Henri Frankfort, distinguished authority on Mesopotamian cylinder seals, wrote: “...it is with ritual, not with myth, that the seal-cutters of the Uruk period seem to be concerned.”68 Much the same can be said about Mesopotamian glyptic art in its later periods as well. There were in certain periods recognizable stylistic schools of glyptic artistry, and no doubt individual artists in other periods too stressed the decorative qualities in the seal-cutting tradition, giving more attention to the preservation or development of particular artistic styles than to the completely faithful reproduction of traditional scenes in all their traditional details. But even then the substance of the iconographic tradition remained cultic and ritual. It is impossible to construct a whole integrated tale of any kind from the bits and pieces of imagery in even the best preserved periods of Mesopotamian glyptic. Moreover, not even the simplest tales that are actually preserved in writing from ancient Mesopotamia are represented in glyptic art by more than a paltry few scenes which may (or may not) portray isolated narrative incidents. As in the modern case of Ndembu ritual and Central African story-telling, only a small part of Mesopotamian story entered into Mesopotamian ritual and cultic iconography, and the sum of the motifs common to both narrative and cultic depiction was much less than the sum of the motifs in any attested story of that time.
None of that surprises. On the contrary, it arises from the very nature of pictorial art. Pictures by themselves were never able to tell a story until the advent of cinema. They could allude to and evoke remembrance of narrative in persons who already knew the tales to which pictures referred, but they were never more than a stimulating supplement to verbal story-telling, and not even pictorial art’s more recent elaborations such as cinema have ever approached the efficiency of speech as a means of narration. It is perfectly natural therefore that Mesopotamian glyptic imagery was cultic and ritual, not mythic. Like the cults to which it was a religious or decorative adjunct, Mesopotamian glyptic iconography was an abstraction from narrative of certain elements that were at some time or other symbolically significant in Mesopotamia. It follows that much may be gained for the study of Mesopotamian cult and glyptic from a prior knowledge of narrative. But the inverse is not true; not even a long and richly attested iconographic tradition like this one will, unaided, tell its modern viewers much about the tradition of narrative that preceded or was contemporary with it.
Luckily, some tales have come down in writing that betoken an abiding Mesopotamian tradition of story-telling about a hewing, cosmotactic hero and ogre-taming enforcer of reciprocity. He was Gilgamesh, the legendary builder of Uruk, a fabulous person about whom various tales were told in Sumerian and Akkadian; no doubt there were more such tales than survive in writing. The best-preserved story concerning him is the so-called Epic of Gilgamesh, in Akkadian, wherein he subdued not one but three different monsters in a series of adventures that took him from a hewn post in his own city of Uruk (Erech) through a great forest of green cedars (in Lebanon?) to another, tamer woods at the very edge of the world where he fashioned a hundred and twenty long punting-poles (three hundred in the Old Babylonian Version) to help him navigate the perilous Waters of Death.
Gilgamesh was unlike numerous other stock characters of ancient Mesopotamian narrative in that he had nothing to do with the creation of the world, and did not himself come into being until after the Great Flood, which gave the world its present shape according to ancient Near Eastern opinion. But he travelled widely through the World not very long after the Flood, discovering as he went how the world is organized and governed by mutual accommodation or compromise between the will of the gods and the will of men.
As the legendary founder of Uruk, Gilgamesh must be understood as a figment of the fabulous age at the very beginning of civilization. From the ancient Mesopotamian point of view, the time of Uruk’s founding was a cosmotactic era when men generally were only just learning the finer points of how they ought to live, and the things which Gilgamesh learned in his adventures and travels were worthy to be preserved for the instruction of all men thereafter:
He who saw everything [to the end]s of the land,
[Who all thing]s experienced, [conside]red all!
...
...
The [hi]dden he saw, [laid bare] the undisclosed.
He brought report of before the Flood,
Achieved a long journey, tiring and resting.
All his toil he engraved on a stone stela.- I, i, 1-2, 5-8.69
Indeed Gilgamesh saw and endured more than any ordinary man could experience and survive. But that was because he was not strictly a man. Only a part of him was human, while most of him was preternatural:
Two-thirds of him is god, [one-third of him is human].- I, ii, 1.70
Thus, like countless others of his cosmotactic type in oral fable everywhere, Gilgamesh too was sufficiently alloyed with monstrosity to be a capable subduer of monsters. He was champion and defender of Uruk, but at first he played that part monstrously, adulterating his protective function with exploitative behaviour of his own that did not recompense the citizens of Uruk for his extravagant use of them. One difficulty was Gilgamesh’s taking of young people and women who did not belong to him:
The nobles of Uruk are worried in [their chamb]ers:
“Gilgamesh leaves not the son to [his] father;
[Day] and [night] is unbridled his arro[gance].
