Gilgamesh the King Read online

  All the same, changes soon were forthcoming. The one most important to me was that my mother and I left the royal palace that had been my home all my life, and took up residence in a splendid but far less imposing dwelling in the Kullab district, westward of the temple of An. It was to An’s service that my mother dedicated the rest of her life, as his chief priestess. She is now a goddess in her own right, by my decree, so that she might be reunited with Lugalbanda. For if he is in heaven, then it is fitting that she be at his side. And though I have said that I do not believe he is in heaven, nevertheless it may be that he is, and in that case it would have been remiss of me not to have sent Ninsun to join him there.

  It was hard for me to understand why I had been forced to leave the palace. “Dumuzi is king now,” my mother explained. “The assembly has chosen him, the goddess has recognized him. The palace belongs to him.” But her words were like the blowing of the dry wind over the plain. Dumuzi could be king, for all I cared; but the palace was my home. “Will we return to it after Inanna sends Dumuzi to the nether world?” I asked, and she looked stern and told me never to speak such words again. But then in a softer voice she said, “Yes, I think you will live in the palace again one day.”

  This Dumuzi was young and strong and vigorous, and came of one of the greatest families of Uruk, a clan that long had held the sheshgal-priesthood in the temple of Inanna, and the supervisorship of the fisheries, and many another high office. He was handsome and of kingly bearing, with thick hair and a heavy beard.

  Yet there seemed something soft and disagreeable about him within, and I did not understand why he had been chosen to be king. His eyes were small and had no shine, and his lips were fleshy, and the skin of him was like a woman’s. I imagined he had it rubbed with oils every morning. I despised him from the first moment of his reign. Perhaps I hated him simply because he had become king in my father’s place; but I think it was not only for that. At any rate, I harbor no hatred for him now. For foolish Dumuzi I have only pity: even more than the rest of us, he was the toy of the gods.

  3

  NOW MY LIFE BECAME VERY different. My days of play were over, my days of schooling began.

  Because I was a prince of the line of Enmerkar and Lugalbanda, I did not have to attend the common tablet-house, where the sons of merchants and foremen and temple administrators are taught to become scribes. Instead I went each day to a small low-roofed room in an ancient little temple at the eastern side of the White Platform, where a priest with shaven scalp and face conducted a private class for eight or nine high-born boys. My classmates were the sons of governors, ambassadors, generals, and high priests, and they had great regard for themselves. But I was the son of a king.

  That created difficulties for me. I was accustomed to privilege and precedence, and I demanded my usual rights. But in the classroom I had no rights. I was big and I was strong, but I was neither the biggest nor the strongest, for some of the boys were four or five years older. The first lessons I learned were painful ones.

  I had two chief tormentors. One was Bir-hurturre, the son of Ludingirra, who had been my father’s master of the chariots and who had gone down into the death-pit to sleep beside him. The other was Zabardi-bunugga, the son of Gungunum the high priest of An. I think Bir-hurturre bore a grudge against me because his father had had to die when mine had died. What quarrel Zabardi-bunugga had with me, I never fully understood, though possibly it grew from some old jealousy his father had felt toward Lugalbanda. But these two were determined, whatever the reason, to make me see that my high rank and privilege had ended when the crown had passed to the king Dumuzi.

  In the classroom I took the front chair. It was my right, to go before the others. Bir-hurturre said, “That chair is mine, son of Lugalbanda.”

  The way he said son of Lugalbanda, he made it sound like son of Dung-fly, son of Trash-picker.

  “The chair is mine,” I told him calmly. That seemed self-evident to me, in no need of defense or explanation.

  “Ah. Then the chair must be yours, son of Lugalbanda,” he answered, and smiled.

  When I returned from midday recess I found that someone had gone down to the river and captured a yellow toad, and had skewered it into the middle of my seat. It was not yet dead. To one side of it someone had drawn the face of the evil spirit Rabisu, the croucher-in-doorways, and on the other side was drawn the storm-bird Imdugud with her tongue thrust out.

  I pulled the toad free and turned to Bir-hurturre with it. “You seem to have left your midday meal on my seat,” I said. “Here. This is for you to eat, not for me.”

