What do you do when you have a story about enduring friendship, reckless attempts to win fame and immortality, and the inevitable bleakness of the human condition? You mine it for ecological themes, of course! And that is exactly what we are going to do today with the oldest surviving epic in the world, the ancient Mesopotamian Gilgamesh Epic. Such an undertaking stands in a long tradition, as the Epic both offered its contemporary readers explanations for the world in which they lived, as well as granting us today many insights into the society that conceived of it.¹ In this blog we will unearth how the Epic relates to the concept of wilderness and the perceived dichotomy between nature and culture in ancient Mesopotamian thought.

The Gilgamesh Epic is one of those literary classics that anyone should have read, but where many did not yet get the chance to do so. I will therefore first summarize the most salient points of the plot, so we are all – more or less literally – on the same page. Then we will look at the aforementioned dichotomy between nature and culture in ancient Mesopotamian thought, as it has long been championed in older scholarship. We will subsequently see that current scholarship, as well as the Gilgamesh Epic itself, does not necessarily support such a reading wholeheartedly. In the end, it will turn out that the attitude towards nature in ancient Mesopotamia was more ambivalent than we used to think.

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The Gilgamesh Epic

Ever since its (re)discovery was made public in 1872, the Gilgamesh Epic has been recognized as a staple of world literature.² Though it is perhaps not entirely accurate to speak of the Gilgamesh Epic, as there are many precursors to and variations on its most well-known rendition, the so-called Standard-Babylonian Epic. The figure of Gilgamesh has a long history but he first appeared as a literary figure in disparate Sumerian narrative texts, the origins of which are most often dated to the Ur III-period (ca. 2110-2003 BCE).³ This apparent existing Gilgamesh-tradition retained relevance and appeared to have often been reworked and expanded upon. From the Old Babylonian-period (ca. 2002-1595 BCE) onwards, there arises something of a consolidated epic poem in Akkadian.⁴ Variations on this poem could also be found in other languages than Akkadian, as well as in other places than Mesopotamia. There are, for instance, also Hittite, Hurrian, and Elamite fragments of the epic that have turned up. The Gilgamesh Epic slowly but surely became canonized, and it is this version – the aforementioned Standard-Babylonian Epic – that was found in the famous library of the Assyrian king Aššurbanipal (ca. 669-627 BCE) and became known the world over.⁵ This rendition was written in a, well, standardized form of the Babylonian dialect of the Akkadian language – which aimed to more faithfully reproduce the perceived classics of Akkadian literature – and is the most complete version we have today.⁶

As was customary in ancient times, the Gilgamesh Epic is often referred to by its first sentence: “He who saw the Deep.”⁷ The ‘he’ in question is Gilgamesh, a legendary king of the ancient Mesopotamian city-state of Uruk whose mother was the goddess Ninsun.⁸ And this king achieved marvelous things, such as fashioning the cyclopic walls of his city. But through abusing his position and his divine heritage, Gilgamesh also proved to be a veritable nuisance to many of his subjects.⁹ The pleas of the people of Uruk did not went unheard, though, as the gods created an equal to the blusterous king.¹⁰ This was Enkidu. For the first part of his life, Enkidu lived in the wilderness and was a companion and friend to the animals that resided there. But an animal lover with thumbs turned out to be a great bother for the local trappers and they went to the king for advice.¹¹ Gilgamesh advises them to civilize the wild man, and sends a sex worker named Šamḫat with them.¹² And indeed, following his encounter with the sex worker, Enkidu is rejected by the animals and he goes with Šamḫat to Uruk.¹³ After a short rivalry, he befriends the king and soon the two take off to seek fame by means of a visit to the ceder forest in the east.¹⁴ Presumably to the relief of many of Gilgamesh’ subjects!

The cedar forest was a place where one could achieve fame, because it was seen as an inimical place which also yielded rich resources that the cities of Mesopotamia lacked, such as the wood of large trees.¹⁵ Though they are hounded by portentous dreams, Gilgamesh and Enkidu nonetheless fight the mysterious guardian of the forest, Humbaba, with the blessing and assistance of the god Šamaš.¹⁶ But when the guardian pleads for his life, Enkidu encourages Gilgamesh to kill him anyway. And the king does just that. When the friends depart the forest with their cargo of precious wood, though, the last curse of their enemy still rings in their ears.¹⁷

