Gilgamesh

The Bard Sequence explores humanity's oldest epic, Gilgamesh, with help from Shana Russell (Bard High School Early College Newark), Nico Veroli (Bard Sequence) and Matt Park (Bard Sequence). 

Key conversations touch on gender and sexuality, urbanism, and the historical context for the epic. 

Transcript

Matt 
He who saw the deep, the country's foundation, who knew the proper ways, was wise in all manners. Welcome to the Bard Sequence Seminar Podcast. Today, it's Gilgamesh.

Matt 
And I'm Matt Park, Director of the Bard Sequence. Today, I'll be your friendly moderator and panelist. And I'm joined by Nico Veroli and Shana Russell. Shana, can you start by briefly introducing yourself? 

Shana
Sure. Hi, I'm Shana Russell. I teach literature and year one seminar at Bard High School Early College Newark. 

Matt
Thanks, Shana. Nico? 

Nico
Hi, my name is Nico Veroli. I'm a philosopher  by training and I teach the first year seminar at Camden New Jersey. 

Matt
Thanks, Nico. Full disclaimer for our audience, we are not here as experts who are going to tell you what Gilgamesh is really about. Instead, we're gonna talk about what Gilgamesh is to us and why we value the text, or not. We're gonna ground our readings in evidence from the text, but if we do a decent job, you should be walking away from this with more questions than answers.

We are also not here to summarize the text for you, because whether it's a podcast or an essay, you should not spend your precious time giving your audience a literal summary of something that they need to read for themselves. And we're gonna start with one more round of introductions, this time to Gilgamesh itself. Nico, how did you meet Gilgamesh? How did that meeting impact the way you view or viewed the text, and do you like this text?

Nico
I encountered Gilgamesh first by teaching it a collaborative endeavor of a college in Palestine. It was a collaboration between the Palestinian Public University and Bard College, where I was teaching first-year seminar and it was once in my contact to teach Gilgamesh because it is a literature that emerges out of the Middle Eastern cultural context.

And so it was fascinating to teach it in that setting because the students had a really particular relationship to it and they were really struck by the ways in which the language in which it's written, ancient Sumerian, kind of sounds a little bit like modern Arabic, but you know while at the same time being completely incomprehensible from the standpoint of modern Arabic. And then the text itself enabled us to get into some really interesting issues that are still very much contemporary in the Middle East. I love getting to know the content there. I've taught it in Camden as well. And it raised some really interesting issues for students, for myself.

I started thinking about it and writing about it a little bit. And the preparation for this podcast enabled me to think and write about it more than I had before. That was really wonderful. 

Matt
Thanks, Nico. Shana, how did you meet Gilgamesh? 

Shana
I met Gilgamesh as an undergraduate English major at Florida A&M University. I did not like it. I felt like... Well, it was presented to me as one of those pieces of literature that if you're going to be an expert, you have to know it. Everyone, you have to know it. And I read it in the same class that we read Beowulf. Even now, I don't like really science fiction or fantasy. So I did not, why are there so many monsters and ogres and all kinds of things in it? Why does it take this amount of work to read it? Um, reading ancient texts close to their original language, you can get them just even like a lot of work to enjoy a story.

And I really felt like women got the short end of the stick at the time because I was a budding baby feminist. So I hated it. And now I really love it. And that's actually because I'm a much better analyst of literature than I was then. And so back to the gender question, now the variety and the diversity of women characters in the text excite me because you have to read them with nuance. And the more I read them, the more I like them. So, big turnaround from introduction to now. 

 Matt
Thanks, Shana. I met Gilgamesh at Bard High School, Early College Newark. Although I never taught first year seminar, so I never actually taught the text. Teaching second year seminar, Gilgamesh was by far the text that students always talk to me about that they read in first year seminar and remember, and some of them remembered very little else outside of some of the things that happened in Gilgamesh, but they remembered that text. And that told me that there was something going on there that was interesting to the students. And so that was kind of my cue to start digging into what is this Gilgamesh thing, because quite honestly, I really hadn't heard of it. My college education did not delve into the so-called classics. That's just not what I got. It certainly was not on offer in my high school education, which was exclusively American and European authors. And the courses I took in college, although I took courses in lots of different subjects, different parts of the world, the ancient Middle East was just not one of those things that got covered. And so I was never introduced to Gilgamesh at all until BHSEC Newark. But like both of you, I have definitely developed a passion for it and I really do love the text. 

So with that, we're gonna do a bit of a deeper dive. So we're gonna do five or fewer minutes of context. I am going to do my best to limit myself to five minutes of context here. It's really difficult with the text this old in which there is this much context. And so one of the things I really had to do was decide, am I going to focus more on the ancient stuff or the modern stuff and the history of its modern reception? I chose to go ancient because that fascinates me. And I'm really kind of interested in how this text has just survived for so long and then maybe we can tease out some of the modern stuff later on, or maybe not. It doesn't matter either way. But the purpose of going into the context is really just kind of to dive deeper into the background of the text, not because the context determines what Gilgamesh means, but because it can help us discover some different ways of seeing the text, open up new kind of areas of possible research and inquiry, and show us some things that maybe we might not have seen if we didn't go there. So here we go, I'm gonna time myself and keep to under five.

 So the story of Gilgamesh is usually placed around 2750 BCE, when supposedly Gilgamesh was actually the king of the city-state of Uruk in southern Mesopotamia, modern-day Iraq. That's in the southern half of Mesopotamia where people spoke Sumerian, as opposed to the northern half of Mesopotamia where they spoke Akkadian.
Whether or not the Gilgamesh story actually originates with his kingship or if they were really kind of grafted onto much older stories dating back much earlier is kind of unclear. A lot of scholars seem to accept that Gilgamesh was an actual king and Uruk a real person. I'm not quite so sure about that but I have no way to either prove or disprove it so I'll kind of let that one sit. What we do know is that Sumerian civilization from which Gilgamesh comes was later eclipsed by a number of other civilizations, Akkadian, Babylonian, and Assyrian empires. But these new conquerors choose to keep this Gilgamesh story alive, and it continues to be meaningful to them, although they are conquerors who have come in and displaced Sumerian kings and civilization. And this happens for over a thousand years. We get conquerors like Sargon of Akkad. Hammurabi of Babylon and Ashurbanipal of Assyria, and they create these large empires through violence. But they are all also very serious patrons of libraries and they're heavily invested in creating schools, particularly for training scribes so that society is literate, they can keep records. And one of the texts that they're really invested in keeping alive is this Gilgamesh text. And it's really why we still have it today, despite all of these kind of political and military upheavals, the text remains fairly a fixed star kind of in the constellation. It is also of note that both Sargon and Ashurbanipal, in addition to being librarians and scholars, they were also serious Ishtar worshippers. And Ishtar, as you may know, is one of the main characters in the Gilgamesh stories. The Sumerians originally called her Inanna, which we'll get into in a bit. But they were very much dedicated to Ishtar, and that may have been one of the factors which caused them to kind of preserve this story. 