  I seized him by the hair and thrust the toad toward his mouth.

  Bir-hurturre was ten years old. Though he was no taller than I was, he was very broad through the shoulders and extremely strong. Catching me by the wrist, he pulled my hand free of his hair and wrenched it down to my side. No one had ever handled me like that before. I felt rage rising in me like a winter torrent rushing down upon the Land.

  “Doesn’t he want to share his seat with his brother?” asked Zabardi-bunugga, who was looking on with amusement.

  I broke loose of Bir-hurturre’s grasp and hurled the toad into Zabardi-bunugga’s face. “My brother?” I cried. “Yours! Your twin!” Indeed Zabardi-bunugga was amazingly ugly, with a nose flat as a button, and strange coarse hair that grew in widely spaced bunches on his head.

  They both came at me at once. They held me with my arms behind my back and jeered at me and slapped me. I had never been held so impiously in the palace, not even in the roughest of play: no one would have dared. “You may not touch me!” I shouted. “Cowards! Pigs! Do you know who I am?”

  “You are Bugal-lugal, son of Lugal-bugal,” said Bir-hurturre, and they laughed as though he had said something enormously clever.

  “I will be king one day!”

  “Bugal-lugal! Lugal-bugal!”

  “I’ll break you! I’ll feed you to the river!”

  “Lugal-bugal-lugal! Bugal-lugal-lugal!”

  I thought my soul would burst from my breast. For a moment I could neither breathe nor see nor think. I strained and struggled and kicked, and heard a grunt, and kicked again, and heard a whimper. One of them released me and I pulled myself free of the other, and went running from the classroom, not out of fear of them but out of fear that I would kill them while the madness was upon me.

  The school-father and his assistant were returning just then from their midday meal. In the blindness of my wrath I ran right into them, and they caught me and held me until I was calm. I pointed into the classroom, where Bir-hurturre and Zabardi-bunugga were staring at me and making faces with their tongues, and demanded that they be put to death at once. But the school-father replied only that I had risen from my place without permission, I had spoken to him without permission; and he gave me over to the whipping-slave to cane me for my unruliness. It was not the last time those two tormented me, and occasionally some of the others joined in, the bigger ones, at least. I found I could do nothing against any of this persecution. School-father and his assistant always took their side, and told me I must hold my tongue, I must master my temper. I wrote down the names of my enemies, both my schoolfellows and my tutors, so that I could have them all flayed alive when I was king. But when I came to understand things a little better, soon afterward, I threw those lists away.

  Writing and reading were the first things I learned. It is important for a prince to understand such matters. Imagine trusting everything to the honesty of one’s scribes and ministers when messages are going back and forth on the battlefields, or when one is engaged in correspondence with the king of another land! If the master cannot read, any kind of deceit may be practiced on him, and a great man could be betrayed into the grasp of his enemies.

  I wish I were able to claim with any honesty that my reason for turning to those arts was anything so astute and far-sighted. But no such princely notions were in my mind. What attracted me to writing was my notion that it was m
agical. To be able to work magic, that magic or any other, was tremendously attractive.

  It seemed miraculous that words could be captured like hawks in flight, and imprisoned in a piece of red clay, and set loose again by anyone who knew the art of it. In the beginning I did not even think such a thing was credible. “You invent the words as you go along,” I told the school-father. “You pretend that there are meanings, but you simply make everything up!” Coolly he handed the tablet to the assistant, who read from it everything that the school-father had read, word for word. Then he called in one of the older boys from another room, and he did the same; and then I was whipped on the knuckles for my doubting. I doubted no longer. These people—ordinary mortals, not even gods—had some way of bringing the words alive out of the clay. So I paid close heed as the school-father’s assistant showed me how to prepare the soft clay tablets, how to cut a reed stylus to a wedge-shaped end, how to make the marks that are writing, by pressing the stylus into the tablet. And I struggled to comprehend the marks.

