The Ancients - The Epic of Gilgamesh: Rise of Enkidu

Episode Date: February 4, 2024

The Epic of Gilgamesh is one of the oldest surviving works of storytelling from history. Written in ancient Mesopotamia over three thousand years ago, this epic poem recounts the fabled tale of King Gilgamesh of Uruk and the forging of his friendship with Enkidu, a wild man sent by the Gods to keep Gilgamesh on the right path.In this episode of the Ancients, Tristan Hughes is joined by Dr Sophus Helle to explore and recount this oldest of myths - first written in Old Babylonian on cuneiform tablets - and discover how it became a foundational work in the tradition of heroic sagas. This episode was edited by Aidan Lonergan and produced by Joseph KnightDiscover the past with exclusive history documentaries and ad-free podcasts presented by world-renowned historians from History Hit. Watch them on your smart TV or on the go with your mobile device. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code ANCIENTS sign up now for your 14-day free trial HERE.You can take part in our listener survey here.

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they've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals. No pressure to be who you're not, just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are. So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and welcome to our special bumper episode on one of the most extraordinary pieces of literature to survive from antiquity, the Epic of Gilgamesh, written in Mesopotamia more than 3,000 years ago. Now, over the next two episodes, we are going to be talking you through this amazing story in great detail with the writer, translator, and a seriologist,

Dr. Sophus Hell. Sophus is an expert on the epic. He has even translated it into Danish. This man knows his stuff. Now, in this pilot episode, we cover the first part of the epic, his stuff. Now in this pilot episode we cover the first part of the epic, from the story's beginnings at the ancient city of Rook, to the introduction of key figures such as King Gilgamesh and the wild man Enkidu, to their adventures together as brothers in arms slaying powerful monsters. I really do hope you enjoy, and here's Sophus. I really do hope you enjoy. And here's Sophus. Sophus, it is wonderful to have you on the podcast today.

I'm delighted to be here. What a topic, the epic of Gilgamesh. Now, I mean, to kick it all off, Sophus, can we say that this is the world's earliest known epic masterpiece? Well, it's a complicated question. I think there's a real desire to claim Gilgamesh as the oldest something. And people say, oh, it's the oldest poem, the oldest epic, the oldest whatever. I mean, there are literary texts that are a thousand years older than even the earliest versions that we have of the Epic of Gilgamesh. And I think the Epic of Gilgamesh stands out for many reasons besides it being the oldest. But certainly for many people, it will be the oldest story that they've ever read. And I think that is one of the amazing things about Gilgamesh.

I like to say that the Epic of Gilgamesh is what I call a found foundation. So it's foundational in the sense that this is, you know, very earliest beginning of culture that, you know, many people are familiar with. And it is found in the sense that it's actually a relatively recent discovery. It's only really been known in the modern world for about 150 years. And so, you know, unlike, let's say, the classics, the Odyssey, the Iliad, that have been around and read and, you know, interpreted for thousands of years, Gilgamesh is still this bit of a puzzle for many people.

There's still, you know, we're still making sense of what text is this? What does it mean? And people are always, you know, coming up with new ways of interpreting it or responding to it. I think it still has that sense of freshness to it in our modern culture. I love that. And we're going to be exploring all of that in today's episode. I mean, if we start with the background, that context of when it is created. So how far back are we talking with the creation of the Epic of Gilgamesh? Yeah, so we have to travel all the way back to what is called the Old Babylonian Period. And that means that we're in the first half of the second millennium BCE. So give or take around year 1800 BCE. And that's when we see the first real literary evidence of any kind of like

substantial size for the stories of Gilgamesh. I think, you know, most scholars assume, and I think correctly, that the Sumerian poems about the hero date to around the 21st century BCE, while the Akkadian version of his story, which is what we'll be focusing on today, they date to around a few centuries later. Gilgamesh's story was told in many versions across the centuries and across the millennia, and the best known version, which is the one that I translated into English. And if you read Gilgamesh, this is probably the version you'll be reading that actually dates to somewhat later, to give or take the 11th century BCE or the 12th century BCE. And with all of these different versions, is it quite different to something like the Iliad or the Odyssey, where we seem to kind of group it under this one name of Homer? Do we think with this epic that there were

