How Gilgamesh Became the Lord of the Dead

Part Two:
In Which the Babylonians Reject the Sumerian Gilgamesh
and Reforge Him in the Image of a Tribal Chieftain

by John David Ebert

About the year 2000 BCE, the Age of Taurus was coming to an end and beginning to give way to a new age, that of Aries (a constellation known to the Mesopotamians, however, as the Day Laborer or Hired Man, pictured, instead of a ram's head with curving horns, as a date palm with two men climbing up either side). The Platonic Month of Taurus (c. 4000 — 2000 BCE) had been characterized by the rise of the world's first cities, created by the Sumerians, as well as a whole series of amazing inventions such as writing, the wheel, monumental architecture, organized armies and the institution of hieratic kingship. By 2000 BCE, however, the precession was beginning to shift out of the Bull and into the Day Laborer, just as the age of the Sumerians was giving way to that of the Babylonians and the Assyrians, two groups of Semitic peoples who ruled from the north and brought with them very different ideas regarding the institution of kingship. For the kings of the new millennium who would become the architects of the new order —kings like Hammurabi of Babylon and Shamshi-Adad of Assyria — were descendants of recently nomadic tribesmen known as Amorites, and these people were fierce warriors of the desert steppe, not city people at all. The old Sumerian notion, consequently, that the king received his right to rule by bestowal of the rod and the ring from a goddess would have been laughable to them and, though they surrendered themselves, for the most part, culturally to the city states which they conquered — trading in their Amorite language for Akkadian— they nevertheless retained strong social structures left over from their adaptation to life on the desert steppes.

According to George Roux in his book Ancient Iraq, the rite of the Sacred Marriage (which seems to have been invented in the city of Uruk, the home of Gilgamesh) was no longer practiced after the end of the last Sumerian dynasty, that of Isin in 1794 BCE — at just about the time of Hammurabi's ascent to the throne in 1792 — for "after that date Dumuzi fell to the rank of a relatively minor deity" (Roux, 92). In the old Sumerian traditions, the king (or ensi) had always received his insignia of rulership from a goddess: there is an old victory stele, for example, representing Annubanini, the king of the Lullubi, receiving from Ishtar the rod and ring of rulership. Above her floats the characteristic eight-pointed star which was part of her iconography and represented the planet Venus. At the palace of Zimri-Lim in the city state of Mari, likewise, the king is also shown receiving the same insignia from Ishtar. But with the changeover from the old Sumerian to the Babylonian order of things, we note that in the new depiction of kingship as shown on Hammurabi's Law Code stela, the great king is receiving the rod and the ring not from Ishtar, but from the sun god Shamash (although some scholars say this figure is Marduk). That Hammurabi, furthermore, went to war with Mari, and completely destroyed the city (c. 1761 BCE) — after several years of uneasy alliance with its king Zimri-Lim — seems consistent with the newly emerging social structures of the second millennium, for Mari was part of the old order of Mesopotamia, having been founded early in the third millennium BCE and its goddess-worshipping traditions, consequently, were rooted in ancient Sumerian practices.

Thus, if the literary figure of Gilgamesh was to make it across the threshold into the new millennium, he would have to be reconceived as a universal, rather than a provincial, hero living in an age of Universal States and embodying the new masculinist values of that age. This age would include a new theory of kingship in which the highest sacred office was to be bestowed no longer by the power of a goddess who was the patron deity of a city, but by a portable god linked with nomadic tribesmen. The new Babylonian conception of Gilgamesh, therefore, would embody those masculinist values in ways that the old Sumerian Gilgamesh, as the servant of Inanna and the city of Uruk, had not.

We note, for example, that with the dissolution of the world of the Sumerian city states also went the practice of kings taking the names of goddesses as part of their throne name. The Sumerian king of Isin, Lipit-Ishtar, was in 1953 BCE the last king ever to name himself after a goddess, for this was a practice abhorred by the Assyrians and the Babylonians, whose kings always named themselves after male divinities. A glance at the Sumerian King List will confirm the old Sumerian practice, for there we find names like Gulla-Nidaba-annapad (Nidaba is the goddess of grain and writing); Arurim, the son of Mashda (Aruru is a creatress); Mamagal (Mammitu was a birth goddess); Ishtar-muti; Ur-Nammu (Nammu was the mother of Ea), etc. This does not, however, mean that Sumerian kings only took the names of goddesses, for many of them also named themselves after male deities, as well.