  Understanding them was enormously troublesome at first. The marks were like the scratchings of a hen in the sand. I learned to tell the differences out of which their meanings sprang. Some of the marks stood for sounds, na and ba and ma and the like, and some stood for ideas, like god or king or plough, and some showed how a word was meant to stand in relation to the words around it. Then I caught the knack of this wonderful witchcraft. I found that almost without effort I could make the marks yield their meanings to my eye, so that I could look down a tablet and read from it a list of things, “gold, silver, bronze, copper,” or “Nippur, Eridu, Kish, Uruk,” or “arrow, javelin, spear, sword.” Of course I could never read as a scribe reads, swiftly scanning the columns of a tablet and bringing from it its full wealth of meaning and nuance: that is the task of a lifetime’s devotion, and I have had other tasks. But I learned my writing-signs well, and know them still, and can never be deceived by some treacherous underling who means to play me false.

  We were taught also concerning the gods, and the making of the world, and the founding of the Land. School-father told us how the heaven and the earth had come forth from the sea, and the sky had been put between them, and the moon and the sun and the planets were fashioned. He spoke of the bright and shining Sky-father An who decrees what must be done, and of Ninhursag the great mother, and of Enlil the lord of the storm, and of the wise Enki and the radiant sun Utu, the fount of justice, and cool silvery Nanna, the ruler of the night; and of course he spoke much of Inanna the mistress of Uruk. But when he told how mankind was created it saddened and angered me: not that we were brought into being to be serfs to the gods, for who am I to question that, but that the work was done in such a cruel and slipshod way.

  For look, look you, how the job was managed, and how we suffer for our makers’ foolishness!

  It was at a time when the gods lived like mortals on the earth, tilling the soil and caring for their flocks. But because they were gods they would not deign to work at their tasks, and so the grain withered and the cattle died, and the gods grew hungry. Therefore the sea-mother Nammu came to her son Enki, who dwelled lazily then in the happy land of Dilmun where the lion did not kill and the wolf did not snatch the lamb, and she told him of the sorrow and distress of his fellow gods. “Rise from your couch,” she said, “and use your wisdom to bring forth servants, who will assume our tasks and minister to our needs.”

  “O my mother,” he replied, “it can be done.” He told her to reach into the abyss and scoop up a handful of clay from the depths of the sea; and then Enki and his wife the earth-mother Ninhursag and the eight goddesses of birth took the clay and fashioned it, and shaped the body and the limbs of the first mortal being, and said, “Our servants will look like that.”

  Enki and Ninhursag, out of joy at what they had achieved, gave a great feast for all the other gods, and showed them how the creation of mankind would ease their lives. “See,” he said, “each of you will have your own estate on the earth, and these beings will assume your tasks and minister to your needs. These will be the serfs who toil, and over them we will place bailiffs and sheriffs and inspectors and commissioners, and above them kings and queens, who will live in palaces just as we do, with butlers and chamberlains and coachmen and ladies-in-waiting. And all of these creatures will toil day and night to provide for us.” The gods applauded, and drained many a mug of wine and beer; and they all grew gloriously drunk.

  In their drunkenness, Enki and Ninhursag continued to bring forth beings out of the clay. They brought one forth that had neither male organs nor female, and said it would be a eunuch to guard the royal harem; and they laughed greatly at that. And then they brought forth beings with this disease and that, of the body or of the spirit, and set them loose into the world as well. And lastly they made one whose name was “I Was Born Long Ago,” whose eyes were dim and whose hands trembled, and who could neither sit nor stand nor bend his knees. In this way did old age come into the world, and disease and madness and everything else that is evil—as the drunken joke of the god Enki and the earth-mother his wife, the goddess Ninhursag. When the mother of Enki, the sea-mother Nammu, saw what he had done, she exiled him in her anger to the deep abyss, where he dwells to this day. But the injury was done; the drunken gods had had their joke; and we suffer under that and always will. I will not quarrel with their having made us to be their creatures and their things, but why did they make us so imperfect?

  I asked the school-father that question, and he had me whipped on my knuckles for the asking.

