Gilgamesh by Stephen Mitchell Read Free Book Online

tragedies: obscene, vulgar, high-spirited, irreverent, and rambunctious, letting loose all the energies that will soon enough become contained and very somber.
DEATH AND DEPARTURE
    S uddenly Enkidu has two dreams about dying. The second of them gives us a wonderfully graphic picture of how the ancient Mesopotamians imagined the dead, who sit miserably in pitch darkness, “dressed in feathered garments like birds.” The great gods are not mocked, and the killing of Humbaba will have fatal consequences. Gilgamesh, through his tears, calls the first dream nonsense and makes a weak attempt to interpret the second one as a good omen. But both friends know that Enkidu is doomed. And indeed, as his dreams warned, he falls mortally ill.
    The next morning, Enkidu curses the trapper, and then Shamhat, for taking him out of the wilderness. (It never occurs to him to curse his beloved Gilgamesh as well, though this was Gilgamesh’s idea.) The speech expresses Enkidu’s impotence at the thought of dying, and part of its power is in letting out all the stops on the vindictive, outward-blaming ego. “May wild dogs camp in your bedroom,” Enkidu says,

    â€œmay owls nest in your attic, may drunkards vomit all over you, may a tavern wall be your place of business, may you be dressed in torn robes and filthy underwear, may angry wives sue you, may thorns and briars make your feet bloody, may young men jeer and the rabble mock you as you walk the streets.”
    The speech is not just a rant; it is also powerful reporting, once we transpose the optative to the indicative: a portrait of the life of an aging prostitute, with its poverty, abuse, and humiliation.
    Shamash provides Enkidu with a more balanced view that calms his “raging heart.” Civilization, the god points out, has been just as much a paradise for Enkidu as the wilderness was. And wasn’t it Shamhat who brought Enkidu the greatest joy of all, his friendship with Gilgamesh? Enkidu acknowledges this and turns his curse of Shamhat into a blessing. “May you be adored by nobles and princes,” he says; “may Ishtar give you generous lovers / whose treasure chests brim with jewels and gold.” In the interval between the curse and the blessing, Shamhat has ascended from the cheapest of whores to the most expensive and esteemed of courtesans, a kind of Babylonian Ninon de Lenclos. Oddly, both curse and blessing imagine Shamhat as a prostitute (poor or rich) rather than a priestess; Enkidu doesn’t seem to know the difference. Of course, it is possible that many priestesses of Ishtar would have beendelighted to be wealthy courtesans instead. But for the true devotee, the change would hardly have been a blessing. Devotion to the goddess was at the core of her life, and in comparison, even the kind of wealth and adulation given to a Hollywood star would have been meaningless.
    After twelve days of agony, Enkidu dies and leaves Gilgamesh alone with his grief. It is a tragic moment in the epic, though epics are not necessarily tragic; the Homeric poems contain both the tragedy of Achilles and the romance of Odysseus, with its happy ending (for him, if not for the suitors and the little dangling maids). Enkidu could easily be seen as a tragic hero, pulled out of his Eden into the corrupt world of humans to suffer an arbitrary death sentence from the gods. And, as reconciled as he seems, there is a certain lingering bitterness about his death. One might say that his death was caused by Gil-gamesh’s monster-hunting, just as his birth was caused by Gil-gamesh’s tyranny. But more accurately, Enkidu caused his own death by insisting that Gilgamesh kill Humbaba; if they had let the monster live, all would have been well. The fact that neither Enkidu nor Gil-gamesh ever realizes this is part of the pathos of the situation.
    Gilgamesh’s lament at the beginning of Book VIII is one of the most beautiful elegies in literature. In it