The Epic of Gilgamesh - Anonymous [24]
There are one or two other points that need explanation. I have omitted altogether Humbaba’s hypothetical ‘Watchman’ at the Gate, because I think it is always Humbaba himself who is referred to. Though the language is ambiguous, a second watchman is not mentioned again and would be superfluous. The Old Babylonian fragment describing the killing of Humbaba I have used in full, after the Sumerian account, though they may really overlap. I have very slightly altered the sequence of lines at the beginning of the last journey (Assyrian Tablet IX); this is in order to state the motive for the journey as early as possible. Additional lines for the ‘Garden of the Gods’ are based on the translation of L. Oppenheim (Orientalia 17, 1948, 47-8). The same source gives the simile of the ‘wool’ for sleep. The ‘Things of Stone’ which Gilgamesh smashes before embarking with Urshanabi defy explanation at present. The sweet-water current along with the movements of Gilgamesh and Urshanabi when they leave Utnapishtim are difficult to follow; I have used a clue given by Speiser in Ancient Near Eastern Texts (p. 96, n. 232). The statement that Gilgamesh returned ‘through the gate by which he had come’ is taken from the words of the wife of Utnapishtim (Heidel XI, lines 207-8). Something is necessary here to mark the transition.
In the enumeration of names at the end of the Sumerian ‘Death of Gilgamesh’ I have left out two pairs which appear to belong to personages about whom nothing is known; for the others I have added an explanatory epithet, so that the names may convey a hint of what is implied in this catalogue. I have left them in their Sumerian forms. At three points I have borrowed a few lines from other epics. At the beginning of the account of the flood I have inserted the lines of explanation for the wrath of Enlil taken from the flood narrative in the Old BabylonianEpic (see below p. 57); they are the lines beginning ‘In those days the world teemed, the people multiplied...’ Again at the end of Enkidu’s dream of the underworld, the simile of the bailiff is taken from the Assyrian ‘Vision of the Nether World’, in which the whole passage has a fairly close parallel, while the lines describing the position of Dilmun come from the Sumerian ‘Deluge’. A short resume of the division of the material on the tablets will be found in the Appendix.
July 1959 (1972) N. K. s.
Since the publication of this version of the Epic of Gilgamesh in 1960, decipherment of fresh tablets, and study of those already known, has added much to our understanding of the Epic itself, and of its historical and literary background. Gilgamesh was the subject of a meeting of the ‘Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale’, the proceedings of which have been published as Gilgameš et sa légende,Cahiers du Groupe François-Thureau-Dangin, I, Paris 1960. Here are to be found a full bibliography, new textual material and discussions. Among the substantial additions of which, in spite of some contradictions, I have made use, is a new Sumerian account of the Humbaba (Huwawa) episode (J. van Dijk). The difficulties inseparable from this sort of interpretation can be seen in the fact that ‘the felled cedars’, and the tying and laying down of the branches, of one translation, have become, in another, ‘aura coats’, rosettes or’ sleeping camp-followers’. Another addition comes at a point where the text is particularly defective; the crisis of the meeting between Humbaba and Gilgamesh. To the Sumerian and Old Babylonian can now be added a Hittite tablet from Boghazköy, written down in the thirteenth century, and containing what is probably the Hurrian tradition concerning this episode, in which the hero may have been Humbaba, not Gilgamesh (H. Otten, 1958). The language is much like that known from other Hittite myths; and a single tablet covers the course of events from the endowing of Gilgamesh by the gods to the killing of Humbaba.