Now let us contrast the Sumerian and Assyrian coronation ceremonies themselves, paying particular attention as we do so, to the role of the goddess. Henri Frankfort cites a Sumerian coronation inscription, a ceremony which took place in the temple of Inanna at Uruk, as follows:

He (the ruler) entered into Eanna.
He drew near the resplendent throne dais.
He placed the bright scepter in his hand.
He drew near the throne dais of Nin-men-na ("Lady of the Crown")
He fastened the golden crown upon his head.
He drew near to the throne dais of Nin-pa ("Lady of the Scepter")
Nin-pa fit for heaven and earth. . .
After she had discarded his "name (of) smallness,"
She did not call his bur-gi name
But called his "name (of) rulership." [undoubtedly meaning his goddess name]

In the Assyrian coronation ceremony, by contrast, the king went not to the temple of Ishtar, but to the temple of the god Ashur. As Frankfort writes:

...the central ceremony of the coronation is preserved in one text. The priest carried crown and scepter, still on the felt cushions which supported them when lying on their 'seats,' and brought them to the king. Then, while crowning the king, he said:

The diadem of thy head-may Assur and Ninlil, the lords of thy Diadem, put it upon thee for a hundred years.
Thy foot in Ekur (the Assur temple) and thy hands stretched towards Assur, thy god-may they be favored.
Before Assur, thy god, may thy priesthood and the priesthood of thy sons find favor.
With thy straight scepter make thy land wide.
May Assur grant thee quick satisfaction, justice and peace.
(Kingship and the Gods, pp. 246-47)

We note that in this version of the coronation, the king receives the insignia from a priest on behalf of the god Assur (the goddess Ninlil, though present, has faded off into the background). And so, for the Assyrians of the second millennium BCE, the right to rule over the land will not be granted by Ishtar (Sumerian Inanna), patron goddess of Uruk, the world's first city, but by a desert storm god named Ashur (equivalent to Babylonian Marduk, who displaced Sumerian Enlil, Ninlil's husband).

Now, the contrast that I am implying here by a shift from kingship descending from a goddess of a city to that of a tribal desert god has interesting implications for the theory of the king's reign, for to my knowledge, the concept of the length of time the king was allowed to rule by the Babylonians as well as the Assyrians was theoretically for as long as he could live without being assassinated, precisely what the concept remains down to the time of Saddam Hussein. This was, apparently, not the case amongst the Sumerians, for in a stable, rooted urban environment governed by a temple priesthood whose main concern seems to have been the patient study of the skies for omens and astronomical phenomena, the length of the king's reign was punctuated by specifically determined cosmic cycles. Inanna, for instance, was associated with the planet Venus, which is governed by a particular 8 year astronomical cycle in which the planet returns back to exactly the same position with respect to the zodiac that it had occupied eight years earlier. Consequently, we note the perhaps not coincidental fact that according to the Sumerian King List, Gilgamesh ruled for 126 years, just two years shy of precisely 16 Venus cycles (i.e. 128 years). Many other kings on that list, likewise, show reigns the length of which may be determined by multiples of 8 year cycles.

The Sumerian version of the episode known as "Gilgamesh and Huwawa," furthermore, is the only version of the story that includes Gilgamesh and Enkidu traveling to the Cedar Forest accompanied by a retinue of precisely 50 warriors. None of the Babylonian versions of this myth carry that little detail. Now, in a four year period, there are 50 months. Such a period would be exactly half of an eight year cycle, and every eight years, Venus created a five pointed pentagram of back and forth motions in the heavens. Such a cycle, as Robert Graves has pointed out in The White Goddess, was traditionally characterized as a Great Year, and in Greece, the reign of kings was calibrated to such eight year intervals. Half of such a cycle would be analogized to the first half of a year, in which a king would rule from winter solstice to summer solstice, while the second four years would be associated with the latter half of the year, from summer to winter, ruled over by the king's tanist, or twin. Sometimes, two kings would trade off in four year periods as earthly embodiments of these cycles (the yearly trade off of Eteocles and Polyneices, the sons of Oedipus, may be an echo of such a tradition). So, in accordance with this symbolism, Enkidu would have been associated with the tanist, or summer king, while Gilgamesh would represent the winter king, which is why Enkidu is always associated with the realm of the dead (since, in Mesopotamia, all the plants die off in summer rather than winter). All of this kind of priestly, astronomical (and very urban) determinism did not interest the Babylonians or the Assyrians one bit. Hence, with their reconception of Gilgamesh, he is no longer regarded as the paramour of Inanna / Ishstar, fit only for a predetermined death and resurrection like her earlier lover Dumuzi. This is what lies behind Gilgamesh's vituperative rejection of Ishtar's advances upon him after he returns from his expedition to the Cedar Forest in the Standard Babylonian Version.

