The Epic of Gilgamesh - Anonymous [13]
The great friendship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu that begins with a wrestling bout in Uruk is the link that connects all the episodes of the story. Even in a dream, before he had seen Enkidu, Gilgamesh was drawn to him by an attraction ‘like the love of woman’. After the meeting Enkidu becomes ‘a younger brother’; a ‘dear friend’, though in the Sumerian poems, in which there is no early history of Enkidu, the master and servant relationship is stressed to a greater degree. It is Enkidu who brings news of the mysterious cedar forest and its monstrous guardian, the encounter with whom is the subject of the second episode.
The journey to the forest and the ensuing battle can be read on different planes of reality, like medieval allegory. The forest is an actual forest, sometimes the Amanus in north Syria, or perhaps in Elam in south-west Persia; but it is also the home of uncanny powers and the scene of strange adventures like those of Celtic heroes and medieval knights; and it is the dark forest of the soul. On the first level, the historical, the need of the cities for timber is the motive for the whole expedition. Gilgamesh, the young king of Uruk, wishes to display his power and ambition by building great walls and temples, as did Sargon of Agade and Gudea of Lagash. But strange tribes lived in the mountains who would resist any attempt at removing the cedars by force. There must be fighting before the valuable commodity can be shipped away, and in battle the gods of the forest tribes would fight behind their own people: therefore it was essential to enlist against them some one of the great Mesopotamian gods, and use his stronger magic against their magic. Shamash is won over with promises of a new temple to be built in his honour, and he gives his special protection to the enterprise. Among the terrors of the mountains were earthquake and volcano. A geological fault runs across Anatolia and through Armenia, and volcanoes may still have been active as late as the third millennium B.C., a fact which adds interest to the accurate description of a volcano in eruption which is contained in one of the dreams which comes to Gilgamesh on the Cedar Mountain.
On the second level this episode is an adventure. Two young heroes set out to win fame; the mountains and the cedars, with their guardian, are the challenge beyond the horizon of the everyday world. They go armed but alone, and alone they meet the giant Humbaba, who has been variously identified as a North-Syrian, Anatolian or Elamite god, according as to whether the journey is visualized as leading to the northern or the eastern mountains. He protects the forest with various enchantments; though the enchanted gate which Enkidu is supposed to open, to his hurt, may be a misunderstanding. When it reappears later, in his death-bed conversation, it is a gate in Uruk that is meant, the wood of which has come from the forest. Then there is a mysterious sleep which overcomes Gilgamesh as soon as he has felled the great cedar; and when at last Humbaba is tracked down in the deepest part of the forest, he almost overwhelms Gilgamesh with his ‘nod’ and the ‘eye’ of death. He is only subdued with the help of Shamash and the eight winds. These are a very potent weapon, for it was with the winds that the god Marduk overcame the primeval waters of chaos in the battle at the beginning of the world, as told in the Enuma Elish.
There is a third level also, for Humbaba is ‘Evil’. The first time he is referred to it is simply this, ‘Because of the evil that is in the land, we will go to the forest and destroy the evil’ ; so Gilgamesh plays the part of the knight who kills the dragon. Although in the conflict the two companions triumph, because they have taken sides amongst the gods using the weapons of Shamash to destroy the protégé of Enlil, they have incurred the anger of the quick-tempered, rancorous storm-god, and for this they will suffer later. In one view, indeed, the whole forest episode is a cruel trap set by Enlil in order