  I learned other things that confused and frightened me. These were the tales and legends of the gods, the same ones that the harper Ur-kununna had sung in the palace courtyard. But somehow when the stories fell from the lips of that sweet and gentle old man they had lit a warm light of pleasure in my soul, and when I heard them in the dry precise voice of the pinch-faced school-father they seemed transformed into dark and disturbing things. Ur-kununna had made the gods seem playful and benevolent and wise; but in the school-father’s telling the gods seemed foolish and ruthless and cruel. And yet they were the same gods; and yet they were the same stories; and yet even the words were same. What had changed? Ur-kununna had sung the gods loving and feasting and bringing forth life. School-father gave us quarrelsome bickering untrustworthy gods who cast darkness upon the world without warning and without mercy. Ur-kununna lived in joy, and walked to his death uncomplaining, knowing he was beloved of the gods. School-father taught me that mortals must live their lives in endless fear, for the gods are not kind. And yet they were the same gods: wise Enki, lordly Enlil, beautiful Inanna. But the wise Enki had created old age for us, and the weakness of the flesh. The lordly Enlil had in his unquenchable lust raped the young girl-goddess Ninlil, though she cried out in pain, and he had fathered the moon upon her. The beautiful Inanna, to free herself from the nether world, had sold her husband Dumuzi to the demons. The gods, then, are no better than we are: just as petty, just as selfish, just as thoughtless. How had I failed to see these things, when I listened to the harper Ur-kununna? Was it merely that I was too young to understand? Or was it that in the warmth of his singing the doings of the divine ones took on a different semblance?

  The world that school-father revealed to me was a world that was bleak and chancy. And there was but one escape from that world, to an afterlife that was even more harsh and terrifying. What hope, then? What hope for any of us, king or beggar? That was what the gods had made for us; and the gods themselves are just as vulnerable and frightened: there is Inanna, stripped bare in her descent into hell, standing naked before the queen of the nether world. Monstrous! Monstrous! There is no hope, I thought, not here or anywhere after.

  Heavy thoughts, for so young a child, even a child that is the son of a king, and who is two parts god and only one part mortal. I was filled with despair. Alone I went one day to the side of the city by the river, and peered over the wall and saw the dead bodies floating in the water, the
corpses of those who could not afford a burial. And I thought, it is all the same, beggar or king, king or beggar, and there is no meaning anywhere. Dark thoughts! But after a time I put them from my mind. I was young. I could not brood forever on such things.

  Later I saw the truth within the truth: that even though the gods are as ruthless and as capricious as ourselves, it is also the case that we can make ourselves as exalted as gods. But that lesson was one that I was a long time in learning.

  4

  BECAUSE THERE IS DIVINE BLOOD within me, I grew swiftly to extraordinary size and strength. When I was nine I was bigger than any of the boys in the little temple-school, and I had no more trouble with the likes of Bir-hurturre and Zabardi-bunugga. Indeed they looked to me as their leader, and played the games I called for playing, and gave me the first seat in everything. The only difference between us was that they had hair on their bodies and their cheeks, and I did not.

  I went to a sage in the Kullab district and bought from him, for ninety se of silver and half a sila of good wine, a potion made of powdered juniper root, cassia juice, antimony, lime, and some other things, which was meant to hasten the onset of manhood. I rubbed this stuff under my arms and around my loins, and it burned like a thousand devils. But soon hair was sprouting on me as thickly as on any warrior.

  Dumuzi launched military campaigns against Aratta, against the city of Kish, and against the wild Martu tribesmen of the desert. I was too young to take part in these wars. But already I was training every day in the skills of the javelin, the sword, the mace, and the axe. On account of my size the other boys were afraid to stand forth on the training-grounds against me, and I had to practice with the young men. When dueling with axes one day with a warrior named Abbasagga, I split his shield in half at a single blow, and he threw down his weapon and ran from the field. After that it was hard for me to find opponents, even among the men. For a time I went off by myself and studied the art of the bow and arrow, although that is a weapon used only by hunters, not by warriors. The first bow that was made for me was too weak, and I snapped it as I tried to draw it; then I bought a costly bow of several woods cunningly laminated together, cedar and mulberry and fir and willow, which better served my purpose. I still have it.