[Is this Gilga]mesh, [the shepherd of ramparted] Uruk?
Is this [our] shepherd, [bold, stately, wise]?
[Gilgameshl leaves not [the maid to her mother],
The warrior’s daughter, [the noble’s spouse]!”
The [gods hearkened] to their plaint,
- I, ii, 11-18.71
Reacting to the citizens’ protest against the ogreish element in Gilgamesh, the same goddess who created him makes another monstrous mixture of disparate natures to be a foil to him. This new preternatural person is Enkidu, a compound of human and herbivorous animal characteristics fit to match and offset the blend of human and predacious qualities in Gilgamesh:
With the gazelles he feeds on grass,
With the wild beasts he jostles at the watering-place,
With the teeming creatures his heart delights in water.
- I, ii, 39-41.72
Though he is a different mixture (animal and human, as distinct from the blend of human and divine in Gilgamesh), Enkidu is just as disturbing a person as is Gilgamesh. He denies hunters their game in the same way Gilgamesh had denied familial rights to the citizens of Uruk:
The hunter opened [his mouth] to speak, Saying to [his father]:
“My father, there is [a] fellow who [has come from the hills],
He is the might[iest in the land]; strength he has.
[Like the essence] of Anu, so mighty [his strength]!
[Ever] he ranges over the hills,
[Ever] with the beasts [he feeds on grass].
[Ever sets he] his feet at the watering-place.
[I am so frightened that] I dare not approach him!
[He filled in] the pits that I had dug,
[He tore up] my traps which I had [set],
The beasts and creatures of the steppe [he has made slip through my hands].
[He does not allow] me to engage in fieldcraft!”
- I, iii, 1-12.73
The remedy for Enkidu’s interference with orderly hunting on the steppe is the same as the remedy for Gilgamesh’s interference with orderly family life in Uruk. The two monsters, Gilgamesh and Enkidu, meet, grapple, and subdue one another in a perfectly reciprocal manner beside a doorpost of hewn wood in Uruk:
They met in the Market-of-the-Land.
Enkidu barred the gate
With his foot,
Not allowing Gilgamesh to enter.
They grappled each other,
Holding fast like bulls.
They shattered the doorpost,
As the wall shook.
- II (Old Babylonian Version), vi, 11-18.74
Before Enkidu’s arrival at Uruk from the wild steppe where he was born, Gilgamesh dreams of his coming. In the dream Enkidu is an axe destined to be Gilgamesh’s inseparable tool and companion:
[Again Gilgamesh says] to his mother:
“[My mother, I] saw another dream:
[In ramparted Uruk] lay an axe; there was a gathering round it.
[Uruk-land] was standing about it,
[The land was gathered] round it,
[The populace jostled] towards it.
[I] placed it at thy feet.
[I loved it] and was drawn to it as though to a woman,
[Thou didst] make it vie with me.”- I, vi, 7-15.75
Thus Gilgamesh the tamer of monsters is also a hewer: he begins his career as ogre-fighter in this epic by associating himself with an axe. And appropriately, his first joint adventure with Enkidu after they have fought and tamed each other is an expedition to cut down trees for timber. Together they go to an enormous cedar forest on a mountain far from Uruk where, before felling the trees, they must first fight and defeat the forest’s guardian daemon, Humbaba (Babylonian Huwawa). Before leaving Uruk on this hazardous mission, Gilgamesh and Enkidu equipped themselves with axes:
Mighty adzes they cast;
Axes of three talents each they cast.
- III (Old Babylonian Version), iv., 30-3l.76
When Gilgamesh and Enkidu struggled with one another their contest ended in a draw, and Gilgamesh accepted Enkidu as his companion and equal. But the ferocity and preterhuman qualities of Gilgamesh’s next ogreish opponent, Humbaba, are more ample than were Enkidu’s. This second step in the progression of Gilgamesh’s contests with ogres is more dangerous, occurring as it does in the forest of live cedars, and cannot end in mutual accord as did the wrestling-match with Enkidu beside a single hewn post within the civilized precincts of the city.
