Epic of gilgamesh who is enkidu

Shamhat puts some human clothes on him and takes him to some shepherds so they can initiate him into the parts of human civilization that her sexcapades didn't quite cover: i. But he still he "do[es] not know how to live" 1. Not like a human, anyway. So, we're guessing he feels rather confused and uncertain, or at least like his world has been rocked a little bit.

And not in the good way. Maybe all that "I'm gonna give Gilgamesh a beat-down" stuff is just him talking big because he's a little freaked out about this new world. He doesn't quite know how to act with the food and drink at first although the Old Babylonian version has him downing seven jugs of beer in no time flat , but he does become the shepherd's "watchman" 2.

We can gather that he is accepting of this new life and what it offers him. He's trying to fit in. Once Enkidu and Gilgamesh become best buds, the truly zany and contradictory elements of Enkidu's personality start to stand out. For example, when Gilgamesh suggests going to the distant Cedar Forest and doing battle with the monster Humbaba, Enkidu joins the elders of Uruk in arguing against the quest.

It's too dangerous, he thinks, and besides, the god Enlil appointed Humbaba on purpose to be a terrifying guardian of the forest. It seems that Enkidu has some privileged info here. There is no room in the text for anyone to have told him this, so we have to assume he knew it when he was living with the animals.

Still, when Gilgamesh insists, Enkidu joins his friend on the quest. Over their five-day journey, when Gilgamesh keeps having terrible nightmares, Enkidu acts as a dream-interpreter how did he learn how to do that?

In fact, from this point on, Enkidu becomes the most gung-ho of the two. When Gilgamesh gets a little freaked out by Humbaba's changing-faces trick, Enkidu basically mocks his fear by saying, "Why, my friend, are you whining so pitiably, hiding behind your whimpering?

Once Humbaba has been subdued, and is pleading for his life, it looks like Gilgamesh is going to spare him; but then Enkidu speaks up, urging him to go ahead and kill the monster. We have to ask: why? Does this show Enkidu's wisdom in not believing the words of the no-good stinkin' Humbaba. Or, does this show some human jealousy on the part of Enkidu, who doesn't like Humbaba's suggestion that he and Gilgamesh become best buds? Three's a crowd, you know.

But when Enkidu finds out that he's gotten the death penalty for all his misbehaving, he changes his tune. Gilgamesh and his adventures can only be described in superlative terms: during his legendary journeys, the hero battles deities and monsters , finds and loses the secret to eternal youth, travels to the very edge of the world — and beyond.

Despite the fantastical elements of the narrative and its protagonist, Gilgamesh remains a very human character, one who experiences the same heartbreaks, limitations and simple pleasures that shape the universal quality of the human condition.

Gilgamesh explores the nature and meaning of being human, and asks the questions that continue to be debated in the modern day: what is the meaning of life and love? What is life really — and am I doing it right? The text provides multiple answers, allowing the reader to wrestle with these ideas alongside the hero. Some of the clearest advice is provided by the beer deity, Siduri yes, a goddess of beer , who suggests Gilgamesh set his mind less resolvedly on extending his life.

The epic also provides the reader with a useful case study in what not to do if one is in the exceptional circumstance of reigning over the ancient city of Uruk.

In ancient Mesopotamia, the correct behaviour of the king was necessary for maintaining earthly and heavenly order. Despite the gravity of this royal duty, Gilgamesh seems to do everything wrong. He kills the divinely-protected environmental guardian, Humbaba, and ransacks his precious Cedar Forest. He insults the beauteous goddess of love, Ishtar, and slays the mighty Bull of Heaven. Through these misadventures, Gilgamesh strives for fame and immortality, but instead finds love with his companion, Enkidu, and a deeper understanding of the limits of humanity and the importance of community.

The Epic of Gilgamesh was wildly famous in antiquity, with its impact traceable to the later literary worlds of the Homeric epics and the Hebrew Bible. Yet, in the modern day, even the most erudite readers of ancient literature might struggle to outline its plot, or name its protagonists.

While many of the great literary works of ancient Greece and Rome were studied continuously throughout the development of Western culture, the Epic of Gilgamesh comes from a forgotten age. The best-known version is the Standard Babylonian Version, written in Akkadian a language written in cuneiform that functioned as the language of diplomacy in the second millennium BCE.

For almost two millennia, clay tablets containing stories of Gilgamesh and his companions lay lost and buried, alongside many tens of thousands of other cuneiform texts, beneath the remnants of the great Library of Ashurbanipal. Gilgamesh wants to know, How did you do this? Unhelpfully, Uta-napishti explains:. Ever the river has risen and brought us the flood, the mayfly floating on the water.