many different authors who contributed to it? So with the Iliad, we sort of have the version that we know, and we can see some changes in it in the earlier times, but we more or less just sort of, you know, see the Iliad appearing on the world literary stage, and we can reconstruct a long process of oral composition that lies behind the written text that has come down to us. With Gilgamesh, it's different. There you really see various stages of composition and redaction over the centuries. So you can really see the text changing and growing, becoming more fixed over time. And I think that's one of the things that's wonderful about it. So most people, when they read Gilgamesh, they'll just read this one version,

and that version is wonderful in itself. But if you want to dig deeper into the epic, you can sort of peel away the layers of history and see how it really comes together. So, you know, one of the main features, for example, of the later version is this central love story between the king, Gilgamesh, and the wild man, Enkidu. And in earlier versions, that's actually not so much a love story. Enkidu is more Gilgamesh's servant than he is his very, very good friend, as he becomes in the later version. Thank you for that evolution of the epic right there. I mean, also you highlighted, when talking about the timeframe, that this is the old Babylonian period. Does that give a hint of where in the Mesopotamian world most of this epic was written? Was it written in Babylon?

Yeah, so I mean, like, we should probably set down some key terms. So first of all, one of the key terms to understand this part of the ancient world is cuneiform, and that is the writing system that Gilgamesh and a bunch of other texts are written in. Cuneiform is this amazing writing system that is the oldest writing system that we know. So when writing was invented, it was cuneiform that was invented. And when we talk about Mesopotamia, we also talk about the cuneiform cultures in the plural. So we have a whole different set of cultures that coexisted and interacted and waxed and waned over the millennia that shared this writing system and that really

were bound together by this common cultural heritage, even despite these various changes. And so the main cultural clusters we are looking at today are the Sumerians, the Babylonians, and the Assyrians, all of whom use this writing system. The Sumerians spoke Sumerian, the Babylonians, and the Assyrians spoke a language called Akkadian. So that's sort of like the main terms that we'll be talking about. And the best known version of the epic is written in the Akkadian language. But as I've already indicated, there are some Sumerian precursors to that story. And is it through these clay tablets, these cuneiform tablets, that this story has been preserved, the discovery of so many of these in Mesopotamia? Yeah, exactly. And that, again, one of the wonderful things

about the cuneiform writing system is that it's written on clay. And I always say that, you know, if you cough loudly next to a roll of papyrus, then it'll shatter. But clay is just kind of clay, you know? And if you throw away a clay tablet and wait 4,000 years, it'll kind of still be there.

Clay doesn't really degrade or rot in the same way as other writing materials, like parchment. And that means that from the cuneiform world, we have an absolutely huge abundance of written material. A lot of it is literary material like Gilgamesh, but much, much more of it is, you know, receipts and contracts and administrative texts, stuff like that. So we really have this huge and to a degree still largely unexplored corpus from what is now Iraq in the ancient world. And, you know, this evidence spans many millennia. The cuneiform writing system gets invented around 3500 BC and is then used all the way to around year zero. So that's three and a half thousand

years of history. That is absolutely mad and Sophos, it absolutely blows your mind how there are still so many of those tablets out there that we know about that are yet to be translated. So how much there is still to be discovered, maybe even for this epic too. I mean, so we have this wealth of tablets from which we know about the epic, but do we also know about the epic through other primary sources, for instance, archaeology, through depictions? Yeah, absolutely. I think the iconography of Gilgamesh is a surprisingly complicated area of research. It's not as easy as you might think to link specific images to scenes from the epic. And there's quite a lot of debate, even about cases where I feel personally that this must be a representation of Gilgamesh. But some of my colleagues would disagree. A famous

case is the stele in the Louvre or the relief in the Louvre, which shows a figure holding a lion, and that lion looks on the image like it's very small, but it's actually, if you go and look at the actual thing, it's perfectly lion-sized. It's just that the person holding it is very, very large. And his size happens to match quite precisely the size of Gilgamesh that is given in the epic, but some of my colleagues will dispute that and say that it's actually a representation of another kind of supernatural creature. So, you know, it's not always easy to match iconography with the text, but there are many numerous candidates for possible representations of Gilgamesh in the iconography as well. But also, you know, archaeology and textual studies, they do go together. These texts were found in specific locations,

and it's important to understand where the texts were written, where they were kept, and how they were kept together. So, for example, one really interesting fact for me is that if you look at the archaeological evidence of where these clay tablets were found, you'll see that in a lot of personal archives, you know, a Babylonian scholar of the first millennium BCE, he might have one tablet one, tablet seven, tablet nine,