Gilgamesh stopped Enkidu’s violation of hunters’ rights to game on the open steppe, and reciprocally Enkidu stopped Gilgamesh’s violation of citizens’ rights in Uruk. But although it was thus subdued, these two tamed ogres’ transgressive nature still drove them to trespass in Humbaba’s forest, which was a sacred precinct of the goddess Ishtar. After their long journey, the two friends reach the Cedar Forest where Humbaba is a kind of resident care-taker. The description of the Forest as they approach it in the Assyrian Version of the epic is short and fragmentary, but still better than James Frazer’s rendering of the comparable scene in the Vale of Nemi:
They stood still and gazed at the forest,
They looked at the height of the cedars,
They looked at the entrance to the forest.
Where Humbaba was wont to walk was a path;
Straight were the tracks and good was the going.
They beheld the cedar mountain, abode of the gods,
Throne-seat of Irnini.
From the face of the mountain
The cedar77 raises aloft its luxuriance.
Good is its shape, full of delight.- V, i, 1-8.78
Humbaba challenges them when they enter the forest and begin to cut the great cedar:
[Gilgamesh] seized [the axe in (his) hand]
[and] felled [the cedar].
[But when Huwawa] heard the noise,
[He] became angry: “Who has [come],
...
And has felled the cedar?”
- V (Hittite Recension), 8-12.79
Humbaba is a terrible yet purely defensive monster, who valorously guards the Cedar Forest but is otherwise unaggressive. Gilgamesh and Enkidu subdue him with the help of Gilgamesh’s patron god Shamash. As the sun god, Shamash was a ‘high’ god like Greek Zeus, and could effect changes in the weather as could Zeus. Shamash immobilizes Humbaba by causing winds to blow against him. Thoroughly defeated, Humbaba entreats Gilgamesh to spare his life and to accept him as a loyal servant. But Enkidu, who seems to be less generously disposed than Gilgamesh, objects, and Humbaba is not permitted to join the less monstrous Enkidu as an additional guardian of Uruk or companion to Uruk’s Lord Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh is reluctant to see him killed, but in the end Humbaba is hewn down and beheaded like one of his own cedars:
Thereupon Huwawa replied to Gilgamesh:
“Let me go, Gilgamesh; thou [wilt be] my [master],
And I shall be thy servant. And of [the trees]
Which I have grown, I shall [...]
...
...”
But Enkidu [said] to [Gilgamesh]:
“To the word which Huwawa [has spoken]
H[ark] not [...]
Let not Huwawa [...].”- V (Hittite Recension), 21-30.
[...] the head of Humba[ba they cut down [...].- Assyrian fragment, line 47.80
This scene of decapitation was familiar to at least one Assyrian seal-cutter (Fig. 66):
Ishtar admired Gilgamesh’s manliness after his exploit in the Cedar Forest, though it was her forest and her guardian monster which he and Enkidu had violated. She invited Gilgaamesh to be her lover, but he spurned her, and she sent the third monster of the story against him. It was the Bull of Heaven, a mixture of animal and mineral substances, and temperamentally the opposite of the purely defensive ogre Humbaba. The Bull of Heaven is pure trespasser and aggressor. Again Gilgamesh and Enkidu subdue the ogre, but this time they kill it as quickly as they can, without the least debate or hesitation, because it is utterly useless as a protective agent to either men or gods.
Each of the monsters in this epic is different, and each is disposed of differently. The differences are arranged in two parallel progressions:
| Kind | Disposition |
|---|---|
| Gilgamesh: God/Human |
Lord of Erech and guardian of its human flock, destined to die in the distant future. |
| Enkidu: Human/Animal |
Companion of Erech’s lord and guardian of its animal flocks, destined to die in the near future. |
|
Humbaba: Animal/Aerial Substance (see Old Babylonian Version III, iii, 18-20, and v, 16-17; Assyrian Version II, v, 3). |
Inimical guardian of a distant, wild precinct, denied servitude under the Lord of Erech, dies presently at the hands of hesitant slayers. |
|
Bull of Heaven: Animal/ Terrestrial Substance (Lapis) |
Inimical invader of Erech’s domestic vicinity, guardian of nothing, dies presently at the hands of urgently prompt slayers. |
The impudent killing of Ishtar’s two ogres Humbaba and the Bull of Heaven, and Gilgamesh’s insulting refusal to recompense Ishtar for that loss by becoming her lover, lead to the death of Enkidu. Ishtar’s father, Anu, exacts payment of Gilgamesh for killing her creatures by decreeing that he must similarly give up his favorite creature, Enkidu, to death:
And Anu said to Enlil:
“Because the Bull of Heaven they have slain, and Huwawa
They have slain, therefore”—said Anu—“the one of them
Who stripped the mountains of the cedar must die!”
