Book Information
Gilgamesh: A New Rendering in English Verse
David Ferry
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York
Copyright 1992
ISBN: 978-0-374-52383-1
The literary critic Harold Bloom said, “One ancient test for the canonical remains fiercely valid: unless it demands rereading, the work does not qualify.” (Bloom, 29) I found this to be true, especially when re-reading Tablet IX of Gilgamesh: A New Rendering in English Verse by David Ferry. After my first read, I formed an interpretation. King Gilgamesh, grieving the loss of his friend Enkidu, sets out on a dangerous journey to Utnapishtim, who, along with his wife, are the only humans granted immortality by the gods. Gilgamesh wants to know how to avoid Enkidu’s fate. Until now, with no father to guide him, all his actions and decisions have been dependent on others. He ignores wise council and chooses adventure and bravado over steadfastness and duty. Upon Enkidu’s death, his solitary trek to Utnapishtim is both a testament to his bravery and a sign that he has not yet fully matured. His aloneness amplifies his terror. On the way, he has violent and confusing dreams like those he had on his journey with Enkidu to the Cedar Forest. Only now he awakens to find no one to reassure him. Bravely, he forces himself to continue. It is on this journey that we begin to feel sympathy toward him. Yet there is also disappointment in him because of his choice to abandon his subjects and indulgently seek immortality.
Upon my first reading, I interpreted Gilgamesh’s self-centeredness as playing out against the tension between old and new religious beliefs. He reflected the priorities of the patriarchal and sky-god worshiping society. These clashed with the old mother-goddess worshiping ways. On his journey to Utnapishtim, he passed through a gate that connects the sky with Mother Earth. According to the Oxford Companion to World Mythology, “The representation of the sky as a god, like that of the earth as a goddess, is ubiquitous and ancient: Father Sky and Mother Earth is a natural prehistoric mythological metaphor. Later, in a more specific sense, sky gods, as opposed to earth deities, represent a value system or worldview in which supreme transcendent, ruling, and usually creator deities are seen as living ‘on high’… out of the immediate reach of humans, whereas earth goddesses are essentially earth itself, the world we live in and depend on for nourishment… The more agricultural, matriarchal, or even merely matrilineal the culture, the more important goddesses tend to be; the more patriarchal, military, and urban oriented the culture, the more important the sky gods become.” (Leeming 359)
While there is nothing wrong with my interpretation, it does reflect the priorities of my time - those of a modern reader brought up on twentieth century psychological and feminist ideas. David Leeming, editor of The Oxford Companion to World Mythology, reminds us that “Our heroes reflect our priorities.” (Leeming 179) Given my modern perspective and prejudices, I had difficulty liking and understanding Gilgamesh. I saw him only as what the literary critic Northrop Frye described as a ‘dingy hero,’ because his priorities seemed out of order.
Harold Bloom’s suggestion came to mind when I read Tablet IX for the second time. I wondered, what were society’s priorities in ancient times? In the case of Gilgamesh, one must ask, which ancient times? During the reign of the ‘real’ Sumerian King Gilgamesh around 2650 BCE? Or in Babylon, a thousand years later when the individual myths about the hero-king were standardized into what we now call “The Epic of Gilgamesh”? I sought to understand more about civilization at the time when Gilgamesh is assumed to have reigned. I read two books: Man Makes Himself, by V. Gordon Childe (archaeologist) and Sumerian Mythology by Samuel Noah Kramer (Assyriologist). Additionally, I studied The Anchor Atlas of World History, Vol. I.
