make himself a name and persuaded Enkidu to accompany him to the vast and remote Cedar Forest, abode of Huwawa (or Humbaba), a frightening giant ‘whose mouth was fire, whose breath was death’. Having prepared their weapons and prayed to the gods, the two friends left Uruk and, covering in three days the distance it normally took six weeks to travel, they reached the Cedar Forest:
They stood still and gazed at the forest,
They looked at the height of the cedars…
From the face of the mountains
The cedars raise aloft their luxuriance,
Good is their shadow, full of delight…
Having caught the guardian unaware, they entered the forbidden land, and already Gilgamesh was felling tree after tree when Huwawa rose in anger and would have massacred the two adventurers if Shamash had not come to their rescue; he sent all the eight winds against Huwawa, who, paralysed, acknowledged himself beaten and begged for his life. But Gilgamesh and Enkidu cut off his head and triumphantly returned to Uruk.
Following this exploit, the goddess Ishtar herself fell in love with Gilgamesh and offered to marry him; but Gilgamesh would have none of it. Reminding the unfaithful goddess how she had treated her numerous lovers, from Tammuz, for whom she had ‘ordained wailing year after year’, to the shepherd and the gardener, whom she had turned into wolf and spider, he abused her in the most outrageous terms:
Thou art but a brazier which goes out in the cold,
A backdoor which does not keep out blast and windstorms,
A waterskin which soaks through its bearer,
A shoe which pinches the foot of its owner!
Bitterly offended, Ishtar asked Anu to send the Bull of Heaven to ravage Uruk. But after the Bull had knocked down man after man, Enkidu seized it by the horns while Gilgamesh thrust a sword into its neck, and as Ishtar was cursing the ruler of Uruk, he tore off the beast's right thigh and tossed it in her face.
Such impudence was more than the gods could stand. They decided that one of the pair should die. Enkidu, therefore, was seized with a long and painful disease and, having reviewed his past life, cursed the harlot and dreamed of the sombre Netherworld, he passed away, mourned by his companion for seven days and nights ‘until a worm fell out of his nose’.
The death of Enkidu affected Gilgamesh deeply. For the first time the fiery and fearless King of Uruk realized the full horror of death. Could he also disappear like this? Could he not escape the dreadful fate of the human race?
Fearing death I roam over the steppe;
The matter of my friend rests heavy upon me.
How can I be silent? How can I be still?
My friend, whom I loved, has turned to clay,
Must I too, like him, lay me down
Not to rise again for ever and ever?
Gilgamesh decided to meet Ut-napishtim, the man who survived the Deluge, and obtain from him the secret of immortality. First he had to cross the mountain of Mashu, the vast and dark mountain of the setting sun whose entrance was guarded by scorpion-men; but they took pity on him and let him pass. On the other side of the mountain he met Siduri ‘the barmaid who dwells on the edge of the sea’, and Siduri's advice was to stop worrying and wandering and enjoy life. Yet, touched by his sorrow, she told him where Ut-napishtim could be found: on the other side of an immense and dangerous sea barred by ‘the waters of death’. Our hero did not hesitate. He enlisted the help of Urshanabi the boatman, crossed the sea and finally met Ut-napishtim, who told him his own story, the story of the Flood. Could Ut-napishtim do something for Gilgamesh? Yes, he should get hold of a certain thorny plant, the plant of life which grew in the depths of the ocean. Gilgamesh, like a pearlfisher of the Persian Gulf, tied heavy stones to his feet, dived and picked the plant. Alas, on his way home, while he lay asleep near a spring, a snake came out from the water and carried away the precious harvest. There would be no eternal life for Gilgamesh. The conclusion implicit in the story is as pessimistic as Ut-napishtim's address to our hero:
Do we build houses for ever?
Does the river for ever raise up and bring on floods?
The dragon-fly leaves its shell
That its face might but glance at the face of the sun.
Since the days of yore there has been no permanence;
The resting and the dead, how alike they are!
Such is – briefly outlined and unfortunately robbed of its poetical fragrance – the story of Gilgamesh, unquestionably the most famous epic tale in the ancient Near East, judging from the numerous Assyro-Babylonian ‘editions’ and from the Hittite and Hurrian translations that have come to us.21 Gilgamesh-the-hero is, of course, a myth. But what of Gilgamesh-the-king? A few years ago one would have strongly doubted his existence; today there are good reasons to believe that a king of that name actually ruled over Uruk, though definite proof is still lacking. For some time we have had the impression of standing at the moving, ethereal border which separates fiction from reality; we now have the certitude that the time of Gilgamesh corresponds to the earliest period of Mesopotamian history.
