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By Root 305 0

for wishing to forget Assyria, Babylon, and all that concerned them, except as a cautionary tale. Moreover, the century in which Nineveh fell was the same that saw the emergence of the modern poetic forms of the lyric and choral ode written in alphabetic script. But if Greek lyric of the seventh century is modern, the Greek Epic still belonged in part to the same legendary world as Gilgamesh the king of ancient Uruk. It would have been historically possible for the poet of the Odyssey to hear the story of Gilgamesh, not garbled but direct, for ships from Ionia and the Islands were already trading on the Syrian coast. At Al Mina and at Tarsus the Greeks were in contact with Assyrians. It is unlikely, but not impossible, that Assurbanipal heard a Greek story-teller reciting the Iliad in Nineveh.

It is possible that rather too much has been made recently of the apparent similarities between early Greek and western Asiatic mythology and legend. This is not the place to chase those beguiling will-o’-the-wisps of criticism: whether Gilgamesh was a prototype of Odysseus or wielded the club of Heracles. It is less a case of prototypes and parentage than of similar atmosphere. The world inhabited by Greek bards and Assyrian scribes, in the eighth and seventh centuries, was small enough for there to have been some contact between them; and the trading voyages of Greek merchants and adventurers provide a likely setting for the exchange of stories; particularly if the ground had been prepared, centuries earlier, by Bronze-Age Mycenaeans in their contacts with the people of Syria, and possibly with the Hittites of Anatolia. Therefore it is not surprising that Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and Humbaba should seem to inhabit the same universe as the gods and mortals of the HomericHymns, Hesiod’s Theogony, and the Odyssey. Common to all is the mise-en-scène, a world in which gods and demi-gods fraternize with men on a fragment of known earth which is surrounded by the unknown waters of Ocean and the Abyss. These men occasionally emerge from the penumbra of myth and magic as sympathetic, recognizable human beings, such as the Homeric heroes, and with them is Gilgamesh of Uruk.

When the Babylonian gods and their universe went underground it was only to reappear in later Mediterranean religions, and particularly in Gnostic beliefs; so too the heroes were transformed and survived, travelling westward as well as east. Gilgamesh has been recognized in the medieval Alexander, and some of his adventures may have been transferred to the romances. So perhaps behind the Welsh Cynon, behind Owen and Ivain, behind Sir Gawain searching for the Green Chapel through the northern winter forest with its oak trees and trailing moss, behind Dermot fighting the ‘wild man’ at the fountain (which is the way to the country under the waves) there is still the Sumerian Country of the Living, the Cedar Forest and the Silver Mountain, Amanus, Elam, Lebanon. These are stories of folklore and romance which run back from the medieval courts through Celtic legend and minstrelsy to archaic Sumer, and perhaps further, to the very beginning of story-telling. Although the Sumerian hero is not an older Odysseus, nor Heracles, nor Samson, nor Dermot, nor Gawain, yet it is possible that none of these would be remembered in the way he is if the story of Gilgamesh had never been told.

Today ours is a world as violent and unpredictable as that of Assurbanipal, the king of Assyria, the Great King, king of the World, and of Nahum of Judea, and even of the historical Gilgamesh, the king of Uruk, who made war and sent out expeditions in the third millennium before Christ. The difference is only that for us the ‘swirling stream of Ocean’ lies not over the rim of a flat horizon, but at the end of our telescopes, in the darkness they cannot penetrate, where the eye and its mechanical extensions turn back. Our world may be infinitely larger, but it still ends in the abyss, the upper and nether waters of our ignorance. For us the same demons lie in wait, ‘the Devil in the clock‘, and in the end