wherever it might be, but wouldn't have the full series of Gilgamesh, which really tells us that they treated these parts of the epic, there are 11 tablets in the final version of the epic, they really treated each of those parts as like independent parts of the story that could be appreciated on their own. A lot more like episodes in a modern TV series than like chapters in a book. So there, you know, you get archaeological evidence about how the text was understood. So these things very much go hand in hand. There you go, the Epic of Gilgamesh, also the first box set. If you look at it that way, it's hilarious. And very literally, the epic describes itself in the epic as a box containing these tablets. Wow. Okay. Well, there you go. Well, we've been waiting long enough. Let's delve into the story

itself. Sophus, when and where do these scribes, do they set the Epic of Gilgamesh? So one thing that's important to understand is, for them, Gilgamesh is set in the distant past. And, you know, when you read the Epic of Gilgamesh today, you know, like the Babylonians are in the ancient past, Gilgamesh is in the ancient past, and that can sort of seem like the same past. But the Epic is set in a past that would have been perceived as ancient even by the Babylonians. And so we have to travel far into the remote past and we begin in the city of Uruk, which is Gilgamesh's city. And Gilgamesh is the young and restless king of the city-state called Uruk. Yes, let's explore this figure of Gilgamesh. He's young, he's the king,

but he's got quite an interesting backstory because he seems to be more than just the everyday mortal almost. Absolutely, he is two-thirds god and one-third human, which is already an interesting, you know, relation. Like, he's not like the Greek semi-gods who are half human and half mortal. Like, sorry, half human and half God. He is two-thirds one and one-third the other. And that already gestures at the imbalance that lies at the very core of his being. Like he is not any kind of harmonious combination of these two aspects of his being.

They are very much at odds with one another in a literal sense. The gods say about him that there is a storm in his heart. And his mother says about him that he has a heart that does not sleep. So again, that sense of imbalance and restlessness is absolutely foundational to this character. So what kind of character does he have? So he's restless, is he also quite an arrogant figure then, I'm guessing? He is an arrogant figure and a violent figure as well. Like there are many scenes in the epic where he goes on an attack on a person he's just met for no apparent reason, and often causes himself more harm than good in the process. There are many instances where the epic tells us quite explicitly that he is a person who does not have full self-understanding.

So, for example, when he launches a quest against the monster Humbaba, the advisors, the elders of his city, advise against it and tell him, Gilgamesh, your heart carries you away. You do not understand that which you say. So his portrayal at the beginning of this epic, are the scribes, are they very much wanting to portray him as not the ideal ruler, as actually being a pretty bad ruler? Yeah. And I think part of the reason is that it's the scribes doing that depiction. So that has been argued by a scholar named Karen Sonig, that Gilgamesh really presents this vision of kingship as being fundamentally imbalanced,

and so what the king needs to rule well is to listen to the advice of his counselors. And that is a very convenient story to tell for those people who were, you know, this text was studied in schools, for example. And many of those students would want nothing more than to become the counselors of the king. And so the story shows why that role matters, why being a scholar and a scribe and an educated person matters in part so you can check the excesses of power. so you can check the excesses of power. And the story really illustrates that on the highest cosmological level, not to get ahead of ourselves, but it ends with the story of the flood,

which is launched by the king of the gods because he fails to listen to the divine advisor. We will certainly get to the flood in due course. I mean, one last question on Uruk. Now, do we know much about the size of this place that Gilgamesh was ruling? Was this a major settlement or was this quite a small town? Well, Uruk waxes and wanes over the millennia, in part due to the changing course of the

River Euphrates. At the very beginning of cuneiform culture, Uruk is the largest city in the world. And then at around the time when the standard Babylonian version of the epic, which is, as I said, the main one, Uruk is actually a relatively small town, and then it grows in importance again later. Again, much of this has to do with changes in the river patterns. I think it's really important, though, that the story is set or begins and ends in Uruk. Uruk is absolutely central to the epic's vision of the world, very literally so. Gilgamesh first travels to the end of the world in one direction and then the other direction, but it comes back to Uruk is absolutely central to the epic's vision of the world, very literally so. Gilgamesh first travels to the end of the world in one direction and then the other direction, but it comes back

to Uruk each time. So sort of positioning Uruk at the natural midpoint of the world. And cuneiform cultures were really founded around the city. They were heavily city cultures. They saw cities as the building blocks of civilization. And the poem begins and ends with the praise of the city of Uruk. I must also ask about the name Gilgamesh. I mean, Sophus, is there any indication that this mythical, this epic story of Gilgamesh could have been loosely based on a historical figure? Do we know of any actual historical figure called Gilgamesh from Uruk? So again, this is a matter of controversy among my colleagues. I tend to lean on the side of Gilgamesh being an entirely fictional figure. There's some new research by Justa Gabriel at the