It's really during the Babylonian period, 1894 to 1595 BCE, which historians call the Old Babylonian Period, that we first see a really unified Gilgamesh story compiled by a single poet. Before that, it was kind of a scattering of different folk stories, some of which were written, some of which were spoken in Sumerian. But really in the old Babylonian period, we see the first unified Gilgamesh story that has a clear beginning and end. There are some important changes in the story between the older Sumerian and Babylonian periods. One of the changes is that Inanna/Ishtar is kind of minimalized, whereas Enkidu is elevated. In the original stories, Enkidu is kind of a mere servant of Gilgamesh and he becomes a much more complex and dynamic friend, competitor, peer, and lover. Whereas Inanna kind of gets downplayed, a lot of her backstory ends up being omitted from the Gilgamesh story. And so we get an Ishtar/Inanna that is perhaps a little bit less interesting than the Sumerian, unfortunately. Whereas what we do get is a much more interesting in Enkidu. So kind of a trade off there. 

The next major development that happens is sometime between 1300 and 1000 BCE, when a self-described priest/scribe/exorcist, Sîn-lēqi-unninni, redacts and standardized the Gilgamesh story, and that's the form that more or less exists today, because of the number of times that it was copied and preserved. We know this name, Sîn-lēqi-unninni, because he had the gall to put his own name in the story. Something which was very rare in cuneiform writing. Typically you did not find the person who redacts or copies a story to inscribe their name on the tablets, but he chooses to do so. And that those particular tablets are copied and copied and copied many thousands of times. And that's essentially why we have the story today. And that is putting me very close to five minutes. So I'm just gonna stop. I did not get to all the things I thought that I would, but oh well, Gilgamesh is still here and that's my story and I'm sticking to it. 

Nico, Shana, are there any other things contextually that you would add just based on your own kind of knowledge of the text? 

Nico
I can say something from a more sociological and political perspective, though I really appreciated your historical contextualization. So one way of reading this text is the literary to a sociological situation that characterized most early states. And by early states, I mean states that existed between 3000 and 1000 BC. So around the time of the writing, down to a big chunk of the states that you just mentioned Matt that ensured the survival of the Gilgamesh epic. And that's... And this might explain why they were interested in it. So because of their geographical limits, the fact that they were surrounded by large areas that were unsettled combined with the fact that they had large populations of what was called what the sociologists called debt peons, people who fell into slavery because they can't pay their debts, this created an incentive for those peons to escape their fate in moments of crisis by fleeing into the wilderness and becoming what was called, which has come to be known as barbarians. Those barbarians accumulated at the gates of the civilized world and then frequently raided the harvests, the herds of early state peasants and their landlords, sometimes overthrown the rulers, replacing them as happened on a number of occasions. So this situation didn't just affect early states in the Middle East. It's actually affecting early states for every day they've sort of emerged in the Middle East, in the Far East, Mesoamerica and so on. There's always civilizational hub surrounded by unaffiliated populations and territories, right, which, so the question of what is or what ought to be the relationship between the civilized and barbarian is a recurring one in many early civilizations. One question we might ask is, how does the Epic of Gilgamesh answer this question? Right. And I think that might be an interesting question. We should start a conversation at some point. Maybe not today. 


Matt
Thanks, Nico. Shana, anything else on your end? 

Shana
Yeah. Well, what's interesting to me is that as a literary person or a literary scholar, I guess, we call Gilgamesh possibly the world's oldest known work of written literature. And so we use it to define what a civilization is and what it means. And so I think as we read, we can make choices and really engage in conversation about the definition of civilization and the relationship between the written word versus the oral tradition and what that means for how we value stories and storytelling. 

Matt
Thanks, Shana. That leads us into our first real category here, right, which is really starting to get into what Gilgamesh is to us and what the text is to us and, you know, really why it's meaningful to us. I'll start off with my take here. And my take does, it does kind of fit in with this idea that this text has something to say about civilization.

And in particular, I'm interested in how civilization and urbanization are often linked to each other. This idea that in a civilization, you are going to find cities, you're going to find urban areas. Because for me, the city of Uruk is really kind of the driver of this story. It gives a lot of the characters kind of their motivations. It sets the background. But also, I think the city itself is almost a living character in this text and it really undergoes a character arc. At the beginning of the text, the city of Uruk is kind of subjugated or it's just coming out of subjugation. There's a foreign power to the north, which has conquered it essentially, and Uruk has to pay tribute. And it's Gilgamesh who comes along and rallies, you know, the people and tells them to be brave and liberates the city of Uruk, restores its old foundations. And then from that point, Uruk is kind of on the come up, right? And Gilgamesh starts setting things straight. He goes to the sacred forest where he brings back the cedars and shores up the might of the city walls. And at the end of the text, it's Gilgamesh and Ur-Shanabi (incorrectly identified as Uta-Napishti in the audio) and Gilgamesh says, look at this city, it's going to stand forever. And so to me, one of the more interesting kind of arcs throughout the story is the development of the city from being subjugated to the eternal city, the beacon of civilization and of prosperity and progress and all these sorts of things that we tend to but probably shouldn't associate with this idea of civilization and of being civilized. And it gets there through quite a lot of violence, right? And in the text, it's mostly symbolic with the murder of Humbaba, but if we kind of step outside the symbolic aspect and ask what that might mean it probably means a whole lot of killing in order to get your hands on those natural resources, on those cedars, so that the city can in fact grow. For me, I'm very interested by the idea of the city and how important that is to the text and I think especially because the vast majority of our students in the Bard network are living in cities and this is primarily an urban network of schools. I think, asking students to think about their cities is really important today, Especially as the urban form of life is now the dominant form of life on the planet in some places by far. 

