The Old Babylonian Tablet Never Says Gilgamesh Won

The door

Enkidu sets his foot in a doorway in Uruk, and the king can't get through. The scene comes from the Old Babylonian copy known as the Pennsylvania tablet. Morris Jastrow and Albert T. Clay published it in 1920. Gilgamesh comes out at night. Enkidu stands in the street, blocks the gate "with his foot, not permitting Gish to enter," and the two men fight. In Jastrow and Clay's translation the line comes twice: "Like oxen they fought. The threshold they demolished; the wall they impaired."

After that, one line ends the fight: "Gish bent his foot to the ground." His wrath is appeased and his breast is quieted. Then Enkidu speaks to him.

One modern summary says Gilgamesh wins. Jastrow read the same lines and wrote that Gilgamesh was "worsted." The tablet itself never names a winner. The fight is also the end of a longer story, about a creature from the steppe who is turned into a man one step at a time.

Made in the steppe

The later Standard Babylonian version was compiled by Sin-leqi-unninni sometime between 1300 and 1000 BCE. It explains why Enkidu exists. Gilgamesh is two-thirds god and one-third man, and he oppresses Uruk. For the young women of the city, that means the king rapes brides on their wedding night. The people cry out. Anu, the sky god, directs the goddess Aruru to make an equal to the king, and she makes Enkidu in the steppe. He is covered in hair. He grazes with the gazelles and drinks at the water with the herds.

A trapper finds him because Enkidu keeps tearing up his traps. The modern summaries disagree about what happens next. The Wikipedia article on the epic, which follows Andrew George's translation, has the trapper go to the sun god Shamash. The article on Enkidu has him go to his father, who sends him to Uruk to ask Gilgamesh for help, and there it is the king who sends the woman Shamhat. Either way the plan doesn't change. A woman will do what the traps couldn't.

Six days, seven nights

Enkidu stays with Shamhat six days and seven nights. The Epic article notes that more recent scholarship reads it as two weeks. When he goes back to his herd, the animals run from him and he can't keep up. Shamhat tells him not to grieve, because he now has knowledge, like the gods.

Her name changes from copy to copy. The Old Babylonian tablet calls her samkatu, and also harimtu, "woman." The Assyrian copies call her samhatu. Jastrow thought two figures had been merged: a courtesan, the samkatu, from a hero tale, and a harimtu, an unnamed woman from an older story about the first man becoming civilized. He compared her to the woman in Genesis, who is also just called "woman."

Meanwhile Gilgamesh has two dreams. In the first, a "meteor of Anu" falls on him and he can't lift it. In the second, he sees a figure with an axe in the streets of Uruk. He tells his mother, Ninsun: "I loved him as a woman, I embraced him" (Jastrow and Clay). Ninsun says the man is coming. In the Old Babylonian copy, Gilgamesh tells these dreams himself. In the Assyrian copy, Shamhat tells them to Enkidu ahead of time.

Bread, wine, razor

The Pennsylvania tablet tells this part slowly. Shamhat takes off one of her two garments and dresses him in it, keeping the other for herself. She takes his hand and leads him to the sheepfolds. The shepherds put bread in front of him, and he breaks it and stares at it, because he has never learned to eat bread or to drink. She says, in Jastrow and Clay's version: "Eat food, O Enkidu, the provender of life! Drink wine, the custom of the land!"

He eats until he is full and drinks seven goblets. His spirit loosens and his face shines. Clay's translation calls the drink wine. The summary that follows George calls it beer.

Then the body changes. Jastrow restores a barber in a damaged line, following a suggestion from H. F. Lutz. The hair is removed from Enkidu's body. He is anointed with oil and puts on a garment. The tablet sums it up in three words: "He became manlike." He takes a weapon, which Jastrow thought was a dagger because seal cylinders show Enkidu killing lions with one. He kills lions so the night shepherds can lie down, and becomes their protector.

The stranger and the bride

The tablet is broken here. When the text picks up again, a man is standing in front of Enkidu, and Enkidu wants to "destroy his name." Shamhat calls the man over, and he makes a speech. A family home is the destiny of men. So are work, stored food, marriage and one lawful wife. Then the speech turns to the king of Uruk and the marriage act, and calls this the king's fate from the cutting of his umbilical cord. Enkidu's face grows pale.

Nobody agrees on who the speaker is. Jastrow suspected Gilgamesh, or a third person, and thought the lines that name the king were added later. The modern summary calls him a passing stranger. The Enkidu article says it is Shamhat who talks Enkidu into facing the king. In every version, Enkidu walks to Uruk.

The crowd there says he looks like Gilgamesh, only shorter. A couch is spread for Ishhara, and Gilgamesh goes out in the night. Jastrow took Ishhara to be a goddess, a form of Ishtar, and wondered whether the two heroes were fighting over her. The modern summary says it is a wedding, and Gilgamesh is on his way to a bride.

Who knelt

Then comes the fight, and the line about the bent foot. Jastrow pointed out that seal cylinders often show Gilgamesh kneeling. He read the moment as a defeat, with Enkidu consoling the loser. Wikipedia's summary of this same tablet says Gilgamesh "breaks off the fight." Its summary of the Standard version says Enkidu "acknowledges Gilgamesh's superior strength."

What Enkidu says next matters more than who won. He tells Gilgamesh his mother bore him unique, and then: "Kingship over men Enlil has decreed for thee" (Jastrow and Clay). The creature made to stop a tyrant ends the fight by approving the tyrant's crown.

The rival who stopped nothing

Jastrow noticed the problem. Gilgamesh stays in control of Uruk, and he comes home to it at the end of the epic. The city is never freed of him. Jastrow's explanation was that Enkidu is the older hero, with a story of his own. The "Man of Anu" that Aruru made to fight the king was later merged with him, which turned two rivals into inseparable friends.

The Sumerian poems make this harder. In them Enkidu is Gilgamesh's servant, and only in the last poem does he become his "precious friend." Even his name took a while to read correctly: George Smith first read it as Eabani.

Two doors

In the Cedar Forest, Enkidu cuts a huge tree to make a door for Enlil's temple. On his deathbed he curses that door. He curses the trapper, and he curses Shamhat for taking him out of the wild. Shamash answers him: she fed him food fit for gods, gave him wine fit for kings, clothed him and gave him Gilgamesh as a comrade. Enkidu takes the curse back and blesses her. He gets worse for twelve days and then dies. Gilgamesh won't accept it until a maggot falls from the corpse's nose.

So Enkidu's story has two doors. As a wild man, he guarded the first one with his foot. As a civilized man, he built the second for the god who gave Gilgamesh his kingship, and then he cursed it.

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