University of Berlin that is pushing matters in that direction. He is arguing, and I think correctly, that Gilgamesh actually began his literary life as a god and was then later reinterpreted as a human or partially human figure, which would again suggest that this is not a real king that was partly deified, but more a god that was partly kingified, if that makes sense. Absolutely, it does. All right, let's move on with the story. So we've had this introduction, Gilgamesh, ruler of Uruk, two-thirds cod, one-third mortal, not the best of rulers in any sense of form. The gods are watching on. How do they react to Gilgamesh's poor rule?

So the people of Uruk pray to the gods for help, and the gods react by doing something very interesting. They create a companion for Gilgamesh, this figure called Enkidu, who will go on to become his very good friend, possibly a lover. Again, the text is ambiguous, studdedly ambiguous on that point. And Enkidu then grows up among the wild animals, and he has this, you know, almost Tarzan-like upbringing with the gazelles and the steppe, before he is eventually humanized. And that happens because he disturbs the traps of a hunter, who then takes his complaint to Gilgamesh, who sends a very interesting figure named Shamhat to seduce Enkidu and thereby make him human. So who is this figure

of Shamhat? So this is yet another point of controversy, which is that this figure is described as a harimtu. Some people see that as meaning a temple sex worker, a sex worker associated with the temple. Personally, I think the evidence for the Harimtus being sex workers is rather weak. They were certainly priestesses associated with the temple of the goddess Ishtar, and they were certainly sexualized, but that's not quite the same as a sex work. But either way, this figure is sent to seduce Enkidu, and the two of them have sex for a full week. And actually, a new fragment

that was found relatively recently shows that it wasn't just one week, but actually two full weeks of sex, whereby Enkidu becomes human. Wow. So is that what they believed, that to make Enkidu go from this wild man to a civilized human being, it was to have sex with Shamhat for a week or for two weeks? That's the basis of this early part of the story. Yeah, absolutely. And so it really sees sex as foundational to humanity, which I think is so interesting. It is super, super interesting. So Enkidu, he's had this early time in the wild. He's then met Shamhat. They've had this great love experience. And then after that, how does Enkidu cross paths with the ruler of Uruk, with Gilgamesh? He is told that Gilgamesh is about to exercise what's called the Yus Prima Enoctis,

or the Dua de Senor, which is the king's right to sleep with any bride on her wedding night. And here, it's again important to go back to this difference between this being not just said in Babylonian times, ancient Babylonian times, but a time that would have been ancient for the Babylonians. Because a lot of readers come away from this scene thinking that this is something a Babylonian king would have done. But that's not the case. It's a myth about earlier times. And we know it didn't actually happen. And so actually the epic shows Enkidu putting an end to this custom. And so again, that's where these like, you know, the difference between what would have sounded old to them

and what sounds old to us can be a little bit blurred. But yeah, either way, Enkidu challenges Gilgamesh's right to sleep with this bride. And I think, again, it's interesting. Different readers will come away with different impressions about the relation between the two heroes. Again, I think the epic is consciously being ambivalent on that front. But certainly their initial encounter is entirely wrapped in sexuality. In part, Gilgamesh's intention to sleep with his bride

and Enkidu's sex marathon with Shamhat. And that sort of frames their encounter. And when they meet, they immediately start wrestling, which is also a very, you know, physical, possibly homoerotic scene. I think it's always so interesting in the epic, its choice of words is so precise. So this wrestling scene starts with them taking hold of each other. But that same word, to take hold of each other, is later used to describe how they hug each other. So the same act of like coming into contact can be both aggressive and affectionate,

which I think says so much about the kind of male friendship that they go on to have. And is it this kind of physical, quite masculine contest for dominance between these two figures? Is that what the text kind of portrays when they do clash? Yeah, exactly. And they clash very literally on the threshold of this wedding house, which again, is sort of like an interesting moment, a threshold between a public space and a private space. And that's really where their friendship is built, in this sort of mix of the intimate and the public, because Enkidu goes on to become Gilgamesh's advisor, but also between the aggressive and the affectionate, the male and the female.