Shana
I will jump in with mine. For me, Gilgamesh is a text about gender. It starts off with the prologue in the first tablet giving us this really incredibly sort of masculine character, alpha male kind of characterization of Gilgamesh as the kind of king he is. He's like taking liberties with the wives of his subjects whenever he wants to, and he's so great at battle, and no one can beat him. And then, Enkidu gets created to sort of humble him, in a way, because of how he treats his subjects, but all of this pales in comparison to just how perfectly masculine he is. And then, the center of the story becomes this very intimate friendship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu, who some translations describe as romantic by the end of it, which is a completely different kind of masculinity. They have such an emotionally intimate relationship in every translation. They feel very deeply for each other. It is the only real person that we see Gilgamesh feel deeply about and for. He's very dismissive of everyone else. And so we get in the story both a perfectly archetypal view of a masculine king and this like beautiful story of friendship between men that counters our own sort of American and urban understandings of what friendships between men are supposed to look like. And it's a conversation I love having with my students about whether or not men are allowed to hold hands and, you know, what does that mean? Do you care about your friends? How does that work? Because they're also willing to die for each other, which is a different kind of masculinity. And so I love that conversation. So that's the masculinity side. But then, and something I hear students say all the time is like, well, back then, women were discriminated against. Well, we have such interesting representations of women in the story. So we meet Shamhat, who is sometimes called a harlot, sometimes called a courtesan, depending on what translation you have. She is a priestess in actuality, and she's this person who sort of quote unquote makes a man out of an Enkidu. But she's very powerful and she wields a ton of influence and calls into question our ideas about sexuality.

And then we have Gilgamesh's mother Ninsun who can interpret dreams and like scenes in the future. And she is called Wise. So she's kind of one of the wiser characters. Gilgamesh seeks wisdom from her. We are very used to that being father figures in other kinds of stories. And so I love that she is the person who gets to be kind of all-knowing. And then we have Ishtar who is powerful in a different way, who gets to be the sort of jealous woman scorned. And I think that's awesome because any in isolation, all of these women characters would be considered painfully stereotypical. But when you put them all together, it's so interesting how like here are all these roles that women can play in society. This is one of the oldest texts that we have access to. So what does that mean? Then when you say well back then women were oppressed? Well, I don't know these women it's a little bit more nuanced in that way and really fun to read.

So I think, the text for me being about gender, it just calls into question all the things that we assume about both the past and the present and how we are supposed to be and what those identities look like. So that's how I read the text. 

Matt
Yeah, I mean, it's pretty clear to me that Enkidu and Gilgamesh are romantic. I mean, I think it's pretty obvious in the text. I mean, there's mentions of hand holding and kissing. In the 12th tablet, which not everyone includes in the Gilgamesh story, Gilgamesh goes down to the underworld. At least in the Andrew George translation, there's this reference to how much pleasure Gilgamesh has gotten from the penis of Enkidu, but now it's kind of withered and gone in the underworld. I mean, it's pretty clear, right? I don't think there's too much ambiguity, but I think that also says a lot about gender and sexuality in ancient Mesopotamia, in which Gilgamesh could have multiple wives and be a king and also have a male companion and peer and competitor and lover. So I think we should be careful about implying backwards in time our own kind of mores and hangups and taboos. 

Shana
Exactly. 

Matt
Nico, I'll throw it over to you for your take.

Nico
So the thing I get from our conversation so far is that the first work of literature may also be the first gay love story, which is a lovely kind of possibility. One of the interesting things about the epic is that it's broken up in a number of different episodes that are pretty distinct from each other thematically. The civilizing of Enkidu, the bonding with Gilgamesh through the hunt for and murder of Humbaba, the rebuffing of Ishtar, and the killing of the bull of heaven, etc. Each of these moments in narration evokes fundamental questions that have been with us since the origins of human civilization, and perhaps even earlier. What's the difference between the human and the animal? For instance, what is the meaning of sexual pleasure? What is the role of homoeroticism in social relations? How did male dominance arise? What is the meaning of death for the highly symbolic beings that is beings whose existence is determined by meaning that we humans are? In addition, one of the most interesting questions that anthropologists have started asking in recent years, as the discipline has begun divesting itself from the idea that social hierarchy is the natural outcome of human evolution is, why did people ever accept the rule of kings? 

The Epic of Gilgamesh may give us the beginnings of an answer to this question. Kings, because of the fact that they are recognized as sui generis individuals by the whole community, make great literary characters through which a community can make sense of itself narratively and provide its own answers to the fundamental questions I listed a moment ago. This might make sense of defining that kings seem to have, in very early societies, seem to have been in very early societies play kings, whose role was largely ceremonial and even then limited by a seasonal calendar. Example, kings in the spring, but not for the rest of the year. It's quite possible that as kings became more and more central to a community's identity, through narratives like that of Gilgamesh, they gained a power which coercion alone could never have granted them. One that lasted more and more continuously throughout the year until it became a permanent institution. This is what you might call a theory of literature as politics by other means. 

Matt
That's interesting. And again, I mean, I think it does go along with the context a bit in terms of why some of these other conqueror kings choose to keep this story alive, right? Because that character of Gilgamesh, while it originally legitimated Sumerian kings, can also just as easily legitimate Babylonian, Assyrian, right, whatever kings who have kind of moved in and conquered.

I will say, again, one of the things that we lose when we move away from the Sumerian is that in the original Sumerian stories, it is Inanna/Ishtar who hands the kingship to Gilgamesh. And so, you know, Gilgamesh does some work for her of chopping down this tree which has been inhabited by this wicked serpent, you know, biblical,  influence there. Um, and then, you know, they kind of build that tree into a marriage bed, right? And, and Gilgamesh and Inanna/Ishtar, you know, essentially are married and she hands over the kingship of the city to him. Um, as well as a drum that he starts pounding and driving everyone crazy with, but, um, that's, that's perhaps a separate story. 