But Enlil said: “Enkidu must die;
Gilgamesh, however, shall not die!”- VII (Hittite recension), 5-10.81
Gilgamesh recognizes in Enkidu’s consequent death the basic problem of mortality, his own as well as that of others whom he loves as he loved Enkidu. The pain of bereavement and the fear that he must eventually suffer the same fate drive Gilgamesh to distraction and vagrancy:
For Enkidu, his friend, Gilgamesh
Weeps bitterly, as he ranges over the steppe:
“When I die, shall I not be like Enkidu?
Woe has entered my belly.
Fearing death, I roam over the steppe.”- IX, i, 1-5.82
After aimless wandering and other degenerate behaviour, Shamash and the gradual condensation of renewed purpose in his own mind bring Gilgamesh to the outer limits of the world. First he comes to a mountain that is the junction of the world’s vertical and horizontal axes:
The name of the mountain is Mashu.
When he arrived at the mountain range of Mashu,
Which daily keeps watch over sunrise and sunset
—Whose peaks reach to the vault of heaven
(And) whose breasts reach to the nether world below—- IX, ii, 1-5.83 ,/p.
He passes through this mountain along the path which the sun takes (his patron deity was the sun-god, Shamash). Many leagues of the way are in total darkness, but then he emerges into a brightly lit, fabulous grove of precious stones which grow and bear fruit like plants (a conflation of vegetable and mineral). Beyond this place he finally arrives on the seashore at the edge of the world, where he meets the ferry-boatman named Urshanabi in the Assyrian Version (Sursunabu in Babylonian), who is the sole means of communication with Gilgamesh’s immortal ancestor, Ut(a)napishtim. Utnapishtim, like Hebrew Noah in Biblical legend, was the only survivor of the Great Flood in Mesopotamian legend. By special dispensation of the gods, Utanapishtim alone of all men enjoys immortality, but as a condition of that gift he resides with his wife (rather like the destined condition of Homer’s Menelaos and Helen in the Odyssey) beyond the Waters of Death in a place of utter sequestration from all other mankind.
Instructed by the boatman Urshanabi, Gilgamesh takes up his ax once again, cuts, and fashions punting-poles wherewith to cross the Waters of Death to Utnapishtim. There, in conversation with his ancient ancestor, Gilgamesh is at last reconciled with the bitter fact of his own mortality which the great gods had forced him to recognize in consequence of his various acts of dishonour to Ishtar beginning in the Cedar Forest.
From the doorpost beside which the two heroes fought in Uruk through the Cedar Forest to the forest hewn for punting-poles, the progression of trees in the Epic of Gilgamesh is threefold. The sole import of the doorpost at the Market-of-the-Land in Uruk is that of hewn wood. As they approach it, Gilgamesh and Enkidu are opposed both in their natures and in their intentions. The é1ite urbanite Gilgamesh, a mélange of man and divinity dedicated to the defense of Uruk, confronts the rude ruralite Enkidu, a blend of man and animal bent upon a barbarous invasion of the city. But like Victor Turner’s Ndembu at the mukula tree, the two Akkadian heroes find the means to reconcile their differences and be united beside the hewn doorpost.
The remaining two steps in Gilgamesh’s progression of trees are both whole forests, each partially green and partly hewn. The Cedar Forest however derives its significance chiefly from its green state, while the nameless woods where Gilgamesh cuts the punting-poles for the last stage of his quest have again the primary sense of hewn timber. Contumacious and preterhumanly assisted in the first forest, Gilgamesh is a pitiable figure purged of arrogance in the second, where he has no powers left to him except those same skills and resolution in himself which any ordinary man can summon to help him surmount trouble. Ishtar and Shamash both seem virtually to conspire in Gilgamesh’s success in the Cedar Forest, the one permitting and the other aiding in his cutting down Humbaba and the trees. That verdant forest also unites Gilgamesh and Enkidu in their first joint enterprise. Finally even Humbaba begs to join in common cause with Gilgamesh.
But the appearance of united purpose among gods, men, and brutes in the episode of the evergreen Cedar Forest is deceptive. Humbaba is not allowed to serve Lord Gilgamesh as he offered to do, nor will Gilgamesh serve Ishtar. Thenceforth the rift between men and gods that began with Gilgamesh’s hewing of the cedar grows steadily wider until, through his hewing and use of the punting-poles, he finally reaches wits’ end in the land of Utanapishtim and is reconciled to the laws of recompense and reciprocity laid down by the gods.