So that's where their friendship is forged. And they instantly become the best of friends. Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era, or yoga era, dive into Peloton workouts that work with you. From meditating at your kid's game to mastering a strength program, they've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals. No pressure to be who you're not. Just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are.

So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. Just before we quickly go on from that, I mean, with the whole wording of the text itself in cuneiform, I mean, how should we be imagining, because we're kind of retelling the story, but the actual words of the Akkadian, I mean, is it quite poetic? Is it very stylized, almost like Homer and the iambic pentameter of whatever they say, to make sure that it really comes off, maybe for those who are reading it, as quite beautiful reading? Yeah, absolutely. I think

it's gorgeous. I think it's absolutely amazing poetry. It doesn't have a fixed pentameter, it doesn't seem to have a fixed meter in that sense, but it has a wealth of other poetic and literary devices like alliteration or other sound games that really makes it sound so incredibly beautiful. And if readers want just a sense of what it sounds like in the original, there was a project at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London called BAPLAR, B-A-P-L-A-R. So if you put that into Google, you'll end up on a page where you can hear different scholars reciting passages from the epic, if you just want a sort of sense of what it might have sounded like in Akkadian. And it's also quite interesting, isn't it? Please correct me if I'm wrong on this, but just having a brief read through, it's almost like when you

get to these different sections, even earlier on, it's as if one character is going to speak to another character, and then the wording of the text kind of introduces, so Jamhat then speaks to Enkidu this, and then says Enkidu then speaks to Gilgamesh this. And it's almost like whenever there is speech between two figures, it's enclosed by words like X is going to speak to that next, and so on and so on. Is that deliberate? Yeah, absolutely. And I actually think that specific phrase that you're referring to there is a great example of the sound games of the poem, because that phrase, Enkidu made his speech, or in my translation, worked his words, that is in the Akkadian pashypush, which I think sounds delightful. So you're always hearing this little pashypush

phrase, and it's littered with little word games or things like that. Okay, so Enkidu and Gilgamesh, they fought, they respect each other, they're now friends. What happens next in this friendship between these two figures? Yeah, so I'm just going to take a step back here for a moment. We've already talked about how the epic is actually changing in our modern reconstruction of it. So I mentioned earlier that we previously thought that Enkidu and Shama had had sex for one week. It turns out it's two weeks and so on and so forth. And we mentioned how we are still making discoveries

of textual material and there's so much left to find out. One of the reasons for that is that clay might be a very durable material, but it also easily breaks. And that means that we have lots and lots of fragments that we are working on putting together to make the new text. And also archaeologists are constantly finding new fragments. And that means two things. First of all, it means that the text is constantly changing. We're constantly finding new parts of it, which is very exciting. But it also means that

it's not currently fully preserved, right? So there are lots of parts that are missing. And the part that happens next is one of those examples. And so Enkidu grows sad for a reason that is not totally apparent in the text as it is. Maybe, you know, two years from now, we'll find the perfect fragment that will fill that gap and we'll understand better why Enkidu grows sad. It's possibly because he doesn't have a family. And so he will have nobody to give him funerary offerings after he's gone. That would make sense with Gilgamesh's solution, which is that they have to become famous. They're young men who have to, you know, make a name for themselves. And the way they're going to do that is to kill the monster Humbaba, who lives in the Cedar Forest. How does he mean he wants to become more famous? Is it, as you say,

is it just having that legacy of slaying this great beast? Yeah, and he is very literal for himself. Like he says, I will make a name for myself, Gilgamesh, who slew Humbaba. So why Humbaba? Who is this beast Humbaba? Humbaba changes over the course of the story. So at this point in the story, we're very much meant to interpret him as a fearsome monster. His breath, his death, as the text says.

