Gilgamesh—Like You’ve Never Seen Him Before

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Gilgamesh

Stephen Mitchell
(New York: Free Press, 2004) 290 pp., $24

Gilgamesh is at once our newest and our oldest, most venerable epic poem. Unlike Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, which have been broadly known since their composition around the late eighth century B.C. (except during the medieval Dark Age, when Greek learning was largely lost in the West), the first clay tablets inscribed with the Gilgamesh epic were found just 150 years ago, at the ancient Assyrian site of Nineveh in present-day northern Iraq.

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Since its discovery, the 3,500-year-old Mesopotamian saga has been rendered into English countless times.^a Not until now, however, has it found a translation capable of evoking its great power—a translation vigorous in its narration, translucent in its poetry and incisive in its depiction of our clever, struggling, frail humanity. Stephen Mitchell’s Gilgamesh is a masterpiece of storytelling, or re-telling.

Excavating at Nineveh from 1846 to 1851, the British explorer Austen Henry Layard discovered a library of cuneiform tablets assembled by the last great Assyrian king, Assurbanipal (668–627 B.C.). This library also included documents collected by Assurbanipal’s two immediate predecessors, King Esarhaddon (680–669 B.C.) and King Sennacherib (704–681 B.C.). Layard and his assistant, Hormuzd Rassam, recovered almost 24,000 clay tablets, which they sent back to the British Museum. Among these tablets was the Epic of Gilgamesh, though neither Layard nor Rassam—nor anyone on earth, for that matter—could possibly have known, for neither the script incised on the tablets nor the language it encoded was yet understood.

By the mid-1850s that had changed, due to a brilliant decipherment by the British major-general Henry Creswicke Rawlinson. The language, it turned out, is an East Semitic tongue called Akkadian, different dialects of which were spoken by the Babylonians in the south and the Assyrians in the north; and the script is cuneiform, a wedge-shaped writing, invented by the Sumerians around 3000 B.C. and consisting largely of syllabic signs. An amateur British Assyriologist named George Smith struck up a correspondence with Rawlinson, who, impressed with Smith’s knowledge of Akkadian cuneiform, arranged for him to catalogue the British Museum tablets unearthed by Layard and Rassam. In the early 1870s Smith came across an extended tale that included the story of a great deluge similar to the Flood recounted in the Bible. In his book The Chaldean Account of Genesis (1876), Smith described his discovery of what turned out to be Tablet 11 of the Gilgamesh epic:

“I soon found half of a curious tablet which had evidently contained originally six columns of the text… On looking down the third column, my eye caught the statement that the ship rested on the mountains of Nizir, followed by the account of the sending forth of the dove, and its finding no resting-place and returning. I saw at once that I had here discovered a portion at least of the Chaldean [Babylonian] account of the Deluge.”

In the years since Layard and Rassam excavated at Nineveh, Gilgamesh tablets have turned up all over the Near East. Many of these tablets are considerably older—some more than a thousand years older—than the ones from Assurbanipal’s library, and tell slightly different versions of the story.

Today, after more than a century of archaeological and philological work, we know a good deal about the genesis and development of the Gilgamesh epic. 041Some of the earliest stories in the epic were written down in Sumer, the southernmost (and oldest) Mesopotamian civilization. According to a Sumerian king list, Gilgamesh was the fifth ruler of the Sumerian city of Uruk, which would date his reign around 2700 B.C. Even if this king list is largely fiction and Gilgamesh was not a historical figure, a number of disconnected stories recounting his actions were written down in Sumerian (a language unrelated to any other known language) around the end of the third millennium B.C.

Then, in the first half of the second millennium, the Babylonians collected the stories about Gilgamesh and edited them into a coherent extended tale, written in Akkadian. This earliest form of the Gilgamesh epic is called the Old Babylonian Version. Toward the end of the second millennium B.C., the epic was standardized in an 11-tablet version, now called the Standard Babylonian Version, attributed by tradition to a Babylonian poet-editor named Sin-leqi-unninni. Later still, in the early first millennium B.C., a 12th tablet—telling of Gilgamesh’s death and rebirth as a god of the netherworld—was added to the Standard Babylonian Version. We now have some 73 manuscripts of the Standard Babylonian Version.

This means that stories about Gilgamesh circulated in the Near East for more than 2,000 years—from the late third millennium B.C. through the first century A.D., when the use of cuneiform writing went out of fashion. Given the epic’s hoary antiquity and the immense 042labor required to keep it current (not only was the epic translated into such languages as Hurrian and Hittite, but each copy had to be incised on wet clay tablets, which then had to be dried and stored in special libraries), it clearly mattered deeply to the ancients.

Stephen Mitchell’s translation helps us understand why. The epic we have today is full of gaps (perhaps a third to a fifth of the text is still missing) so that literal translations can be hard to follow. The epic was also composed in a highly stylized manner—with numerous repetitions and parallelisms, for example—consistent with ancient Mesopotamian sensibilities, but not with ours. Mitchell, who cannot read Akkadian cuneiform and therefore relies on the work of earlier scholars (particularly Andrew George and Jean Bottéro), is unfettered by the lacunae and archaisms of the original. As a poet who is also a translator, Mitchell has created an English poem that is a “version” rather than a “translation” of Gilgamesh.