Gilgamesh enters the wood to cut poles at a time when all the characters in the tale seem to be irremediably at odds. Everyone whom he meets during his great wandering after the death of Enkidu (itself a form of social division) is amazed at his unkempt appearance and his eccentric purpose in being where he is, so far removed from his home in Uruk. Ultimately Utnapishtim too disapproves Gilgamesh’s coming to him as not worth the labour or the risk. Even Gilgamesh’s patron god Shamash has counselled him to change his ways, and having counselled, left Gilgamesh to his doom. But out of this divided and discordant situation Gilgamesh achieves through the agency of the punting-poles a reunion with his own kind and a new, stable harmony in his relations with both men and gods. Crossing the Waters of Death by means of those poles to visit Utnapishtim, he consults the eldest of all men, the one man in the world whose being unites in itself the whole accumulation of human wisdom extending even to the era before the Great Flood. From this oracle, who unifies and reconciles in himself all of human history, Gilgamesh learns to unite and to be reconciled to the diversity of influences that shape his own experience.
So the green cedars of Humbaba’s forest seemed to promise unity and cohesion for Gilgamesh’s world, but in the end they produced instead discord and divisions. Inversely, the sadder, tamer, and less glorious wood where he went at Urshanabi’s behest to make punting poles seemed to betoken Gilgamesh’s irrational resolve to separate himself altogether and perhaps forever from the society of other men by the crazy voyage to Utnapishtim. But out of that wood and the journey which it enabled him to complete came not only Gilgamesh’s reconciliation with his own mortal nature, but also the knowledge that for any man nothing else is possible. Gilgamesh carries that invaluable knowledge home to record on a stone stela for benefit of the people of Uruk and their descendants ever after, thus uniting all generations of men through all time from Utnapishtim downward in the certain knowledge of the limits of human capability. This accomplished, Gilgamesh returns to his proper place in Uruk a thoroughly subdued, tamed man, able contentedly to resume both service to the gods and life among his own kind, accepting at last the law of reciprocity, the give and take essential to civilization.
Gilgamesh is, moreover, uniquely equipped by his personal adventure in search of the immortality which he could not achieve to rule—or to maintain unity among—other, less experienced men: the citizenry of Uruk. So this ancient tale of two woods has also its political implications. Gilgamesh has learned not only what he must know to be content with his own circumstances, but also what he must know to govern, which is to say, to help other men toward reconciliaion with their circumstances. The lesson of his experience beyond the Waters of Death—the lesson of the punting-poles—pertains therefore to the political life of the state as well as to the regimen of personal ambition in private life. Man is mortal; nothing which he possesses is absolutely his inalienable property, because he is by nature insecure even in his own life, the necessary premise of all other property-rights.
Where in nature security of possession is so tenuous, there must compensatorily be in civilization fair rules of exchange justly enforced to protect every kind of property, even life itself. Lord Gilgamesh as ruler of Uruk accordingly had the bounden duty to obey and to enforce fair rules of exchange and reciprocity in all matters under his jurisdiction. Memento mori was thus the crux not only of Gilgamesh’s personal rehabilitation and reunification with the people of Uruk after the death of Enkidu, but also of his rehabilitation as just governor of his people. The same slogan, memento, homo, quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris, would equally well fit any of Gilgamesh’s myriad cosmotactic counterparts in oral fable from Hebrew Adam to Lenje Mandu, for to a man all these foresters and ogre-tamers learn the law of exchange, price, and payment through an actual or certainly impending experience of death.
The written preservation and archaeological recovery of the Epic of Gilgamesh were extraordinary pieces of good luck. That tale proves what Mesopotamian glyptic by itself could never prove, rich though it is: that the pattern of the Two Trees’ story was the same in Mesopotamia three or four millennia ago as it is in modern oral fable. And as though that good luck were not enough, there is extant also a multiform of the story, a Sumerian tale wherein a stream of water separated the green tree growing in the wild from its hewable domestic opposite. Again the preternaturally alloyed man Gilgamesh met ogres at the tree when the time came to hew its wood, and subdued them, in this way embroiling himself once more in questions of property and possession: Shortly after the creation of the universe, a tree growing on the bank of the Euphrates was uprooted by the south wind. Inanna (Ishtar) took the floating trunk and planted it in her garden in Uruk. She intended to use it, in due time, as timber for her bed and chair. When several hostile beings interfered with Inanna’s plan, Gilgamesh came to her rescue. In gratitude, Inanna made from the base of the tree a pukku, probably a magic Drum, and from the crown a mikku, apparently a Drumstick of magic potency similar to the Drum’s, and gave them both to Gilgamesh. One day both these precious objects fell into the nether world. Gilgamesh sought to retrieve them but could not. Lamenting his loss, he cried “O my pukku, O my mikkū.”84