There's a great line also in Akkadian. And, you know, the fire grows from his lips and so on and so forth. He lives in what is known as the Cedar Forest, which is a sort of mythologized version of a real forest of cedars in what is now Lebanon. And so the heroes travel there to kill him. And they have many reasons to do so. And the text is sort of like, again, it loves its ambiguities. It loves being strategically not fully explicit about things. And one of the things that's not fully explicit about

is why this quest against Mbaba is first conceived. And Gilgamesh gives differing and not fully compatible explanations for it over the course of the story. And eventually he goes to his mother and says, you know, I have set out on this quest because I have grown massive, as the text says, sort of meaning I have grown bold or something like that. And then his mother, she despairs of what he tells her and then he goes up to, she goes up, sorry, to the roof of her palace, the roof of her temple, where she prays to the sun god Shamash. And she says to Shamash, why did you burden my son with so restless a heart? Implying that all of these various reasons that he gives are not quite the real reason. The real reason is simply that Gilgamesh is just

restless, that he's just, you know, he's always moving, he's always wanting to do something. And I do think that that is part of what really fascinates me about this epic, that his conception of psychology is such a modern view of the self, that we're just always doing things that we can't fully explain. And we give different and incompatible explanations. But at the end of the day, there's just sort of fire within us. Is that one of the key reasons of Gilgamesh's mother in this story? Almost to kind of cut through the rubbish, cut through the crap, and actually really show what

is your real reason that you're going on this quest to slay Humbaba. As you say, it is just his restless nature. Yeah, absolutely. She is the all-knowing deity in the text. And so she sort of gives us a literal bird's eye view by going to the roof of her palace. And it's an amazing scene, her prayer to Shamash. It's such a beautiful scene. And it also foreshadows a lot of what will happen later in the epic. So she tells Shamash, you know, will Gilgamesh not die one day? And that is before Gilgamesh has even conceived of the plan that will occupy him later, which is to become immortal. So even before this enters the story, she has already alerted the audience to the fact that Gilgamesh will fail in his quest to become immortal.

And so she is really like this character who sort of stands outside the story. And she's a very powerful figure in many ways. And so Enkidu sees Gilgamesh wanting to go on this quest. I mean, how does he feel about it? Is he also gung-ho wanting to go and fight this great beast in this forest of cedars? No, quite the contrary. He really resists the idea. Which is, again, what makes this interesting. If the idea of fighting Humbaba is for Enkidu, it's also despite Enkidu, because Enkidu resists the idea whenever he can. And also, why this forest of cedars? I mean, you look at Hercules and his quests and sometimes go down to the underworld or a real high mountain

or so on and so forth. Why does Humbaba, of all places, for them going on a quest, live in this forest of cedar trees? So the forest of cedar trees would have held a deep cultural fascination for the scholars of southern Iraq, in part because Iraq is poor in resources like timber. The trees that grow there are not particularly big. And if you want to build a big palace or a big temple, then you need big trees. And so the real-life kings would have gone on expeditions to places like Lebanon to secure these huge timbers and carry them back.

So it is a sort of mythologized version of a real-life expedition, which we know would have often been taking place. And both celebrates and critiques those kinds of achievements. All right then, well, Sophus, go absolutely wild. So Enkidu is not very keen, but Gilgamesh is, he gets his way. They set off from Uruk. How does their quest unfold to reaching Umbaba and actually seeing this figure in person? At first, they have to face the series of dreams that Gilgamesh has on every night of the way there. And these are, you know, some of the most powerful passages in the epic that describe these terrifying visions, including of something that seems to be almost like a volcano on their journey

there. But every night, Enkidu manages to interpret these ominous dreams as signs of certain success. And again, this is really a way in which the epic really is a key part of its culture, because omens were such a huge preoccupation for the Babylonians. Omens were to be found everywhere, in the path of planets, or in the entrails of sacrificed sheep, or indeed in one's dreams. And so these dream interpretations are really quite a crucial scene because it shows us Enkidu working through these nightmares to produce a more positive interpretation. But eventually they then come to this forest of Sida. And this is actually another one of those passages that we've discovered relatively recently. So this was published in 2015. And it's this amazing, almost like jungle book-like description of the forest being full of life,

of scents and of sounds. There are monkey musicians there and there are bird sounds. It's a really rich and enchanting landscape. And this is, you know, one of the only descriptions of landscape in Babylonian poetry. And so they reach this forest and they're looking for Humbaba. Is Humbaba still this, almost the nightmare of the forest? Or does his character change? Is he more of a guardian or something different? Yeah, that's exactly right. The closer you get to him, the more you realize that he's not quite this terrifying monster. And he is more a sacred guardian installed by the gods to protect the Cedar Forest from people like Gilgamesh. And increasingly, as the battle begins,

and the heroes get closer and closer to winning the battle, they let each other and thus the reader know that they have to kill him quickly before the gods hear of it. So we go from being this, very clear cut, very stereotypical man against monster battle to being something much more complicated. And eventually the heroes do win the day and they kill Humbaba. But then they look at each other and they're like, why did we actually do this? And Enkidu imagines the king of the gods, Enlil,

interrogating them and say, you know, why did you, in your anger, destroy this forest and kill its guardians? Like, what anger drove you to do this? And they actually can't answer that question. And Humbaba, before he dies, we see him pleading for mercy, which Gilgamesh refuses him. So it really changes in its emotional tonality and its emotional description of this relation from something very clear-cut to something a lot more confused.