In Man Makes Himself, Childe discusses the societal shifts that occurred during the transition from the Paleolithic (Old Stone Age) to Neolithic (New Stone Age) archaeological periods. He says, “… by 3000 BC, the archaeologist's picture of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Indus Valley, no longer focuses attention on communities of simple farmers, but on States embracing various professional classes.” (Childe 142) According to The Anchor Atlas of World History, Vol. I, around “3200-2800 the Sumerians settled in Southern Mesopotamia… Their origin is unknown; it is possible that they came from the East and were related to the creators of the Indus Valley civilization. The land was divided into city-states. The centres of the cities were the monumental temples, erected on rising terraces of bricks, the walls decorated with colored plugs of clay in mosaic fashion. They were located in districts dedicated to the god to whom the land belonged. Possessors of political power and the chief of the high priests were the local princes… They dominated both priesthood and city.” (Kinder 27)
Based on these reading, I started to form a mental image of societal priorities in the third millennium BCE: statehood over individualism; specialization over generalization; organized religion; building of sacred architecture; and political power. In the standardized version of the Epic of Gilgamesh, the mythic Gilgamesh builds the first temple in Uruk. While the standardized version is a thousand years removed from the life of the ‘real’ king Gilgamesh, the original, and much older, Sumerian myths about him suggest that his near contemporaries believed he built the temple. In these stories, he is referred to by his Sumerian name, Bilgames. According to Andrew George, Assyriologist, “These are not the same as the Babylonian Gilgamesh epic, … but separate and individual tales without common themes… it is entirely possible that the poems stem ultimately from an older, oral tradition.” (George xix-xx) In one of these early poems, The Death of Bilgames, Gilgamesh is the builder of temples:
“Your [matter] – having travelled each and every road,
having fetched that unique cedar down from its mountain,
having smitten Huwawa in his forest,
having set up [monuments] for future days,
having founded [temples of the gods,]
you reached [Ziusudra in his abode!]” (George 202)
Whether or not the ‘real’ King Gilgamesh built the temple, we are now beginning to understand what society prioritized at this time. Other Sumerian myths give further insight into society’s values. In Sumerian Mythology, Samuel Noah Kramer discusses the myth – Inanna and Enki: the Transfer of the Arts of Civilization from Eridu to Erech. (Erech is the Biblical name for Uruk. See Genesis 10:10) This myth forms, “the basis of the cultural pattern of Sumerian civilization” (Kramer 66) Enki, Ocean God, presents divine decrees to Inanna (Ishtar) including decrees about lordship, godship, kingship, truth, descent into the nether world and ascent from it, the flood, eldership, heroship and power, enmity, goodness and justice, wisdom and understanding, the troubled heart, judgment and decision. There are over a hundred in total. The decrees I chose to list here relate specifically to the mythic Gilgamesh and his exploits.
The Sumerians prioritized godship and kingship which were physically represented by the temple. According to Childe, “…the erection of such a monument required more than labourers and their food. The whole was carefully planned: the artificial mountain was laid out with its corners to the cardinal points. A centralized directing force was requisite… Thus the first temple at Erech reveals a community, raised to the dignity of a city, disposing of a surplus of real wealth accumulated in the hands of a deity and administered by a corporation of priests.” (Childe 145-146) Childe further describes the evolving role of the leader: “…by 3000 BCE there is already emerging beside the deity in every city a temporal potentate. He styles himself humbly the god’s ‘viceregent,’ but also boldly ‘king’… [T]he king fulfilled essential economic functions… He was possessed of the material power of a civil ruler and a military commander… Early kings boast of their economic activities – of cutting canals, of building temples, of importing timber from Syria…“ (Childe 154-155)
Childe reminds us of the opening lines of David Ferry’s rendering of the epic:
“He built Uruk. He built the keeping place
of Anu and Ishtar. The outer wall
shines in the sun like brightest copper; the inner
wall is beyond the imagining of kings.
Study the brickwork, study the fortification;
climb the great ancient staircase to the terrace;
study how it is made; from the terrace see
the planted and fallow fields, the ponds and orchards.” (Ferry, 3)
We have read of Gilgamesh’s exploits, and we realize that they are fiction, intended, as Northrop Frye suggests with his analogy of the ‘dingy hero,’ to teach the reader a lesson about how a hero should, and should not, behave. It is in these opening lines, however, spoken in third person by Gilgamesh himself as he looks back on his life, that we sense what the true priorities of the human king were.
Bibliography
Childe, V. Gordon. Man Makes Himself. Nottingham: Spokesman, 2003.
George, Andrew. The Epic of Gilgamesh: The Babylonian Epic Poem and Other Texts in Akkadian and Sumerian. London: Penguin Books, 1999.
Kinder, Hermann and Hilgemann, Werner. The Anchor Atlas of World History, Volume I. Garden City: Anchor Books, 1974.
Kramer, Samuel Noah. Sumerian Mythology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972.
Leeming, David. The Oxford Companion to World Mythology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
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