Nico
One of the things that I really appreciate about the Epic of Gilgamesh, I'll say is that it raises all these interesting questions, but it doesn't provide the final answers to any of them, which means that all of these actors, right, of the barbarians, the peasants, the kings, and the aristocrats, can all find the answers that they're looking for in it, which enables it to survive, like that, for two thousand years uninterruptedly. And then to come back at the end of the 19th century, to be a story that we're still interested in, inspired by the fact that so much another two thousand years has elapsed since it disappeared, at least temporarily. That's really fascinating.

Matt
I agree. I think the text often presents its own opposite on a number of subjects, and it does not give you a conclusion. And again, I do think that is contrary to my initial readings of it, similar to Shana's, where when I first read it, Gilgamesh was just a tyrant, an imperialist, and just a straight-up murderer, right? And that's what they did. They murdered Humbaba, and that's the story. And with subsequent readings, again, I have found it to be a lot more complicated. Thank you, Shana and Nico. We're going to go now to some close reading.

So we're going to zoom in a bit, pick a passage from the text. You can either just kind of identify it, or if it's short enough, you're welcome to read the passage and then tell us what you take away from that passage. Nico, would you mind kicking off our close reading? 

Nico
Absolutely. So the passage I'm interested in is situated at the beginning of verse 9, in which Gilgamesh... Enkidu... seek out eternal life so Enkidu has just died and this is what Gilgamesh says this is um lines one through five page 68 and 69 of the Andrew George  translation for his friend Enkidu Gilgamesh did literally weep and wandered the wild. 

I shall die and shall I not be then as Enkidu. Sorrow has entered my heart. I am afraid of death, so I wandered a while to find Uta Napishti, son of Ubar Tutu." 

This passage clearly introduces the next three tablets of the epic. Gilgamesh's warning from Enkidu to go on a quest for the secret of eternal life, which he believes he can get from Uta Napishti, the lone survivor of a divinely ordered flood, whom one could interpret as a literary precursor of Noah. In fact, many people have suggested that there is a clear line of literary influence between the epic of Gilgamesh and the Torah and the biblical story of Noah in particular. One could call this passage the discovery of death. It's as if Gilgamesh, in the moment of Enkidu's death, discovered his own mortality.

That is to say the fact that he is inevitably going to die. How is this possible? One might ask. Didn't Gilgamesh know that living beings could die before this moment? In fact, didn't he have to know this fact since the essence of his friendship with Enkidu had to do with killing? There is a moment of psychological identification hinted at by the passage that may help in answering this question at least partially. Gilgamesh asks, I shall die and shall I not then be as Enkidu? Though Enkidu's death, through Enkidu's death, Gilgamesh can imagine himself as dead. Why is that? Because Enkidu is Gilgamesh's outer ego. At least one could argue his divinely ordained mirror image. Here I'm going to quote him.

I'd like another passage from tablet one, lines 90 to 100 on page four of the Andrew George translation. The warrior's daughter, the young man's bride, to their complaint, the god Anu paid heed. They summoned Anu, Aruru, the great one. You Aruru created mankind, now fashion what Anu has thought of. Let him be a match for the storm in his, that is say Gilgamesh's heart, let them vie with each other so Uruk may be rested. The goddess Aruru heard these words, what Anu had thought of, she fashioned within her. 

There's a lot to comment on this passage, but the core of it for my purposes is that it describes Enkidu not just as a companion invented by the gods, but as an exact counterforce one whose aim is to neutralize Gilgamesh's depredations on the daughters and wives of Uruk by being a match for Gilgamesh, a wife, as a dream Gilgamesh has a little later puts it. While there are obvious homoerotic innuendos here, as there are throughout the rest of the text, what interests me is the idea that Gilgamesh can only understand death through Enkidu. That is to say through a distorted image of himself, distorted because Enkidu while being Gilgamesh's alter ego is not him. And so for Gilgamesh to imagine Enkidu as himself or Enkidu's death as his own, it's for him to imagine his own death as another's and so therefore to misrecognize a death other than his own as his own.

And so one has to ask as when we imagine our own death as another's, we're not making the same mistake. And to follow through on this thought, is it also the case that when we go seeking an eternal life for ourselves, let's say in doctrines of religious salvation, what we're seeking is in fact, the return of the dead to life and not as we imagine our own escape from death. 

Matt
Thanks, Nico. I mean, Freud has this argument that our own deaths are fundamentally inaccessible to us, right? And that therefore the only way that we can in fact access our own deaths, because at the point of death we cease to be and therefore we have no clue what happens at that point, that our only access to our own deaths is through the deaths of others and in our observations in the world. That's really interesting. Thank you, Nico.

Shana, what part of the text are you choosing to close read? 

Shana
My close reading comes from Tablet 6, which I am going to summarize. It is the appearance of Ishtar, Ishtar's pivotal scene as I like to call it. I should say as a caveat, I love teaching seminar because I get to embody my identity as a lover of reading. My reading of Ishtar is as though she is in fact my best friend. That is how I interpret this. Um, and so that is how I'm going to summarize it. So here's what happens. Here come Enkidu and Gilgamesh back from winning an epic battle. Ishtar sees them come back. She's really hot for Gilgamesh. She has no problem saying so. That is why I like her so much. So she's like, listen, Gilgamesh, will you please, will you please be my husband? And that's when we kind of figure out that they have some history together between the two of them. Gilgamesh says no and decides he is going to remind her, Ishtar, of all of her previous husbands or lovers and what their fate has been. So I think one of them gets turned into a wolf, somebody gets sent to the underworld, somebody gets turned into a toad. It's a really long list. And Gilgamesh runs through the entire list in front of her. She gets mad, she goes to tell her father. So she turns into like a bratty teenager and says, listen, he insulted me, therefore he has to be punished. Her father, he's a very reasonable man, but a girl dad nonetheless. So he says, perhaps you had something to do with the fact that you got insulted by Gilgamesh. She doesn't care. She requests the bull of heaven to punish Gilgamesh and Enkidu for refusing her marriage proposal and then embarrassing her in front of everyone.

And when she sends the bull of heaven, there's this epic, again, another epic battle. Enkidu really comes out as the hero here. So Gilgamesh gets kind of prematurely knocked down. And so Enkidu ends up being the real, the real hero in my mind. So he finally, I think it's like the underdog gets to shine a little bit there as well. Of course, Ishtar is very upset that now both she has been insulted and her epic punishment has been foiled um, and then she kind of sulks away.

