The Epic of Gilgamesh - Anonymous [7]
Of the early literary writings the Enmerkar poems, as they stand, are less heroic tales than argumentative contests and disputes. Not enough of the Lugulbanda cycle has yet been translated to judge how far it is heroic and epic in character. Most of the remaining Sumerian poems are either hymns and laments addressed to the gods, or are concerned with their attributes and activities. A number of ‘epics’, all more or less fragmentary, are known from the Old Babylonian and later periods, but the protagonists are usually gods and monsters. Gilgamesh is the one human character of heroic stature who has survived, though heroic fragments may be embedded in other material, as the ‘Song of Deborah’ is set in the Book of Judges.
5. The Hero of the Epic
Our enjoyment of the story is not seriously affected by whether or not there was a historical Gilgamesh; but scholars have in fact been able recently to establish beyond doubt that a man, a king, named Gilgamesh lived and reigned in Uruk at some time during the first half of the third millennium. Controversy is limited now to whether he lived around 2700 or some hundred or so years later. Names of the forerunners and contemporaries of Gilgamesh have been found written on bricks and vases; while two semi-historical documents, the ‘Sumerian King-List’ already referred to, and the so-called ‘History of Tummul’ give conflicting historical and genealogical evidence. According to the first, Gilgamesh is fifth in line from the founding of the first dynasty of Uruk (after the flood) and reigned 126 years, but his son reigned a mere thirty years, and thereafter kings lived and reigned an ordinary human term. The Tummul document, also dating from the beginning of the second millennium, tells that Gilgamesh rebuilt the shrine of the goddess Ninlil in Nippur, following an earlier restoration by kings of Kish.
The various chronological ambiguities are of minor importance compared to the establishment of Gilgamesh as an historical person: a king who probably led a successful expedition to bring back timber from the forests of the north and who was certainly a great builder. The walls of Uruk were a by-word, but they were not yet of burnt brick; this is an anachronism possibly due to misunderstanding of an earlier text by later redactors.
Remembered was the superior quality of the ‘plano-convex’ bricks used in the construction of the fortifications. Excavations at Warka have shown the magnificence of the temple buildings even in the proto-literate period; but Gilgamesh was also remembered as a just judge, and later report made him, like Minos of Crete, a judge in the Underworld, one to whom prayers were addressed and who was invoked by incantation and ritual. One prayer begins, ‘Gilgamesh, supreme king, judge of the Anunnaki’.
At the beginning of the poem the hero is described. He is two parts god and one part man, for his mother was a goddess like the mother of Achilles. From her he inherited great beauty, strength, and restlessness. From his father he inherited mortality. There are many strands in the story, but this is the tragedy: the conflict between the desires of the god and the destiny of the man. The mother of Gilgamesh was