Is this a key narrative part of the whole epic of Gilgamesh? Almost like this rollercoaster of emotions as more and more of the story unfolds, because you do feel more than a bit bad for Humbaba by the end. Absolutely. It's a very pathetic scene where he pleads for his life. I definitely think that we're meant to sympathise with Humbaba in his final moments, which is not necessarily what we were expecting to do when the heroes set out on their mission. And also, how do they manage to defeat Humbaba? Is this like with weapons, with swords? I mean, what do we know about that? Yeah, so there is this epic sword battle between them. But ultimately, the battle is clinched not by the heroes themselves,

but by the assistance of Shamash. And as you might remember, Shamash receives this entreaty from Gilgamesh's mother, who tells him to step in with his winds and overwhelm Hubalba, which is exactly what Shamash does. And not only does Gilgamesh's mother pray directly to the sun god, she also prays to the sun god's wife, Aya, and asks her to remind him. So there are these sort of two women working outside this like male-male battle to secure that it goes the way they want, which I think is another interesting moment in the epic that sort of undermines this heroic masculinity a bit. Is it that kind of recurring presence and prominent presence of women in the story that almost direct them on their whole trajectory? Yeah, exactly. And I also think that, you know, Gilgamesh is at first presented as this like

burly superhero, hyper-masculine character, but especially on the road to Humbaba's forest, and as they stand at the entrance of the forest, and as they hear Humbaba approaching, we see a very different kind of relation between Gilgamesh and Enkidu. They sort of take turns being scared and having to comfort each other. They are very, you know, they're also very sensitive, especially in this moment. And so so yeah, I mean, I definitely think that the epic creates these very epic heroic expectations, and then pulls them apart, and then puts them together again, in this really interesting way. So if you go into the epic expecting like a very standard man against monster narrative, then you'll be disappointed. But I

think what the epic does instead is much more interesting. It said it's that roller coaster of emotions. And I mean, from my reading of it, I still don't really know how I feel about Gilgamesh by the end. No spoilers there. I mean, Sophus, going on then, they have slain Humbaba with this divine aid, but this doesn't feel like the end of the story for Gilgamesh and Enkidu. I mean, what happens to them next? Who do they have to face next?

So what happens next is that they return to the city of Uruk. And then we meet another character, the goddess Ishtar, who I already mentioned as the patron goddess of these Harimtus that we met in the form of Shamhat. And here the reader really has to imagine something like a modern slow-mo scene because Gilgamesh is washing himself and, you know, there's water in his hair, he's half naked in the river or fully naked in the river for that matter. And then Ishtar sees him and is immediately attracted to him and proposes marriage. And, you know, Ishtar is the goddess of sex, among other things. She's also the goddess of war. And she's a very, very ambivalent figure. I have, besides working on Gilgamesh, the other text I've

worked on a lot is an older author called Enheduanna, who is best known for her poems, her hymns to the Sumerian goddess Inanna, who is the Sumerian version of Ishtar in Akkadian. And, you know, Enheduanna has this incredibly interesting and rich and poetic and philosophical description of Inanna slash Ishtar as the goddess of contradiction and the goddess of change. Gilgamesh the epic, by contrast, seems a lot more anti-Ishtar. So that's definitely the difference between the two texts I work on. Here, at least in Gilgamesh's response to her, she is depicted very, very disparagingly as a goddess who takes one lover

after another and then destroys them, who is unreliable and changeable in every way. Changeable here, not in the positive sense celebrated by an Hidwana, but in a very misogynist, stereotypical sense. And so Ishtar proposes marriage to Gilgamesh. How does Gilgamesh respond? He rebuffs her and rejects her in every way, enlists the various lovers that she took and then destroyed. And she is enraged, so she then summons the Bull of Heaven to kill the two heroes, which is the second main fight scene in the epic, where the Bull of Heaven, which is known to us as the Constellation, the Taurus, that literal Constellation comes down from the sky to

