Gilgamesh (18 page)

p. 6,
Sîn-lēqi-unninni:
His name means “Sîn [the moon god] is the One Who Accepts a Prayer” (or less probably, according to George, the name is Sîn-liqe-unninnï, “O Sîn, Accept my Prayer!”). “The first-millennium catalogue of cuneiform literature which says that ‘the series
Gilgamesh
(is) according to Sîn-lëqi-unninni the ex[orcist-priest]' … was doubtless understood to mean that Sîn-lēqi-unninni was the author of the late version, since that was the only version known in that period. The very fact that the epic is attributed to him indicates that Sîn-lēqi-unninni must have made some important, perhaps definitive, contribution to its formulation. It is certainly possible that he was the editor of the late version, but that is not necessarily the case. It often happens that a work of literature is attributed to a figure who made a decisive contribution to its development, even though a later form of that work is the one actually in use … It is possible that Sîn-lēqi-unninni produced a Middle Babylonian form of
Gilgamesh
which had a substantial enough influence on the final form of the epic to associate his name with it permanently, but that the form found in the first-millennium copies was a later revision of Sîn-lëqi-unninni's text. Still, it is equally possible that he was the editor of the late version” (Tigay, p. 246).

p. 6,
Standard Version:
The Standard Version “is known from a total of 73 manuscripts extant: the 35 that have survived from the libraries of King Ashurbanipal at Nineveh, 8 more tablets and fragments from three other Assyrian cities (Ashur, Kalah and Huzirina), and 30 from Babylonia, especially the cities of Babylon and Uruk … The eleven tablets of the epic vary in length from 183 to 326 lines of poetry so that the whole composition would originally have been about 3,000 lines long [the same length as
Beowulf
-
S.M.
]. As the text now stands, only Tablets I, VI, X and XI are more or less complete. Leaving aside lines that are lost but can be restored from parallel passages, overall about 575 lines are still completely missing, that is, they are not represented by so much as a single word. Many more are too badly damaged to be useful, so that considerably less than the four-fifths of the epic that is extant yields a consecutive text” (George,
EG,
pp. xxvii-xxviii).

p. 7,
the priestess Shamhat's speech inviting Enkidu to Uruk:
This passage provides us with the only extended comparison of Sîn-lëqi-unninni's marvelous powers of expansion. Here is a literal prose translation of the Old Babylonian version (from the Pennsylvania tablet,
OB
II, ll. 45 ff.):

And here is Sîn-lëqi-unninni's version (again in a literal prose trans-lation):

p. 8,
Uruk's then famous six-mile-long wall:
“Excavations have shown that by the Early Dynastic Period, that is, just about the time of the historical Gil-gamesh, the walls of Uruk had a perimeter of six miles. The great area of the city at that time, the end of what archeologists call the Uruk Period (ca. 3800
B.C.
to about the time of the earliest pictographs, ca. 3000 B.C.), shows that the city was probably without equal in size and wealth.

Within the walls, excavators have found, about a third of the area was occupied by public buildings and the dwellings of the wealthy, about a third by houses of the poor, and a third by gardens, open spaces, and cemeteries” (Maier in Gardner and Maier, p. 61).

p. 8,
observe the land it encloses:
“The uniqueness of what happened in early Sumer and its significance for world history can hardly be exaggerated.

The main source of this revolution seems to have been the city of Uruk (biblical Erech, modern Warka) in southern Sumer, which by circa 3400 BC had become the largest permanent urban settlement ever created. At its core lay two monumental temple complexes dedicated to the sky-god
Anu and the goddess of love and war, Inanna. In and around these temples were found what are still the earliest writings from anywhere in the world, the pictographic system of recording on clay tablets that evolved into cuneiform, along with sophisticated architectural, technological, and artistic traditions illustrated by the Warka Vase and Head. Life in and around the temples was supported by well-coordinated religious, social, and presumably political administrations” (Potts, “Buried between the Rivers”).

“At the high point of its development in the fourth and third millennia, the city enclosed a territory of approximately 5.5 km2 [=2.1 square miles]. The gigantic dimensions may be illustrated by a compar-ison: Athens under Themistocles measured about 2.5 km2 [=.98 square miles], Jerusalem in the year 43
C.E.
about 1 km2 [=.39 square miles]; not until Rome under Hadrian was there a city larger than Uruk” (translated from Robert Rollinger, in Schrott, p. 283).