Now it is true that one of the oldest of the Gilgamesh tales is the Sumerian version of "Gilgamesh, Inanna and the Bull of Heaven," in which Gilgamesh is already depicted as rejecting the advances of Inanna. However, a comparison of the Sumerian version of this episode with that of the Standard Babylonian Version is instructive, for in the Sumerian version, Gilgamesh is still featured in a role that ties him very closely with the figure of the goddess and hence, with the city of Uruk itself. For here, it is Gilgamesh's mother, the cow goddess Ninsun, who plays the role that would traditionally have been filled by Inanna, for as the story begins, his mother has instructed him to pluck a branch from the juniper grove and allow himself to be shorn of hair in the Gipar (the residence of the temple priesthood). Inanna notices what he is doing and then proposes to him:

O wild bull, you shall be my man, I will not let you go,
In my temple Eanna I will not let you go to pass judgment,
In the holy Gipar I will not let you go to pass verdicts,
In the god An's beloved Eanna I will not let you go to pass judgement!
O Gilgamesh, be you [my groom] and I will be [your bride]
(Andrew George, p. 170)

Gilgamesh then goes to his mother and tells her about Inanna's proposition, to which his mother replies that he must reject her offer, lest it weaken his warrior's arm. Then, when he goes out to reject Inanna's solicitations, he puts it in such a way as to make it seem as though he is still acting on her behalf and for her best interests:

'Lady Inanna, you must not block my path!
Let me catch wild bulls in the mountains, let me fill your folds!
Let me catch sheep in the mountains, let me fill your pens!
Let me fill. . .with silver and carnelian!'
The queen spoke with a snort,
Inanna spoke with a snort. . .

Here, he is still presenting himself as performing the sacred hunt on the goddess's behalf. He will go out and catch bulls and sheep, all right, but only because he intends to keep her temple well stocked with provisions. This is the Taurean image of the ensi working in servitude to his city's primary divinity. Gilgamesh is clearly afraid here of upsetting his city's goddess. Nothing of the sort, however, exists in the Babylonian versions, which are unequivocal in their emphasis on Gilgamesh's rejection of the goddess. For in the Standard Version, Ishtar, upon noticing his return from the Cedar Forest, says to him:

"Come, Gilgamesh, be you my bridegroom!
Grant me your fruits, O grant me!
Be you my husband and I your wife!"

Gilgamesh then rejects her advances by reciting a litany of lovers whom she has mistreated, citing that the fate of each one of them was death or else some form of misery equivalent to death. He knows that playing the role of her lover entails an astronomically predetermined death and neither he, nor the Babylonians, were willing to submit to such cosmically feminine determinism.

Frustrated and angry, Ishtar travels up to heaven to her father Anu and demands that he allow her to unleash the Bull of Heaven "which grazes where the sun rises." And since the sun rose in the sign of Taurus during the vernal equinox of the Age of Taurus, we begin to realize that the story is an account of the sacred new year festival which was held by the Sumerians every springtime, and normally entailed the performance of the Sacred Marriage rite, in which the king would cohabit with a priestess of the temple of Ishtar. But since this text is an account of the end of the Age of Taurus, the traditions associated with that epoch are in full disintegration, for the king will no longer cooperate in the act of his own regicide, and so Gilgamesh and Enkidu must slay the cosmic bull in a performance of the world's first Spanish bull ring adventure. Thus, the Age of Taurus, with its kings submissive to the will of their female priestesses, draws to a close.

This, then, was the idea of kingship in the Age of Taurus, in which the planet Venus rules over the bull god king. In the newly dawning Age of Aries, however, the archetypal story will later become that of Jason and the Argonauts, in which the new hero searches for the golden fleece of the ram as symbol of the spring equinox, and in doing so, will be helped by the witch Medea, whom he will then cruelly cast aside once he has used her to gain his own ends. Reconceived by the Babylonians as their hero of the Age of Aries (or the Day Laborer) Gilgamesh, likewise, casts the goddess aside, just as the Babylonians and the Assyrians, during the second millennium BCE rejected the older Sumerian theory of the bestowal of kingship from the goddess of the astronomically determined city state.

For the Age of Aries is ruled over by Mars, whose Mesopotamian counterpart was Nergal, an underworld god of both war and plague. Nergal, moreover, was identified with Gilgamesh, for he was known variously as "Erra," "Errakal," and "Irrakal" and later became associated with "Herakles," the Greek counterpart to Gilgamesh. Herakles, like Gilgamesh, makes a transit through the zodiac via his Twelve Labors, and both heroes, as Robert Graves has pointed out, use their shirts for a sail at one point.

Perhaps, then, the two men climbing the date palm which forms the Mesopotamian symbol for the Day Laborer (i.e. Aries), are precisely Gilgamesh and his hairy twin Enkidu, the counterparts of the Gemini.

John David Ebert is a former editor for the Joseph Campbell Foundation. He wrote footnotes for Baksheesh & Brahman, Sake & Satori and The Mythic Dimension, all posthumous publications of Campbell's writings. His first book was Twilight of the Clockwork God: Conversations on Science & Spirituality at the End of an Age (Council Oak Books, 1999). His most recent book is entitled Celluloid Heroes & Mechanical Dragons: Film as the Mythology of Electronic Society (Cybereditions, 2005), and was reviewed by Dr. William Doty in the August 2005 issue of Mythic Passages. His work has been published in various periodicals such as Utne Reader, The Antioch Review, Lapis and Alexandria. He is currently working on a book about popular culture and mythology, tentatively entitled Electric Demigods of the Lightspeed World.

Read more by John Ebert at his website cinemadiscourse.com

Subscribe to the Mythic Passages e-zine