Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [74]
In his recent, modern-English version of Gilgamesh, translator Stephen Mitchell hints at this atmosphere in the streets of old Mesopotamia:
Every day is a festival in Uruk,
with people singing and dancing in the streets,
musicians playing their lyres and drums,
the lovely priestesses standing before
the temple of Ishtar, chatting and laughing,
flushed with sexual joy, and ready
to serve men’s pleasure, in honor of the goddess,
so that even old men are aroused from their beds.
—GILGAMESH
In every city of ancient Sumer, and other Mesopotamian cities, pairs of temples were dedicated to Inanna and her husband Dumuzi. In the annual marriage ceremony on New Year’s Day, the king of each city would impersonate Dumuzi, and a priestess—or possibly a cultic prostitute—would portray Inanna in a ritual intended to ensure fertility and prosperity. In some early accounts, this rite was actually a sacrificial one, and the figures representing Dumuzi and Inanna were killed every eight years. Some archaeological finds suggest that the king was killed along with a large group of family members and retainers. But over time that idea undoubtedly proved unpopular with the kings, who were stand-ins for Dumuzi, and the ritual evolved, with the “death” becoming ceremonial. In later times, the sacrifice was performed symbolically, and the king—or his stand-in—was merely struck.
The city of Uruk and Inanna play central roles in the most enduring work of Mesopotamian literature, an epic poem called Gilgamesh.
MYTHIC VOICES
As king, Gilgamesh was a tyrant to his people.
He demanded, from an old birthright,
The privilege of sleeping with their brides
Before the husbands were permitted.
—from Gilgamesh: A Verse Narrative translated by Herbert Mason
Who was mythology’s first superhero?
Kids today, as always, grow up in a world saturated with superheroes. Comic books, movies, cartoons, and video games all provide a steady diet of Superman, Spider-Man, Hulk, and a host of heroes—some old, some new. With supernatural powers that allow them to defeat evil and danger, these superheroes are also almost always tempered by some flaw, some bit of humanity that hints at the weakness and faults that lie within every mortal.
The first such character in literary history is probably the hero—or antihero—of Gilgamesh, which is widely considered the oldest epic poem in world literature. Its central character, a semidivine king named Gilgamesh, who possesses unusual powers and an oversized ego to go with them, is arguably the world’s first superhero. Model for many successive flawed heroes, Gilgamesh is the man who seemingly has it all, but sets off on a series of quests, seeking to become more noble, or enlightened—or immortal—in the process.
A powerful king of Uruk, Gilgamesh claims that he is two-thirds god and one-third man. A perfect physical specimen, a skilled athlete and sex machine, Gilgamesh forces the young men of his city to work building the walls of the city and routinely rapes all the young maidens in Uruk, a tradition that continued into European feudal history as the droit du seigneur (“the right of the lord”). Worn out by his demands, the people of Uruk pray for help, and the gods fashion a creature named Enkidu—a mythical prototype for Frankenstein, the Golem, and other mythical monsters—to challenge Gilgamesh. Covered in shaggy hair, Enkidu is more beast than man, eating and drinking with the gazelles and cattle.
A young hunter sees Enkidu in the woods and tells his father about this wild man. His father says they must tell King Gilgamesh about him. Instead of going to fight the man-beast, Gilgamesh enlists the aid of Shamhat, a prostitute from the temple of Ishtar, to do the work of taming Enkidu.
Shamhat is no ordinary “streetwalker.” In Stephen Mitchell