CHAPTER 8
THE EARLY DYNASTIC PERIOD
The history of ancient Iraq is divided, like its prehistory, into periods characterized by major political changes often accompanied by changes in the social, economic and cultural fields. The first of these periods begins around 2900 B.C. and ends with the conquest of Sumer by the Semitic king of Akkad, Sargon, in 2334 B.C or thereabouts. For this reason, it is sometimes called ‘Presargonic’, though the term ‘Early Dynastic’ (abbreviated ED) is usually preferred by English-speaking scholars. The Early Dynastic period, in turn, has been broken down into three parts: ED I (c. 2900 – 2750 B.C.), ED II (c. 2750 – 2600 B.C.) and ED III (c. 2600 – 2334 B.C.), but it must be made quite clear from the start that if by ‘history’ is meant records of political events, or at least genuine incriptions from local rulers, then only part of ED II and the whole of ED III are historical; ED I and the first decades of ED II belong to prehistory in the narr
ow sense of the term until the chance discovery of an inscription, from one of the earliest kings of Uruk or Kish mentioned in the Sumerian King List, pushes back overnight into the past the beginnings of history, as has already happened twice.
Until the First World War, our knowledge of the Early Dynastic period was almost entirely derived from the excavations carried out by the French at Lagash – or rather Girsu1 – nowadays Tell Luh or Telloh, a large mound near the Shatt al-Gharraf, forty-eight kilometres due north of Nasriya.2 Besides remarkable works of art, these excavations have yielded numerous inscriptions which have made it possible to reconstitute in fairly great detail the history of Lagash and to draw up a list of its rulers from about 2500 to 2000 B.C. Unfortunately, the information thus obtained was practically restricted to one city, and its rulers did not figure on the King List, probably because they were not considered to have held sway over the whole of Sumer.
Then, in the winter of 1922 – 3, Sir Leonard Woolley found at al-Ubaid, among the debris of magnificent bronze sculptures and reliefs which had once decorated a small Early Dynastic temple, a marble tablet with an inscription reading:
(To) Ninhursag: A-annepadda, King of Ur, son of Mesannepadda, King of Ur, for Ninhursag has built (this temple)
Both A-annepadda and his father figured on the Sumerian King List, the latter being the founder of the First Dynasty of Ur which succeeded the First Dynasty of Uruk. Thus for the first time one of those early Sumerian princes long held as mythical was proven to have actually existed. There is reason to believe that Mesannepadda reigned in about 2560 B.C.
Finally, in 1959 a German scholar, D. O. Edzard, found in the Iraq Museum a fragment of a large alabaster vase, engraved with three words in a very archaic script:
Me-bárag-si, King of Kish
This monarch, as Edzard showed,3 was none other than Enmebaragesi of the King List, twenty-second king of the ‘legendary’ First Dynasty of Kish and the father of Agga who, as we have seen, fought against Gilgamesh. Since another inscription of that king was found at Khafaje in an archaeological context suggesting the end of ED II, and since Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, had seven successors whose reasonably long reigns totalled 140 years before his dynasty was overthrown by Mesannepadda, we may safely assume that Mebaragesi reigned around 2700 B.C. and take that date as a provisional starting-point for the history of ancient Iraq.
The twenty-one kings of Kish preceding Mebaragesi and the four contemporary kings of Uruk preceding Gilgamesh would nicely fill the gap between 2900 and 2700 B.C., provided we ignore the incredibly long reign assigned to each of them by the Sumerian King List. There is no reason to doubt that these monarchs existed, despite the fact that they were later turned into heroes and semigods, but we have no genuine royal inscription from these three centuries, and our knowledge of ED I and ED II is entirely based on archaeological data, the archaic texts from Ur (ED I or ED II) being extremely difficult to understand and of limited historical interest.
From about 2500 B.C. onwards, however, we have just enough royal inscriptions, as well as economic, legal, administrative and even literary texts – notably from Fara, Abu Salabikh and, later, Girsu4 – to sketch a rough outline of the political and social history of Sumer. But apart from a few very short inscriptions (mostly kings' names) found at Mari, on the middle Euphrates, and from fragments of inscribed vases and statuettes discovered at Khafaje, in the Diyala valley, all these texts come from southern Mesopotamia, the northern part of this country remaining regrettably illiterate. However, one must not lose all hope, and the thousands of clay tablets recently found at Ebla show us that archaeology may still hold many surprises.