As the great goddess Ištar takes note of the adventures of the king, she proposes a marriage. Gilgamesh wisely rejects her, as most of her former lovers met a grim fate. The goddess vows to retaliate and the bull of heaven is sent to earth to wreak havoc.¹⁸ The friends manage to kill the bull, though Enkidu dies shortly thereafter and apparently through divine intervention.¹⁹ Devastated by the loss of his friend and fearing his own eventual demise, Gilgamesh roams the earth in search of immortality.²⁰ But when he reaches the sole immortal couple, Uta-Napištim and his wife, they tell him that their fate can never be repeated.²¹ It was bound up with their role in rescuing all life on earth, after the gods had sent a great flood which they later regretted. Gilgamesh is nothing if not stubborn, though. So the couple decides to make their point more thoroughly. The king subsequently fails to pass even the simplest tests to stave off death – to stay awake for a prolonged period of time and to gain and remain in possession of a plant that grants eternal youth.²² He returns home and figures that his deeds, such as fashioning the walls of Uruk, will be his legacy and their own form of immortality.²³ Gilgamesh indeed, as you might say, saw the deep. And he became a sadder but wiser person.

Nature and Culture in Ancient Mesopotamian Thought

Even throughout this cursory summary, the wilderness appears to play an important role. There Humbaba and Enkidu live. There are the places where Gilgamesh looks for fame and resources, and later immortality. Which begs the question, what can we make of the way the wilderness was viewed in ancient Mesopotamian thought?

Human perception of the world in which they live can be said to depend on the times wherein they were born and is often indebted to their cultural idiom.²⁴ In our contemporary times, for example, many have a so-called mechanical worldview. They believe that the facts regarding the natural world exist independently of our knowledge of them. And that the workings of nature are governed by natural laws instead of the supernatural.²⁵ The people that lived in ancient Mesopotamia mostly had an enchanted worldview. They did know facts about the natural world, including geography, but their perception of such facts was probably as much influenced by their worldview as the other way around.²⁶ In that worldview their world was created by cosmic forces, primarily the gods. After its creation the entire world could be characterized as wild, but eventually civilization was – in one way or the other – brought to humankind.²⁷ And thus the wilderness was pushed beyond the outskirts of civilization.²⁸

Within this worldview civilization was defined in contrast to the wilderness.²⁹ The cities of ancient Mesopotamia lay on a flat plain, next to great rivers like the Euphrates and the Tigris that made irrigated agriculture possible. The wilderness beyond their urban and agricultural environment consisted of deserts, mountains, seas, and forests.³⁰ In the past, many scholars took this contrast to mean that ancient Mesopotamian thought maintained a strict dichotomy between cultural order, as epitomized by the cities, and wild nature, which was seen as rather unruly.³¹ But this view of nature as merely a “dangerous, negative, inimical region” is in need of some nuance.³² In the remotest outskirts of nature one could still find the remaining energy from the time of creation, for instance.³³ Thus, a person might experience the undiluted divine there, as well as become a different person through a rite of passage. And the wilderness harbored many precious recourses, that the cities on the flat land near the rivers lacked.³⁴ Therefore, despite an arguably overall negative impression of this space, it is now often maintained that the people living in ancient Mesopotamia were rather ambivalent towards the wilderness.³⁵ The Epic of Gilgamesh is a good source to test if this ambivalence hypothesis holds up, as it is assumed by modern scholars that, in ancient times, people saw this story as being rooted history.³⁶

Nature and Culture in the Gilgamesh Epic

In the Standard-Babylonian Epic, which I summarized above, the ambivalence of the text towards nature is already obvious. Gilgamesh and Enkidu don’t go to the cedar forest just to fight a scary monster, for instance, they also covet the resources that can be found there.³⁷ And if we return to that episode for a moment, we may notice that they are suitably impressed by the splendor of the trees and the adjacent mountains. They even fancy that the gods have also made their abode there.³⁸ Furthermore, on his travels to find immortality, Gilgamesh sees marvels that surpass almost anything that is described in the city of Uruk: a garden with bejeweled trees, for example.³⁹ Nature, as encountered in the epic, is far from one note.

This ambivalence becomes clearer still if we look beyond the Standard-Babylonian Epic. In a relatively recently discovered fragment – recent for Assyriology, that is! – the scene where Gilgamesh and Enkidu enter the cedar forest is way more elaborate, for instance.⁴⁰ In this version the forest is described as being full of life and light, literally oozing with abundance.⁴¹ But Humbaba can also be viewed as a representation of nature in all its contradictory complexity.⁴² Moreover, one may wonder how civilized Gilgamesh and Enkidu themselves are. Not only do they murder their already defeated foe, but in the aforementioned fragment they also make short work of his seven sons.⁴³ Furthermore, the friends acknowledge to each other that their felling of trees has created a veritable wasteland and nervously anticipate cosmic retribution for their deeds.⁴⁴ Not exactly a perfect picture of urban and agricultural order brought from the cities to an unruly nature that just lay there waiting to be civilized!

