The Epic of Gilgamesh - Anonymous [17]
That part of our texts which described the meeting of Gilgamesh with the boatman and their embarkation, in spite of recent publication of a little additional material, is still very defective. Certain seals show two figures, which may be Gilgamesh and Urshanabi, sailing in a boat with a serpent prow. This prow may explain the serpent which is referred to during the meeting between Gilgamesh and the Ferryman; but the nature of the ‘Things of Stone’, which Gilgamesh rashly smashes, remains mysterious and unexplained. All that can yet be said of them is that their destruction makes necessary the use of punting poles, and that they are connected in some way with ‘wings’ or ‘winged beings or figures’, but beyond this ‘they retain for the present most of their secrets’ as Professor Gadd, in a discussion of the new texts, wrote in 1966.
The encounter of Gilgamesh with Utnapishtim ‘the Faraway’ begins with one of those set pieces of ‘Wisdom’, all of which, like Siduri’s exhortation to a life of carefree pleasure, while having a very pessimistic tone, seem intended to reconcile man to his lot on earth. It is followed by Utnapishtim’s account of the flood. This is the best preserved of all the tablets in the Assyrian version, with over 300 extant lines. I have already referred to the older versions unconnected with Gilgamesh: the Sumerian ‘Deluge’, in which Ziusudra stands in the place of Noah or Utnapishtim, and the old Babylonian Atra-hasīs. There is a remarkable resemblance between the story told in Genesis and the Gilgamesh tablet, but there are also striking differences. In Genesis the city is not named, but in the other versions it is usually Shurrupak, the modem Fara, and one of the first of the Sumerian city-states to gain a pre-eminent position.
The account of the eleventh tablet begins with a council of gods. Such councils never boded any good for men and this is no exception. There is no explanation of the immediate cause of the gods’ decision to destroy mankind. Probably it was much the same as in Genesis: ‘The earth was corrupt before God, and the earth was full of violence’, for later there is talk of ‘laying his sin upon the sinner’. In the Sumerian story the account of the flood follows that of the creation of man, vegetation and animals, the institution of kingship and of the proper worship of the gods. Then unfortunately there is a long break in the text, which has obliterated the cause of the gods’ wrath and their decision to destroy mankind by flood, It may be suggestive that the last decipherable phrase is connected with the cleaning and irrigation of small rivers. When the story does become intelligible the gods are divided much as in the eleventh tablet of Gilgamesh. Other flood stories were known in ancient Mesopotamia but the earliest Sumerian literary reference does not seem to be much older than the Old Babylonian Atra-hasis of the early second millennium. In this poem the flood follows pestilence, famine and drought, each designed to exterminate mankind. In the definitive edition of W. G. Lambert and A. R. Millard these lines occur:
Twelve hundred years had not yet passed
When the land extended and the people multiplied,
The land was bellowing like a bull,
The god got disturbed with their uproar.
Enlil heard their noise...
The description of the flood itself in Tablet III has so much in common with the language of Gilgamesh Tablet XI that it seems the latter must have been modelled upon it, or rather upon some lost Middle Babylonian recension.
In the Gilgamesh flood Ishtar, and Enlil are as usual the advocates of destruction. Ishtar speaks, perhaps in her capacity as goddess