Gilgamesh and Enkidu get to celebrate about how amazingly wonderful and masculine they are and that's sort of the end of that scene. And then we don't in this translation, as you mentioned, right, in the minimizing of Ishtar, that's it. That is her moment. Other than mentioning some other places in the text, which signaled to me that she must have been more important in the past, which is how I figured that out because they were talking about other women being priestesses of Ishtar. And I was like, well, why do we not see more of her, go figure, we should have seen more of her. However, what I find interesting about this passage, I love Ishtar, she is my favorite character. I love her more every single time I read it. In part, because she is so powerful, because often times the ability to just be irrationally angry is always given to men when it comes to these kinds of epic stories.

Including sort of jealousy and the ability to be angry about rejection. And we're always talking about men having the same kinds of reaction that she has. And so I find the gender reversal interesting. But also like, even though Gilgamesh is technically shaming her for all of these previous relationships she's had, I kind of like, I'm into it. I'm like, that's cool that a woman in ancient times, a goddess at that is able to just sort of have as many love affairs as she wants to and get rid of them whenever she wants to. So I think if we're going to really read this within, if we were to have a feminist reading of Gilgamesh, suddenly Ishtar becomes the real star there and the ability to do that, to practice that kind of analysis. I think she's such a fantastic exercise in how do we reread or really tease out a minor character put them at the forefront, then what does that tell us? And I think in her case, right, it becomes women are rulers of their own bodies and their own feelings, and they are allowed to be angry and irrational and jealous and disastrous. And I just find that really, really fascinating and sort of fun to read it that way. 

Matt
Thanks, Shana. There's so much I wanna say right now, but I have all of my Inanna/Ishtar stuff in a later prompt. So I'm going to hold on to it for now. I'm coming to it later. 

Nico
Can I add something in response to Shina? 

Matt
Yeah, please. 

Nico
I don't really talk about Ishtar, but I completely agree with you, I mean, later in my prompts. But I completely agree with you that she's a really central character. And one of the hands to that is not only that there's priestesses to Ishtar that come up later on in the text, but that Gilgamesh himself in the later tablets praised to a star on a number of different occasions. And so you really have a classic example here of a character that's kind of repressed by the history of the text itself and a bit of the retelling of the story in a really sort of clear way.

One thing I'll add is that I don't know if you guys are familiar at all with the iconography of Ishtar, but it's fascinating in ancient tablets, she appears as a woman, which she's the goddess of love and destruction, which is an interesting kind of combination. But she appears with wings she looks like an angel and with talons. So somewhere between an angel and a demon. And it's difficult not to assume that later Christian iconography of angels isn't directly influenced by this tradition. 

Shana
If I can add to that, in other literary and mythological representations of her, she does feel guilt and she does take accountability for these outbursts that she ends up having. So the love, destruction, dichotomy comes up. It makes a lot more sense when she is a much more complete character. The other thing about Gilgamesh praying to her later, again with this feminist or gender-focused reading of the text, it shows you how important those tiny details really are. That when someone is appealing to a woman in the other worlds that matters. 

Matt
Thanks Nico and Shana. So I'm gonna jump in with my own. I went simple here. I went right for the beginning of the text because I'm gonna keep with my theme of talking about the city. 

So, see its wall like a strand of wool. View its parapet that none could copy. Take the stairway of a bygone era. Draw near to Iana, seat of Ishtar the goddess, that no later king could ever copy. Climb Uruk's wall back and forth. Survey its foundations, examine the brickwork. Were its bricks not fired in an oven, did the seven sages not lay its foundation? 

And so for me, what's really happening in this part of the text is the city is really being gendered in the way it's being described here. When comparing it to a strand of wool, what is really referencing there is shepherding, which is the primary economic activity or one of the primary economic activities that was supporting the rise and growth of the city. And shepherding in ancient Mesopotamia was really kind of man's work. It was a very highly gendered masculine profession and in fact many of the kings of Uruk, we see images of them wearing the shepherd's cap. Instead of what we often think of kings as wearing a crown or some such thing, because we've got a particular notion of kingship in our minds. But the king wore the shepherd's cap to assert their masculinity. 

We also have this big deal being made of the brickwork, were its bricks not fired in an oven? And in fact, most of the bricks that would have been used to build the city of Uruk were not in fact fired in an oven, because that was extremely resource intensive. You needed a lot of wood and you simply could not get that much wood to fire that many bricks. Brick making in a fired oven was a man's work. It was a highly gendered occupation that men did. So men created the fire brick, whereas anyone could dry bricks in the sun. And that's primarily what everyone used. So whether it's the temple that is the seat of Ishtar, or ordinary public buildings or houses of people, what they're really using there is mud brick. They're drying them in the sun, they're not baking them in a kiln, and anyone is doing it, women are doing it, men are doing it. But to really kind of emphasize the wall, the most highly kind of militarized part of the city and the fact that these baked bricks are being used to build that wall, I mean, essentially what you're really getting here is the city is being highly masculinized and presented primarily as a masculine entity, right? So we do get a mention of Ishtar, we get a mention of her temple, but not a whole lot beyond that. 

I want to contrast that with the translation by Jenny Lewis. So this is how she describes that same passage.

Gilgamesh built the wall of Uruk. A strong strand circling his city. See these bricks from river mud. The rustle of reeds in winter is in them. The hubbub of storms in the summer is in them. The smell of Euphrates and Tigris is in them. As many bricks as birds fly west, dried to hardness on Uruk's roofs, creating a temple for Holy Inanna, and inside the temple, a casket of cedar.

So in the Jenny Lewis translation, which is not being terribly faithful to the original text, but which is, you know, more of a kind of pointed and gendered retelling here, she mentions the wall, but then moves away from it. And mostly what she's talking about is these river bricks, these sun dried bricks that women had access to and that everyone had access to and which in fact builds the majority of the city. And there's, and again, she closes out by mentioning Inanna/Ishtar.

So for me, this passage is really interesting because it really reveals how the city, far from being a neutral entity, is being given very much a gendered identity. And again, that comes out of this context in which we have this long history of male kings and conquerors, and we get these different kind of translations moving away from the original Sumerian, which were more grounded in Ishtar and towards these other redactions done by a lot of men over time. So to me, that's something that's kind of interesting and adds to my appreciation of the text and of the nuances of things that are happening with the city. 