Conclusion: Beyond Dichotomies

In ancient Mesopotamian thought in general, and the Gilgamesh Epic in particular, we can discern a certain ambivalence towards nature. There were “several modes of interaction with nature’s forces in a spectrum between forceful domination, respectful communication, and fascinated admiration of natural abundance and knowledge of its important to human life.”⁴⁵ And this ambivalence is perhaps as immediate to us as it was to Gilgamesh and Enkidu. Do we not all feel a little bit relieved if we may end a stint in nature, however brief it was and be it for work or for pleasure? Until we are required to show up in some mangy room in a high rise somewhere, that is! Nature, as we see time and again, is so much more than the absence of culture. As such, denouncing such dichotomies can be, I think, a valuable pastime.

Despite this being one of my longest blog so far, I have barely scratched the surface of the Gilgamesh Epic. There is still so much to learn and to say about this text. What can we make of the treatment of the cedar forest and its inhabitants in light of our previous discussion of the ecological humanities, for instance? But such an undertaking will have to wait for another time, though that day shall surely come! Next Friday there will be no blog, but the week after we’ll resume our exploration of the humanities and the arts with something completely different.

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References

1. Andrew R. George, “Introduction”, in: Andrew R. George (ed.), The Epic of Gilgamesh (London: Penguin Classics, 2003), p. xiv.
2. Carolina López-Ruiz, Gods, Heroes, and Monsters: A Sourcebook of Greek, Roman, and Near Eastern Myths (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 74; George, “Introduction”, p. xxii-xxiii.
3. Scott B. Noegel, “Mesopotamian Epic”, in: John M. Foley (ed.), A Companion to Ancient Epic (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), p. 236-238; Marc van de Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons Inc, 2016), p. 67. In addition, Gilgamesh also appears in other kinds as documents, such as king lists, see: Mario Liverani, The Ancient Near East: History, Society and Economy, Translated by Soraia Tabatabai (New York: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group, 2014), p.109. For possible attestations of Gilgamesh as a literary figure before the Ur III-period, see: Andrew R. George, The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic: Introduction, Critical Edition and Cuneiform Texts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 4-6.
4. Dominique Charpin, Hammurabi of Babylon (New York: I.B. Taurus & co, 2012), p. xxvi, 15; Liverani, The Ancient Near East, p. 372. For the exact relationship between the Akkadian versions of the Gilgamesh Epic and the Sumerian precursors that we have found, see: George, The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic, p. 18-22.
5. Noegel, “Mesopotamian Epic”, p. 239-241; Liverani, The Ancient Near East, p. 265, 341.
6. This Standard-Babylonian dialect was created as a literary language during “the late second and first millennium BCE” to imitate older grammatical forms, but still betrays influences of the writers’ vernaculars, see: John Huehnergard, A Grammar of Akkadian (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2005), p. 595.
7. GILG. SB, Tablet I, l. 1.
8. GILG. SB, Tablet I, l. 260.
9. GILG. SB, Tablet I, l. 63-72.
10. GILG. SB, Tablet I, l. 96-104.
11. GILG. SB, Tablet I, l. 105-137.
12. GILG. SB, Tablet I, l. 161-162. I am aware of the problems with the verb ‘to civilize’ and its noun and adjective counterparts, but as it is commonly used in scholarly works on the Gilgamesh Epic, I have opted to retain it in order to avoid confusion. For more information on the history and (ab)use of this and similar words, see: Wayne Modest & Robin Lelijveld (ed.), Woorden Doen Ertoe: Een Incomplete Gids voor Woordkeuze binnen de Culturele Sector (Amsterdam: Tropenmuseum, 2018), p. 97, 137.
13. GILG. SB, Tablet I, l. 195-202.
14. GILG. SB, Tablet II, l. 110-117. GILG. P, l. 230-240. Poignantly, in one fragment their friendship is sealed with a kiss, see: GILG Y, l. 18.
15. Laura Feldt, “Religion, Nature, and Ambiguous Space in Ancient Mesopotamia: The Mountain Wilderness in Old Babylonian Religious Narratives”, NUMEN 2016, 63 (4), p. 349-350, 370.
16. GILG. SB, Tablet IV, l. 15-260.
17. GILG. SB, Tablet V, l. 106-265.
18. GILG. SB, Tablet VI, l. 7-118. See also: Mark Weeden, “The Scholar and the Poet: Standard-Babylonian Gilgameš VI vs. Illiad V”, in: Adrian Kelly & Christopher Metcalf (eds.), Gods and Mortals in Early Greek and Near Eastern Mythology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), p. 81-82.