The impact of this discovery cannot be fully appreciated unless one remembers that until 1974 virtually nothing was known about Northern Syria in the third millennium B.C. By a stroke of good luck, in that and the following two years the Italian archaeologists who during a decade had been excavating at Tell Mardik – a large mound lying sixty kilometres south-west of Aleppo – brought to light, in the ruins of a palace dated 2400 – 2250 B.C., some fifteen thousand clay tablets bearing cuneiform signs of the type used in the Sumerian city of Kish.5 Many words and sentences were written in Sumerian ‘logograms’ but others, written in syllables, left no doubt that Tell Mardik was the ancient city of Ebla – a name that had previously appeared in a handful of Mesopotamian texts – and that the language spoken at Ebla was a hitherto unknown Semitic language, promptly baptized ‘Eblaite’, which to some extent differed from Akkadian and from the West-Semitic languages (Amorrite, Cananaean) of the second millennium B.C.
As these tablets were slowly being deciphered, their importance became increasingly obvious. Not only did they reveal that Ebla was the capital city of a relatively large and powerful North Syrian kingdom, but they provided a wealth of information on the organization, social structure, economic system, diplomatic and commercial relations, areas of influence and cultural affinities of this long forgotten kingdom. No Sumerian city-state of the Early Dynastic period has left us such vast and detailed archives, but with a few exceptions (see page 142) the contribution of the Ebla texts to the history of ancient Mesopotamia, although non-negligible, has up to now remained limited, and as more of these texts are being published, it does not seem that this situation will be greatly modified.
The Archaeological Context
Surface exploration and excavations have shown that at the beginning of the third millennium B.C. the urbanization process, which had commenced during the Uruk period, reached its acme, involving the whole of Mesopotamia. In southern Iraq many villages disappeared to the benefit of already large or growing cities, the best example being Uruk which became a huge metropolis covering more than 400 hectares and giving shelter to 40 or 50,000 inhabitants. At the same time, urban centres appeared or developed from proto-historic settlements in the northern part of Iraq. The best known of these towns are Mari (Tell Hariri),6 half-way between northern Syria and Sumer, Assur (Qala‘at Sherqat),7 ninety kilometres south of Nineveh (opposite modern Mosul), and others of unknown ancient name but which must have been important: Tell Taya, for instance, at the foot of Jabal Sinjar,8 and Tell Khueira on the TurkeySyria border, between the rivers Balikh and Khabur.9 Urban growth, exceptionally coupled with rural proliferation, also occurred in the Diayala basin, north-east of Baghdad, where surveys have revealed the traces of ten major cities, nineteen small towns and sixty-seven villages in a area of about 900 square kilometres. Incidentally, it is to the American archaeologists who, in the 1930s, excavated three sites in this region, Tell Asmar (Eshnunna), Khafaje (Tutub) and Tell ‘Aqrab, that we owe the classical and sometimes criticized tripartite division of the Early Dynastic period.10
As a rule, the Mesopotamian towns of the early third millennium B.C. were surrounded by a wall, sometimes double and often reinforced by towers. These fortifications bespeak of frequent wars, and this is supported in Sumer by ED III texts mentioning struggles between city-states and against foreign invaders. We shall never know, however, who were the enemies so much feared by the inhabitants of Tell Taya that they built a citadel and raised their city wall on a three-metre high stone base.
With few exceptions, all the northern towns were subjected to varying degrees of Sumerian influence in matters of art, religious architecture and sometimes pottery and glyptics. How this came about remains uncertain. Some authors have postulated the existence of ‘Sumerian colonies’ in the midst of predominantly Semitic populations, but there is no textual or archaeological evidence to support this theory, at least in the Early Dynastic period, and the most plausible carriers of Sumerian culture would be itinerant artisans and merchants.
Most archaeologists agree that the Early Dynastic period culture is issued from the Uruk-Jemdat Nasr culture, and this is true in many respects, but some discontinuities are striking and raise difficult questions. Thus, there seemed in the ED II period to disappear, for an unknown reason, before the end of ED III, a very peculiar and diagnostic buil
ding material which has never been used in Mesopotamia before and after: the so-called ‘plano-convex’ bricks, shaped like flat-based bread loaves, laid on their edges and arranged in a herring-bone pattern. A more important problem is the quasi-total abandonment of the classical ‘tripartite’ Mesopotamian sanctuaries and their replacement by temples and shrines of various plans and sizes,11 some of them often indistinguishable from the surrounding houses until one went inside, others standing alone, like the large and splendid ‘oval temple’ of Khafaje, with its two eccentric enclosures and its cella raised on a platform; this type of temple goes back to the Uruk period (oval temple of Tell ‘Uqair). Some Early Dynastic sanctuaries clearly reflect non-Mesopotamian influences, possibly for geographical reasons. At Mari, for instance, the temple of the local goddess Nini-zaza contained a conical monolith, a baetyl, which would have been at home in an open-air West-Semitic temple of Syria or Palestine. Further north, the multiple temples of Tell Khueira, so near to the present Turkish border, rest on stone bases and have open porticoes that are reminiscent of Anatolian dwelling-houses.