On the face of the sun its countenance gazes, then all of a sudden nothing is there! Uta-napishti now tells Gilgamesh the story that made George Smith take off his clothes. Like Noah, Uta-napishti was warned of the coming catastrophe, and he ordered an ark to be built. The bottom of the hull was one acre in area, with six decks raised on it.

And the vessel seems to have been cube-shaped! Once the ark was finished, Uta-napishti and his family and all the animals he could lay his hands on, and whatever craftsmen he could summon, boarded the ark. Before he sailed, he gave his palace and all its goods to the shipwright—an ironic gift, since the palace and its goods, and presumably the shipwright, too, would be destroyed the next day. Uta-napishti continues:. The gods Shullat and Hanish were going before him, bearing his throne over mountain and land.

The Anunnaki gods carried torches of fire, scorching the country with brilliant flashes. The goddess cried out like a woman in childbirth. These last lines are what everyone quotes. How thrilling they are, with the gods bent over, howling, in the skies and the storm shattering the earth like a clay pot.

He and his fellow-survivors disembark, and re-people the earth. For suffering this ordeal, Uta-napishti and his wife were granted immortality, but, he suggests, no one but they can live forever. Then he relents and gives Gilgamesh some tests whereby he might cheat death. Gilgamesh fails. They are silly tests, and he fails in silly ways. The poem is not perfect.

Were its bricks not fired in an oven? Did the Seven Sages not lay its foundations? With the poem in its present state, however, such a case is hard to make. According to George, it is a fragment from an older poem, tacked on to supply an ending. Twelve tablets would have been nice. That is the form of the Aeneid, and the Iliad and the Odyssey are each twenty-four books long. I wonder, though. It is surely in Tablet 5, when he kills Humbaba, that Gilgamesh is shown at his noblest.

Whereas, in Tablet 6, we get his crudely worded rejection of the infatuated Ishtar and then the slaughter of the Bull of Heaven, which so displeases the gods that they punish Gilgamesh by killing off his beloved Enkidu. Schmidt, in his book, sort of moseys through the poem, addressing topics as they arise.

When the characters are having sex, he discusses Assyrian sex. Did Gilgamesh and Enkidu have a homosexual relationship?

He also makes the important point that their friendship is the most tender relationship in the poem. Again and again, Schmidt discusses the translations. You might think that a poem that exists in a pile of broken pieces, in an extremely dead language, would be something that translators would run from in a hurry.

The very opposite is the case. Often they are not, by profession, translators or Assyriologists but just poets. Such a procedure should not scandalize anyone in our time.

He is broadminded. Going through the poem tablet by tablet, he stops at his favorite parts and reads to us from various translations. How excited he gets when the men leave for the Forest of Cedar!

Mother monkeys kept up their calls, baby monkeys chirruped. Sometimes Schmidt seems less a literary historian than just a friend, who has come over to our house for the evening, with a bottle, to read us a terrific poem. He recommends specific translations. Sandars ; in the United States, Stephen Mitchell Next, we should move on to one of the Assyriologists, Foster or George, and find out what the surviving inscriptions actually say.

My own recommendation would be the same as his for the first two stops—Sandars, to get comfortable, and, after that, one of the Assyriologists, to get uncomfortable. It can be blunt. Its account of the murder of Humbaba is the nastiest I know. Yet her translation is also the most tender, the most tragic—the one, I think, that might be recommended by feminist scholars.

When Enkidu meets Shamhat at the water hole, there is no talk of love boxes. Enkidu strokes her thighs; he sings to her. Likewise, when, as a result of his commerce with human beings, Enkidu loses his kinship with the animals, that melancholy fact is given its due:. Yes, it is a commentary, not an end-to-end translation, but it includes a lot of translated passages—the best ones, needless to say. I read the book spellbound, in one sitting. Schmidt has emotions about these ancient tablets.

The fine-grained river mud was rolled and patted into shape, sliced, lifted to the eye and, in dazzling sunlight of a scribal courtyard, under supervision, the cuneiform figures were incised. He sees the tablets again as, thousands of years later, various underpaid people sat in the British Museum, year after year, trying to figure out what they said.

The management was afraid of fire. Some of the higher-up staff had lanterns, but George Smith was not a higher-up. If it was a foggy day and the windows did not admit enough light to read by, he had to go home.

On other days, though, he was at his post. By Daniel Mendelsohn.