So that's our close reading, and some of that might be true, or maybe it's not. To find out, we're going to do some believing and doubting. So now we're going to pick parts of the text that we can both look at and say, I believe that, as well as, I doubt that. Shana, would you mind kicking us off?

Shana
No problem. Funny enough, we've actually already talked about my doubt, which is the thing that sticks out the most in my mind. I don't believe that Gilgamesh and Enkidu had a romantic relationship. I think that they were just like friends who make out. I really, I don't. And so I know that everyone thinks that and I spend a lot of time trying to convince my students otherwise. Because even without the added tablet, obviously they have this really intimate relationship. But I just really want to believe that ancient Mesopotamian masculinity allowed for however much affection between men as they could possibly want. And so that is my doubt. And it's a controversial one. I know that most people do not share that interpretation, but I'm sticking with it. I'm sticking with it in my mind. 

Matt
I love it. I love it. Good. This is great. So what is your definition of sex? Romance, right? Because I mean, I think we tend to assume that sex is sex, and it's always been sex, and you look back in time and they either were or were not having sex. But are we in fact imposing our idea of what constitutes sex on the past, whereas it might not have been seen as such in ancient Mesopotamia or elsewhere? What do you think, Shana?

Shana
Well, and that's the example that I use, right? In certain parts of the world, it is very common for male friends to hold hands. And we put so much meaning on that in the United States about men holding hands. Like it means something totally different for good and for bad, right? We elevate those images as positive images of like romantic love between men and as something that we wanna accept or criticize in both ways. But so yeah, I think, you know, like there are even when you think about definitions of sex, like what does mutual sort of pleasure count as well? Because the word that Gilgamesh uses in the later tablet is pleasure. Well, I would, I don't, I don't know cuneiform, but I would love to know how the decision was made for that to be, you know, the word that we use, because pleasure could mean physical, but pleasure can also mean joy. Pleasure can mean fun. like there's all kinds of ways to interpret that. So I think unless it said that, you know, they, not to take a biblical reference, but like Gilgamesh and Enkidu lie together as man lies with woman, I don't know if that would be the right one either, but because again, don't know what cuneiform would look like in the original translation. But that would sort of, I think without that, I just don't think we can make the assumption.

Matt
Thanks, Shana. I'll pick up here because mine is also about sex. And mine in particular is about the big sex scene between Shamhat and Enkidu. 

Nico
Matt, before

Matt
Yeah, sure. 

Nico
Before  you go ahead, I want to respond to Shana with a little bit of a couple of complications, you know, entirely in agreement with what you're saying, Shana. In France, male friends kiss on the cheeks as a form of greeting twice or four times even, if they're close friends. In the Middle East nowadays, it is acceptable for male friends to hold hands and to hug, to engage in a lot of activities which in the United States would clearly qualify them, mark them as gay, even though gay sexuality in the Middle East is still largely shunned and taboo. So that's a very interesting kind of distinction, the ways that masculinity is formulated in these three different cultures. And then on the issue of pleasure, there's something that keeps coming back to my mind, something an anthropologist wrote about ancient Mesopotamian culture, which is that he said, you know, the big difference between ancient Mesopotamians and modern societies is the sort of take on sexuality that was imposed almost universally by the Judeo-Christian traditions. And he says that the big difference is this, that in ancient Mesopotamia, sexual pleasure was considered sacred because the thought was that the ability to take pleasure in sex and to have sex strictly for pleasure was what distinguishes human beings from animals, from the beasts. Whereas in Judeo-Christian cultures, sex is what makes us more like the beasts. It's rationality that's supposed to and thought supposed to distinguish us from the animals. And so I think just that basic contrast suggests that the way contemporaries were reading these texts and thinking about what pleasure was involved with the relationship between the various characters must have been substantially different than the way in which we kind of spontaneously tend to interpret them. And I don't know exactly how sex is the way that people were thinking about that. But they undoubtedly heard these and interpreted sex very differently from the way we do if that contrast is in place.

Matt
Thanks, Nico. I'm glad that you went first, because you actually did a lot of my work for me. Because I was going to say a lot of what you just said. I mean, my believing and doubting is really what is sex. Does it in fact distinguish us from animals? Does it make us more civilized or quite the opposite, right? Do our passions undo anything that can be called civilization and rational thought or organization? And I mean, the passage that I chose for that is this kind of marathon sex session between Enkidu and Shamhat seven days, right? After which, you know, he is civilized and no longer wild. He's introduced to bread and beer and music and boom, there it is, right? He's civilized. You know, and on the one hand, there is something to be said for that in terms of our connections to other people being what's really, if civilization is something, it's about connections to other people that we choose to keep and maintain, and sexual, romantic connections can be among the most powerful of those connections sometimes. But again, on the other hand, how much does sex actually civilize us or distinguish us from other life on the planet and how much does it actually hold up that order versus how much do our uncontrollable lusts and jealousies and greed and everything else to have more than the person next to us, how much does that actually tear down that fabric, damage our connections to other people and ultimately lead us barreling towards something more like violence than community building.

So that's really my believing and doubting. I won't do too much more with that since I think it's pretty much out there now. 

Shana
The way that I pose that question to my students every time we do Gilgamesh is whether or not sex changes us as individuals. And I love doing that question just because at the age that our students are, that is a time when that's a question that a lot of people or a lot of young people are really thinking about, are at that cusp of like, does this make me different? And they are often very convinced that it does until we all of course start talking about it and breaking it down a bit and it becomes less convincing I think over time. 

Matt
All right. You and me baby ain't nothing but mammals. So let's move on to the next category. Although I mean, that is an interesting thing itself. Songs that reference both human and animal sexuality in the same... anyway, let's not go there. Let's just not do it. Let's just not. So now we're gonna take some of those doubts that we just uncovered and put them to work. So we're gonna do add, delete, rewrite. So you have the opportunity to add a section to the text, delete something, or rewrite a section. 