do battle with the two heroes. What happens in this second great clash? I'm guessing it's another victory for Gilgamesh. Yeah, exactly. And there, at the end of that battle, when the heroes defeat the Bull of Heaven, they take out its heart and offer it to the sun god. And there, in that moment, we're really alerted to the fact that here we have reached the heart of the story. It's very literal like that. That is the midpoint of the story. And so the story consists of these two parts, the first of which celebrates the triumphs of Gilgamesh, first against Humbaba, and then against the bull of heaven, and his love with Enkidu. And then the second part will celebrate his great failure, or will at least relate his great failures and his loss. So, so far in the story, Sophus, it's really been quite interesting because it starts off

with Gilgamesh being this very poor ruler and then Enkidu comes along and then they go on this epic adventure and fight these figures like Khumbaba and ultimately the ball of heaven. The effect of Enkidu as a character on Gilgamesh, because I haven't really heard much of this so far, has this influenced what kind of figure he is away from fighting all these monsters? Yeah, I mean, absolutely. In the first place, the gods create Enkidu to divert Gilgamesh's excesses of energy away from the citizens of Uruk, who are overwhelmed by having this constantly restless king who takes out his energies on them in the citizens of Uruk, who are overwhelmed by having this constantly restless king who takes out his energies on them

in the form of constant building projects, constant athletic activities, and it seems perhaps also sexual abuses. And so certainly Enkidu has helped in part by directing Gilgamesh's attention away elsewhere. But also it is clear across the first half of the epic that Gilgamesh and Enkidu become more and more alike and they seem to be obsessed with becoming more and more alike. The epic describes this as mikhru, so they become each other's match, each other's

counterpart. And throughout the epic they sort of mingle into each other. So when, for example, they're going into Humbaba's forest, we're talking earlier about this Pashi Push thing, like the framing of direct speech in the epic, that disappears. And so it becomes at one point difficult to tell who is talking to who, because the heroes have just sort of merged into one. And literally, when they step into Humbaba's forest, the text tells us that they do so as one. And so that is one way in which these two characters shape each other. They shape each other into a profound similarity. This style, this structure, where we almost have it divided into two, we've just covered part one.

I mean, is that a regular motif of Mesopotamian literature that we have act one, Enkidu and Gilgamesh on their adventures, and then the next act could be something completely different. Yeah, absolutely. And that is one of the things that I find really interesting about Babylonian literature, that it is a recurring form within the poetic tradition, that different texts develop in different ways. So for example, another great Babylonian epic is the Epic of Atrahasis, which is focused on the flood story. And there, the first part tells of the creation of humanity in the beginning of time, and the second part tells of the destruction of

humanity in the flood. And that is just one of the ways in which these Babylonian stories play with a division into two parts and a mirroring relation. So for example, in Gilgamesh, we have this more emotional mirroring between triumph and love on the one hand and failure and loss on the other. As a sophist, I also love this fact that, you know, although it was written some 5,000 years ago, they've styled it so that Act I, it really does end on a cliffhanger. They know how to keep retention, don't they, to make sure that you want to listen to the next part. Exactly right. At the very end of the tablet six, after they've killed the bull of heaven

and they've partied to celebrate it, Enkidu says, my friend, I have seen a dream. And then it ends there. And you have to read on to the next tablet to know what that dream is. Cuts to black screen. Love it, dearly. Well, Sophus, we're going to continue that in the next part.

Last but certainly not least, you've done so much work on this epic. I mean, what's the Last but certainly not least, you've done so much work on this epic. I mean, what's the translation, for instance, that you've done of it? Yeah, so my translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh is out with Yale University Press. It includes a translation, a standard Babylonian version, and then it includes an introduction and five essays after the translation that unpack the history and the significance and the main themes of the text. Well, Sophus, it just goes for me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today. Thank you for having me.

Well, there you go. There was Dr. Sophus Hale talking through the first half of the epic of Gilgamesh, leaving on that cliffhanger of Enkidu having this mysterious dream. We're going to be continuing this story, the second half of the epic, we're going to be exploring in the next episode, so stay tuned for that. Last thing from me, wherever you are listening to the Ancients podcast, whether that be on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or elsewhere, make sure that you are subscribed, that you are following the podcast so that you are notified when we release new episodes twice every week.

But that's enough from me and I will see you in the next episode.