As the poem begins, the giant Gilgamesh is a force of nature in need of civilizing. Like a “wild bull,” he tramples over the poor citizens of Uruk, “takes the son from his father and crushes him, / takes the girl from the mother and uses her.” The Urukians complain to the gods, who create the giant Enkidu to act as a counterweight to Gilgamesh. When the two giants meet they fight; then they embrace, have a cry and undertake a perilous adventure to kill another giant, Humbaba, who lives in the Cedar Forest.

After killing Humbaba, the lads return to Uruk, where Gilgamesh commits a rash act that eventually forces him on a journey to the end of the world: Hespurns the goddess Ishtar, who has become smitten with the conquering hero. “Come here, Gilgamesh,” says Ishtar (in her best Mae West voice), “marry me, give me your luscious fruits, / be my husband, be my sweet man.” Overconfident and unwilling to bend to the fickle goddess of love and war, Gilgamesh insults her: “Why would I want to be the lover / of a broken oven that fails in the cold / a flimsy door that the wind blows through, / a palace that falls on its staunchest defenders / a mouse that gnaws through its thin reed shelter, / tar that blackens a workman’s hands, / a waterskin that is full of holes / and leaks all over its bearer.” Ishtar shrieks with fury and demands justice from Anu, the father of the gods, who sends down the Bull of Heaven, which is slain by Gilgamesh and Enkidu. Angry over the death of the sacred bull, the gods demand blood for blood. Enkidu must die.

Enkidu’s death and, especially, Gilgamesh’s painful grief are recounted in some of Mitchell’s most heart-rending poetry. Gilgamesh weeps through the night, recalling his friend and their adventures, each memory like the lash of a whip. For six days, Gilgamesh refuses to allow Enkidu to be buried, hoping that he might come back to life. Finally the horrible finality of death dawns upon him: “Hear me, elders, hear me, young men, / my beloved friend is dead, he is dead, / my beloved brother is dead, I will mourn / as long as I breathe, I will sob for him / like a woman who has lost her only child.”

Now the adventure story turns serious, and the 043reckless rambunctious youth is transformed, in some large degree, into one of the fundamental figures of epic poetry: the quest hero. Newly and intensely aware of his own mortality, Gilgamesh sets out in search of the one human being granted immortality by the gods: Utnapishtim, survivor of the Great Flood. His quest takes him into the underworld, to a tavern at the world’s edge (where the tavern’s mistress, Shiduri, advises him to drink life to the lees), across the great sea, past the Waters of Death—to the distant land of Utnapishtim, who tells the story of the world-destroying deluge.

Although Utnapishtim does not know the secret of immortality (that belongs to the gods alone), he does tell Gilgamesh how to find a “spiny bush” that will make him a “carefree young man again.” Gilgamesh does indeed find the bush, but a snake steals it from him while he bathes in a spring. So Gilgamesh returns to Uruk, alone with his mortality, destined to become king and thus the custodian of other mortal human beings. The last lines of the epic suggest that one kind of immortality resides in what we create and leave behind, like Uruk itself: “See how its ramparts gleamlike copper in the sun … / observe the land it encloses: the palm trees, the gardens, / the orchards, the glorious palaces and temples, the shops / and marketplaces, the houses, the public squares.”^b

Gilgamesh is about many things—friendship, heroism, maturation (it is the world’s first Bildungsroman, or novel about growing up)—but it is above all about mortality. The Czech-Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke called Gilgamesh “the epic of the fear of death,” and this is what sets the poem alongside our greatest epics, all of which deal with death in some significant way.

But we have not lived with Gilgamesh for very long. The Bible and the Homeric epics, among other great works, have become part of our blood and sinew; we look at the world through them. What would have happened if Gilgamesh had not lain beneath the sightless earth all those years? What if, say, a wandering scribe associated with the Alexandria Library had come across the Standard Babylonian Version of 050the Gilgamesh epic, copied it down, and brought the copy back to the library? Scholars at the library then translated the epic into Greek, giving the Mesopotamian tale good Greek hexameters and preserving knowledge of Akkadian cuneiform. Virgil would have looked back to two great epic traditions: Homer and Gilgamesh. Later poets like Dante and Milton would have known intimately—as well as they knew Virgil’s Aeneid—the story of the Mesopotamian hero who struggles to understand his mortality, longs to comprehend the nature of the gods, and travels across the great Symbolic Sea to meet the man who survived the Flood.

What if Gilgamesh had been intricately woven into the fabric of our literature, and our thought, and our feelings, so that even school children knew it as the oldest of epics, the epic of epics, the Ur-Epic?

We would not be the same.

Gilgamesh is at once our newest and our oldest, most venerable epic poem. Unlike Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, which have been broadly known since their composition around the late eighth century B.C. (except during the medieval Dark Age, when Greek learning was largely lost in the West), the first clay tablets inscribed with the Gilgamesh epic were found just 150 years ago, at the ancient Assyrian site of Nineveh in present-day northern Iraq.