I'm gonna start. I would love to add back in the Sumerian Tales. You would get a much more interesting and complex Inanna/Ishtar. So one of the things, Shana, that I wanted to mention before when you were talking is after this whole episode, the Bull of Heaven is killed. Inanna is so grieved and she grieves so poignantly for the Bull of Heaven that she herself goes down to the Underworld to see the Bull of Heaven where her sister is Queen of the Underworld.

And then her sister proceeds to absolutely do her dirty, murder her and hang her on a hook on the wall, where she lies dead for three days before rising from the dead. It's just incredible. There's so much fascinating stuff in these old Sumerian tales that we lose about Inanna and who she was, and how she essentially becomes like the most powerful deity in the whole Sumerian pantheon by stealing all of these powers from  you know, from another god and all of the kind of different exploits and things she gets herself into. I'm not going to go too much into it. I will just recommend two things. Inanna, Lady of the Largest Heart by Betty DeShong Meador and Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth by Diane Wolkstein. They're older texts. They are kind of classic feminist readings of the Inanna stories. I think they're just tremendous and in particular, Inanna, Lady of the Largest Heart. I mean, these are poems written by a Sumerian high priestess in honor of Inanna and they're so great. They're so amazing. They should be a part of the Gilgamesh text and Inanna/Ishtar should be a larger part of the text. So that's what I would do. I would add, and I think, you know, I just want Gilgamesh to be longer. Maybe that's an unpopular opinion, but I wish it were longer, I wish there were more, I want those Inanna Gilgamesh stories in there. I don't wanna lose the cool stuff that happens with Enkidu in the later translations where he's developed, so we keep that. We smash the old and the less old together and have a longer, more interesting Gilgamesh with a better Inanna. That's mine. Nico, what are you doing? 

Nico
For my take on this, I rewrote Tablet 6, but I imagine what rewriting Tablet 6 might look like. And Shana, I think you will appreciate this, but I imagine, I tried to imagine what would happen if Gilgamesh, instead of rebuffing Ishtar, was enthralled by her love for him sufficiently comfortable with his masculinity to accept her offer. And then I sort of tried to ask what kinds of questions come up out of that scenario. For instance, what would happen to his relationship with Enkidu if that were the case, if Gilgamesh decided to marry Ishtar instead of spurn her? Would there be a menage à trois? Would Gilgamesh's fear of death decrease proportionally with his increasing comfort with femininity? To the extent that the epic embodies and expresses the rule of patriarchy in the ancient Mediterranean world, it would be interesting to imagine an alternative scenario in which a more equalitarian order, neither heteronormative nor misogynistic, could take shape. Perhaps hinting at the clearly matriarchal representations of political power that are extent in Minoan Greece about a thousand years after the writing of the Gilgamesh. There's this really fascinating civilization that emerges in ancient Crete called Manoa at the time in which women seem to have been the political leaders which were and ruled over a society that was largely demilitarized for a significant period of time. So that's what I'm thinking about when I imagine rewriting. 

Matt
Thanks, Nico. Shana, what is your Add Rewrite Delete? 

Shana
I should say that I'm very grateful and affirmed that everyone would like Justice for Ishtar. My actual rewrite, I would rewrite that long love scene between Shamhat and Enkidu. In fact, I would rewrite Shamhat as a character in general. So I'm very interested in the choices people make as translators. And so I believe that every translation that I have seen calls her something different. So she is called, she is a priestess objectively, but she's called a courtesan, she is called a harlot, she is called, sometimes she doesn't have a name, sometimes she does. And I think that regardless of where the translation originates, whether it is, you know, British or American, I think that our current, for whatever reason, our current lens does not allow us to really see her as a priestess. And so that's where, and understand the relationship between a sort of spiritual leadership and sexuality, we just aren't allowed to put those things together. So I would take lots of liberties, I think, with translation to translate what we think of as a priestess in the current day, give her those kinds of characteristics or sort of self-assuredness, but also a lot of wisdom. I would rewrite the way she uses language. 

I would lessen the description, the very detailed descriptions of their sexual exploits. I think you get it. I feel like there's so much description of, I want more description of Sham Hat and what she is and how amazing she is. Way less description of how many times they had sex again and again and again. We get that part. 

Matt
Absolutely. I mean, I was raised Catholic, and so for me, there was definitely this very clear wall of separation between priesthood and sex, what is holy and what is sexual, right? And never the twain shall meet. I know in other faith traditions, that's not necessarily the case where the kind of spiritual leaders can also be married and have families and kids and things like that. But I think there was a much closer, I think, connection between sex and sexuality and spirituality, holiness, you know, the other world, I think, certainly in ancient Mesopotamia than we see in most religions today. Even ones which do have female, you know, prayer leaders and priests and, you know, whatever they're called in that particular faith.

But I do think there was a much clearer connection. And I mean, Inanna/Ishtar is just, she's a goddess and she's so sexual, right? And she's so many other things too. She's also violent and militaristic, but also interested in the harvests and so many things, but you know, so sexual as well. And again, I don't think we get a whole lot of that in many of the kind of dominant world faiths today. 

Nico
Yeah, I'd like to add to that. There is this really interesting way in which ancient historians and anthropologists refer to the social type that Shamhat is supposed to embody, which is they call them sacred prostitutes. And that, I think, that expression itself kind of summarizes the closeness of or the the closeness of the relationship between, and the very particular type of the relationship between sexuality and spirituality in ancient Mesopotamian culture, which is difficult for us to fathom. And basically, sacred prostitutes were priestesses, one of whose functions it was to raise funds for their temples. And the way they did it was to have sexual relations with men in exchange for money under the guise of this within the walls of the temple quite frequently, but for the explicit purpose of raising funds for the cult. And it was a perfectly acceptable function, calling that some women took on. In fact, the wife of one of the Hebrew prophets, and I can't remember which one now, became a sacred prostitute in a Mesopotamian cult. And the prophet himself is livid about it. He writes about it in his book. He's really unhappy about it, but that tells me something about how that, where that disjunction happens and how it happens.

And it undoubtedly has to do with the fact that all of the historical figures and writers of the Hebrew Bible are men. Almost without exception. 

Shana
I also think if I can just add quickly that we don't see the connection between who Shamhat is and the impact she has on Enkidu. We're made to believe that just by virtue of her feminine wiles that he suddenly learns all of these things about how to be a person. And so I think we should, we gotta add in some context for the role that she has in the community and the fact that it's far more than just the fact that she is capable of having sex with him and willing to, that suddenly makes him into the person, the character that he becomes later on in the test. 

