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By Root 270 0

western horizon beyond whose ultimate range Shamash disappears at sundown and from which he returns at dawn; it is at the same time the wall of heaven and the gate of hell. The Sumerians thought of the sun as asleep through the night in the bosom of his mother earth, but the Semites held that he continued his journey in a boat, passing under the earth and over the waters of the underworld, till he came to the eastern mountain, to rise up in the morning with his bride the dawn. Gilgamesh in his journey through the mountain called Mashu retraces on foot the sun’s journey; the twin peaks are both sunrise and sunset, and the goal at the end is the sun’s garden by the shores of Ocean.

This garden of the gods is not the heavenly abode, but rather an earthly paradise, the country of the dawn ‘Eastward in Eden’. But in contrast to the land of Dilmun, where the survivor of the flood was taken to live for ever, it is on this side of the waters of death. The episode survives, unfortunately, in a very fragmentary state, and the account of the wonders of the garden with its jewelled fruit is nearly lost; only enough remains to give us one of the rare hints of Eden-garden which survive in old Semitic. Here the sun walks in the early morning and sees Gilgamesh as an unkempt and desperate man; he remonstrates with him, but in spite of the god’s warning that his quest is certain to fail, Gilgamesh is driven on. In a house beside the sea he finds the woman Siduri with her vineyards and wine-vats. She is also called Sabit which once meant ‘barmaid’ before it became a proper name. There may also be a connection between this name and that of the Chaldean Sibyl in Berossus. She is an enigmatic figure never explained, but her language is like that of Circe, herself a daughter of the sun, whose island home lay in the sea, where east and west were confused, and which grew magic herbs and moly. Like Circe and like her son Comus, Siduri dispenses the ‘philosophy’ of eat, drink, and be merry ‘for this too is the lot of man’. Thefigure of the wine-bearer was still used by medieval Sūfī poets for whom it was the symbol of ‘reality revealed’. From Siduri, Gilgamesh received instruction how to cross the waters of death, much as Odysseus had directions from Circe for the way to Hades, across the ‘river of Ocean’. But Gilgamesh, unlike Odysseus, is alone and has no boat; he must find the ferryman, and the directions are doubtful. There is another great difference, for though it entails crossing Ocean and the waters of death, this is not an underworld journey, nor is the boatman Urshanabi a ferryman of the dead. It is still the journey the sun takes every night to ‘the place of transit at the mouth of the rivers’. To reach Utnapishtim ‘the Faraway’, Gilgamesh must cross the same Ocean which was the last boundary of the known or knowable earth to all the ancients, Greeks, Semites, or Sumerians. It was an impassable barrier because it communicated with the waters of death and with the abyss, ‘Absu’, the waters that are above the firmament. Even sophisticated Romans were afraid of the Atlantic; and Caesar’s crossing to Britain was considered an act of almost superhuman daring, because, unlike the Mediterranean Sea, the English Channel was the beginning of Ocean.

For the Sumerians, Ocean was somewhere out beyond the Persian Gulf, and there too was Dilmun, where the rivers ran into the sea, so that ‘the mouth of the rivers’ is exactly equivalent to the Greek ‘springs of Ocean’, there were the Elysian Fields and the blessed isles of Homer and Hesiod, ‘towards night, in the far west in a soft meadow among spring flowers’. Like them, Dilmun was not for the ordinary dead. Utnapishtim did not die, but was singled out to live there for ever like Menelaus among Greek heroes, when he was sent to ‘the Elysian plain at the world’s end, to join red-haired Rhadaman-thus in the land where living is made easiest for mankind, where no snow falls, no strong winds blow, and there is never any rain, but day after day the West Wind’s tuneful breeze comes in from Ocean to refresh