19. GILG. SB, Tablet V, l. 147; GILG. SB, Tablet VII.
20. GILG. SB, Tablet IX-X.
21. GILG. SB, Tablet XI, l. 199-208.
22. GILG. SB, Tablet XI, l. 282-306. It is a snake which makes of with the plant and so the poem explains how snakes can rejuvenate by shedding their skin, see: GILG. SB, Tablet XI, l. 307.
23. GILG. SB, Tablet XI, l. 323-329.
24. Francesca Rochberg, Before Nature: Cuneiform Knowledge and the History of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), p. 17; Jens P. Schjødt, “Wilderness, Liminality, and the Other in Old Norse Myth and Cosmology”, in: Laura Feldt (ed.), Wilderness in Mythology and Religion: Approaching Religious Spatialities, Cosmologies and Ideas of Wild Nature (Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2012), p. 184.
25. Rochberg, Before Nature, p. 18-19.
26. Frans A.M. Wiggermann, “Scenes from the Shadow Side”, in: Marianna E. Vogelzang & Herman L.J. Vanstiphout (eds.), Mesopotamian Poetic Language: Sumerian and Akkadian (Groningen: Styx, 1996), p. 208. Though within that worldview they thought that it was possible to thoroughly know the world as it was created by supernatural forces, see: Marc van de Mieroop, Philosophy before the Greeks: The Pursuit of Truth in Ancient Babylonia (Woodstock: Princeton University Press, 2016), p. 9-10.
27. Alan Lenzi, “The Uruk List of Kings and Sages and Late Mesopotamian Scholarship”, Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 2008, 8 (2), p. 150; Jean-Jacques Glassner, “The Use of Knowledge in Ancient Mesopotamia”, in: Jack M. Sasson (ed.), Civilizations of the Ancient Near East (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1995), p. 1815-1816.
28. Cristopher Woods, “At the Edge of the World: Cosmological Conceptions of the Eastern Horizon in Mesopotamia”, Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 2009, 9 (2), p. 195.
29. Wiggermann, “Scenes from the Shadow Side”, p. 210-211.
30. Peter M.M.G. Akkermans, “Prehistoric Western Asia”, in: Karen Radner, Nadine Moeller & Daniel T. Potts (eds.), The Oxford History of the Ancient Near East: Volume 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), p. 31–34.
31. Rochberg, Before Nature, p. 27-28, 40-41. See for example: A. Leo Oppenheim: “Man and Nature in Mesopotamian Civilization”, in: Charles C. Gillispie (ed.), Dictionary of Scientific Biography – Vol 15 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1978), 634-666.
32. Feldt, “Religion, Nature, and Ambiguous Space in Ancient Mesopotamia”, p. 349, 355.
33. Woods, “At the Edge of the World, p. 186, 219.
34. Feldt, “Religion, Nature, and Ambiguous Space in Ancient Mesopotamia”, p. 349-350, 363.
35. Jordi Vidal, “The Sacred Landscape of the Kingdom of Ugarit”, Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 2004, 4 (1), p. 150; Feldt, “Religion, Nature, and Ambiguous Space in Ancient Mesopotamia”, p. 365.
36. Eckart Frahm, “Keeping Company with Men of Learning: The King as Scholar”, in: Karen Radner & Eleanor Robsen (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Cuneiform Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 517.
37. Mary R. Bachvarova, 2016, From Hittite to Homer  The Anatolian Background of Ancient Greek Epic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), p. 58.
38. GILG. SB, Tablet VI, l. 1-2, 5-6; Stephanie Dalley, “The Natural World in Ancient Mesopotamian Literature”, in: John Parham & Louise Westling (eds.), A Global History of Literature and the Environment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), p. 29. See also: Noga Ayali-Darshan, “The Background Of The Cedar Forest Tradition in the Egyptian Tale Of The Two Brothers in the Light of West-Asian Literature”, Ägypten und Levante / Egypt and the Levant 2017, Vol. 27 (1), p. 187-188.
39. GILG. SB, Tablet VI, l. 171-190.
40. Farouk N.H. Al-Rawi & Andrew R. George, “Back to the Cedar Forest: The Beginning and End of Tablet V of the Standard Babylonian Epic of Gilgameš.”, Journal of Cuneiform Studies 2014, 66 (1), p. 72, 74.
41. Ibidem, p. 76-77.
42. Patsy Callaghan, “Myth as a Site of Ecocritical Inquiry: Disrupting Anthropocentrism”, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 2015, 22 (1), p. 91.
43. Al-Rawi & George, “Back to the Cedar Forest”, p. 74. Though this addition might allude to another myth and, by doing so, imply that order did triumph over evil when Humbaba was slain, see: Ibidem, p. 75.
44. Ibidem, p. 74, 83.
45. Feldt, “Religion, Nature, and Ambiguous Space in Ancient Mesopotamia”, p. 375.