p. 9,
the copper box / that is marked with his name:
“Under the foundations of the main buildings, temples or palaces, people used to bury caskets containing ‘foundation documents' inscribed in the name of the king who was the builder. Gilgamesh is thus supposed to have written down his lofty deeds, in a sort of autobiographical account, on a precious ‘tablet of lapis lazuli,' whose text might be more or less identical to that of the ‘stone tablets' referred to above. By presenting things in this way, the author of
Gilgameß
gave (fictitiously!) as a guarantee of his book a text that originated from the very hand of his hero” (translated from Bottéro, p. 65).

p. 10,
like the Israelite slaves in Exodus:
Exodus 2:23 ff.

p. 11,
a help meet for him:
Genesis 2:18.

p. 11,
he drives away marauding predators:
“You were raised in the mountains, with your own hands / you have killed marauding lions and wolves” (Book III, p. 94).

p. 12,
“Go to the temple of Ishtar
through
will leave him forever:
For a literal translation of this passage, see note, p. 206.

p. 13,
In opening to the anonymous man:
Much later, in the fifth century
BCE,
Herodotus described (or invented) the following custom among the women of Babylon: “Every woman in the country must once in her life sit down in the temple of Aphrodite (=Ishtar) and have intercourse with a stranger … The men pass and make their choice. A woman who has once taken her seat is not allowed to return home until one of the strangers throws a silver coin into her lap and takes her with him beyond the holy ground. When he throws the coin he says these words: ‘The goddess Mylitta make you prosper.' (Aphrodite is called Mylitta by the Assyrians.) The silver coin may be of any size; it cannot be refused, for that is forbidden by the law, since once thrown it is sacred. The woman goes with the first man who throws her money, and rejects no one. After their intercourse, she has made herself holy in the sight of the goddess and goes home; and afterward there is no amount of money, however great, that will buy her favors” (
The Histories,
Book I, paragraph 199).

p. 14,
you will see the young men dressed in their splendor
through
in honor of the god-dess:
For a literal translation of this passage, see note, p. 213.

p. 16,
She used her love-arts
through
he stayed erect and made love with her:
For a literal translation of this passage, see note, p. 235.

p. 17,
like the fawn that emerges with Alice:
In Chapter 3 of Lewis Carroll's
Through the Looking-Glass:

p. 17,
“it is not good that the man should be alone”:
Genesis 2:18.

p. 18,
she is gone:
Except for a tantalizing glimpse in the first of the two Old Babylonian tablets in the Schøyen Collection in Norway, OB Schøyen1 , ll. 1' ff. The text reads (in George's translation, slightly mod-ified): “‘I have acquired a friend, the counselor that I kept seeing in dreams, / Enkidu, the counselor that I kept seeing in dreams.' / Enkidu said to her, to the
£arïmtu:
/ ‘Come,
£arïmtu,
let me do you a favor, / because you led me here into Uruk of the Great Square, / because you showed me a fine companion, you showed me a friend.'”

p. 19,
Deep in his heart he felt something stir, / a longing he had never known before, /
the longing for a true friend:
For a literal translation of this passage, see note, p. 236.

p. 21,
“The priest will bless the young couple
through
Gilgamesh, king of great-walled
Uruk:
For a literal translation of this passage, see note, p. 239.

p. 21,
It is he who mates first with the lawful wife:
“The interpretation [of this pas-sage] is much debated. It may refer to a normal marriage custom, except that there is no other evidence of Mesopotamian kings having relations with brides before the husbands do. The lines may mean that Gilgamesh's behavior was against custom, and related to his wrongful taking of girls, as the citizens complained in I, 60-64. But how then to reconcile its being ‘ordered by the counsel of Anu'? On the other hand, the unique term ‘destined wife' … suggests that the scene may refer to the ancient cultic practice called by scholars the ‘Sacred Marriage,' a ritual act of intercourse originally associated with the coronation rite of the kings in Uruk. In the Ur III and early Old Babylonian periods the cosmic Sacred Marriage of Inanna/Ishtar to Dumuzi/Tammuz was reenacted by their human representatives,
a priestess and the king. Could ordinary brides be selected for this role on occasion? If Gilgamesh's behavior is legitimate, is Enkidu's anger due to misunderstanding or to jealousy?” (Kovacs, pp. 16-17).

p. 21,
It is also possible, as some scholars think:
“A third suggestion is that Gilgameß wore his people out with athletic contests. This last idea agrees with the Hittite tradition that Gilgameß triumphed over the young men of Uruk every day, and with the Sumerian poem of Bilgames and the Netherworld. In the latter text it seems that Gilgameß continually engages the young men of Uruk in some kind of time-consuming game or sport involving the
pukku
and
mekkû,
a heavy wooden ball and mallet. The women of Uruk are obliged to spend their days ministering to the needs of their exhausted menfolk until their outcry results in the disappearance of the two objects into the Netherworld” (George,
BGE,
I, p. 449).