Matt
Thanks, Shana and Nico. All right, we're almost there, we're almost to the close. So we're gonna do the next one really quickly. The next one is kind of just a fun category. I was kind of interested to see who you're gonna throw out here.

So the next one is we're imagining that Gilgamesh is getting the Hollywood treatment. A major motion picture is being made. Title it what you will. Who are you casting in the major roles? I've got one casting that I'm really very happy about and I feel like I've nailed it and I'm just gonna stick to that one. Humbaba... Jack Nicholson. I feel like he is objectively a great Humbaba. And actually, I kind of feel really bad that I haven't talked about Humbaba in this podcast, because I do think he's a fascinating figure. And if I could add anything else to the text, it would be more on who the heck Humbaba is. But anyway, I feel like Jack Nicholson. He's funny. He's kind of furry. He's kind of wild. He can tap into that like Jack Torrance Shining craziness. But he can also be like gregarious. He's a big, larger than life kind of guy.

So I'm going Jack Nicholson as Humbaba. That's my casting. I feel like I nailed it on that one, so I'm not even gonna touch the other ones. Shana and Nico, who are your best castings for this? Who do you got in some of these major roles? 

Nico
So I'll just, I'll limit myself to the duo Gilgamesh and Enkidu, and two actors I thought would be sort of really interesting, both physiognomically and otherwise are for Gilgamesh, Dwayne, The Rock, Johnson, and for Enkidu, Vin Diesel. In part because they kind of look so much alike in terms of their physique and their faces and the fact that they're both bald and so on. But also because Dwayne Johnson is taller than Vin Diesel, which I think kind of reflects the hierarchy of the relationship. They're almost equal but not quite equal. And then the third element that I found fascinating in that relationship is of course the sort of racial dynamics implied by that casting and the fact that Johnson is African American and Vin Diesel is white. And so I find it interesting to shift the hierarchy between them. 

Matt
I think they have beef, don't they have beef? They don't like each other, right? They yeah, I think they actually really don't like each other, which might make that for a fun casting, like when they're making make them hold hands and like walk around. 

Shana
There's some sort of beef around that. I don't know. 

Matt
Yeah. Shana, who's your casting? Who do you got? 

Shana
I am casting Angela Bassett as Ishtar, based specifically on her performances in both What's Love Got to Do With It and Waiting to Exhale. I think she gives the woman's foreign nuance and dignity in amazing ways. And even though, thanks to Black Panther, she has been put in more of a motherly role, I think we should reprise her angry woman vibe back. So that's the only one I came up with because I couldn't decide between Jason Momoa and Dwayne The Rock Johnson for Gilgamesh. So I just moved on. 

Matt
I love it. We have to pitch this immediately. Call up Hollywood. Let them know we've got the movie they're looking for. It's a 5,000 year old story. Let's do it. 

All right. Final category, Seminar Sequence.

So Bard Seminar has been conceived of as a sequence of texts that help guide students on their intellectual journey. What are some other texts that you would pair with Gilgamesh? We're gonna try and make this pretty short, try to keep this to about 90 minutes. Two or three texts and quickly, why would you pair them with Gilgamesh? What journey would that lead students on? I'll start. I chose Learning from Las Vegas by Venturi, Brown, and Isenor and the Urban Experience by David Harvey. Again, leaning really hard into this idea that we really need to think more about cities and how we live in them and their relationship to their hinterlands, to rural areas where they get their natural materials and resources from and really look closely about what's amazing about cities and awesome about them and how much fun city life can be and how diverse amazing places cities can be, but also the strain which they put sometimes on natural resources and the areas around them. And in particular with climate change and who knows what kind of changes we're going to be seeing in terms of how people live and where, I think these are kind of essential questions that I think everyone everywhere should be thinking about.

What are cities? What have they been? How have they changed over time? What are they today? And ultimately, you know, what should they be for the future if we are to live with them and to live in them? I think those are some important questions, and that's the journey I'd like to take students on. Nico, what's your journey? 

Nico
I went in a more kind of existential direction, I guess. In my kind of reading of the Epic of Gilgamesh, and specifically in the story of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, the relationship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu, it's really the quest by these two characters, first for their humanity, and then for happiness, and then finally for meaning. And as such, it really asks some of the deepest questions that humans have asked themselves about themselves. And so I would pair this text with two others, one or two others that ask very similar questions, but in a really different literary genres. The first one, I think, in very different historical contexts, because I think the contrast between the three would be really fascinating. The first one would be Monty Python, The Meaning of Life which I think poses these same questions, but in a really comedic kind of format. And the second one would be Oedipus the King by Sophocles, which poses them in a tragic format. This would give us a chance to think about how we tell stories and how these stories kind of impact the way in which we think about ourselves and our lives. 

Matt
Thanks, Nico. Shana, what's your seminar sequence?

Shana
My dream seminar sequence for Gilgamesh is actually to read it alongside Roald Dahl's Matilda. Speaking of how to tell stories, is to use Matilda and what Matilda the child says about storytelling and the significance of stories. So using her as a lens through which we read or we look at Gilgamesh. I teach Gilgamesh through the lens of the hero's journey, of Joseph Campbell's hero's journey and so I think the practice of literary analysis in this, what does the lover of books, Matilda, think about Gilgamesh is a really great, great way to look at it. So that is my complete dream pairing, although I don't know that I will ever be able to do it. Maybe I can. 

Matt
Thank you, Shana. And thank you, Nico. Speaking of stories, that's about it for our story about Gilgamesh today. But we hope to be back soon with some more Bard Sequence Seminar podcasts, some other texts, and some new faces as well. But this has been just a really lovely conversation. I have some more ways of thinking about Gilgamesh as a result of it, new questions, and new ways of seeing. Thank you, Nico. Thank you, Shana. I really appreciate it. 

Nico
Yeah, thank you both. I feel the same way. I've been really enriched by this conversation. 

Shana
Agreed. Looking forward to seeing the city as a character next time I teach it. 

Matt
Shana Russell teaches at Bard High School Early College in Newark. Nico Veroli teaches for the Bard Sequence. And I am Matt Park. Everybody stay neat, clean, and well-advised.