The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Anonymous · an epic poem in twelve tablets · the Standard Babylonian version, a recension of the late second millennium BC, reconstructed from its manuscripts · scored on the Akkadian, read from knowledge; no text in hand, Akkadian quoted only where its words are certain, in transliteration, with the desk’s own English beneath and Andrew George’s translation (1999) for sense
Mode
Heroic narrative turned to the epic of a life: the story of a king’s failure, framed as a wisdom text and a record set down on a tablet
Mythos
The wild man and the king made as doubles; the friend’s death as the hinge; the journey past the sun’s road to the one survivor; the plant from the Deep lost to a snake that sheds its skin
Phase
Six tablets of deeds, the death at the seventh, four tablets of grief and quest, a return to the walls in the words of the prologue; then a twelfth tablet in which the dead friend is alive again
Presentation
Poem in Standard Babylonian, the literary dialect of Akkadian, on twelve tablets; assembled from many manuscripts, with substantial gaps in several tablets, and still growing as fragments are found
Register
From the bawdy comedy of the seven nights and the insult to a goddess to the house of dust, the lament for a friend and the gods cowering from their own Flood
Scale
One king and one friend, one city and its walls, the steppe, the forest, the mountains, the sea, the gods’ council and the house of the dead
Governing Proposition
A king of Uruk who wears out his city is given an equal, a wild man made by the gods from clay. The two become friends, go to the Cedar Forest for fame, kill its guardian and then the Bull of Heaven, and the gods sentence the friend to die. Grief sends the king past the road of the sun to the one man who survived the Flood, to learn how not to die; he cannot keep awake, he loses to a snake the plant he brought up from the bottom of the Deep, and he comes home with nothing to the walls of his city. The wager of the work is that death is learned not as a doctrine but through the body of the one loved, that nothing a man does reverses it, and that what he can make is the city and the record: the tablet the reader is told, in the first lines, to take out and read.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The series opens with the words by which it was known: “ša naqba īmuru”
“He who saw the Deep”. The man is not named at once. He is the one who saw, and the prologue turns from him to what stands: the wall of Uruk. It tells the reader to climb it, to inspect its brickwork and the foundations the seven sages laid, it measures the city the wall encloses, and it tells the reader to find, in a box of cedar, the tablet of lapis lazuli on which his story is written, and to take it out and read.
That opening makes the epic a wisdom text and a record, and it makes the reader the one who holds the tablet. Then the story begins with the king himself, and with a wrong. Gilgamesh of Uruk oppresses his city, and its young men are exhausted by him. The gods answer by making him an equal: they shape Enkidu from clay, a wild man of the steppe and its beasts. Gilgamesh dreams him before he comes, as a lump fallen from the sky.
A hunter finds Enkidu, and through Shamhat he is made human, so that he can meet the king. He spends seven nights with her, and when he rises the gazelles run from him: he has become human, and the steppe will not have him back. The making of the human from the wild is a gain and a loss at once, and the work says so in one image. He comes to the city and its king, and the double and the man he was made for become friends.
Movement II
The friendship seeks fame. Gilgamesh resolves to go to the Cedar Forest and kill its guardian, Humbaba; the elders counsel against it, and his mother Ninsun prays to Shamash for her son and adopts Enkidu. On the road the king dreams again and again, five dreams on the way to the forest. The dreams teach the reader to read signs; the journey formulas that carry them run level, and the work is heaviest here for what it yields.
At the forest Humbaba pleads for his life, and they kill him. They fell the cedar, and from it make a door for Enlil’s temple. Then Gilgamesh answers the goddess Ishtar with a catalogue of her ruined lovers, the comedy and the insult held in one speech; her anger brings the Bull of Heaven, and the friends kill it. Several of these tablets keep substantial gaps, and nothing is credited here that may have stood in them.
Each deed requires the next. The forest is a sentence the gods must pass; the bull is a second. The gods’ sentence falls, and it falls on Enkidu. Six tablets of deeds end there. The episodes of the gods, Ishtar and the council, are received from older Sumerian matter more than built anew; what is built is the use the work makes of them, as the cause of a death.
Movement III
The seventh tablet is the hinge. On his deathbed Enkidu he curses the door of cedar he helped to make. He dreams of the house of dust, where the dead are clothed like birds in feathers, eat clay and sit in darkness, and where crowned kings sit among them stripped of their crowns. It is the most dreadful vision in the work, and it is given to the one who will go there first.
Then he dies, and the eighth tablet is grief. Gilgamesh calls on the forest paths, the rivers and the beasts to mourn his friend. He veils him like a bride, and paces like a lioness robbed of her cubs. He will not give him up for burial, and later he tells how he kept him until a worm fell from his nose. Death is learned here not as a doctrine but through the body of the one loved, and that is the work’s disclosure.
The friend’s death is not an episode in the action; it is the action’s turn. Everything after it is a question put by the body of Enkidu: whether the king, who has no equal, must also become that. Gilgamesh leaves the city and its walls. Praise of a hero, the matter the work inherited, has become the story of his failure, and the failure begins with grief.
Movement IV
He goes in search of Uta-napishti, the one man the gods let live after the Flood, to learn how not to die. Under Mount Mashu he walks the road of the sun in total darkness, and the work counts the darkness double-hour by double-hour, one to twelve, until light breaks on a garden of jewelled trees. Duration is a thing undergone, not reported.
On the way he meets the alewife, then the boatman Ur-shanabi, and at last Uta-napishti, and each asks the same thing: why his cheeks are hollow. He answers each in the same lines, telling of his friend, the worm and his fear. The tripled speech carries a man repeating his grief, and the form makes the repetition the meaning.
Uta-napishti answers him at the end of the tenth tablet. Man is snapped off like a reed; the dead and the sleeping are alike; no one has seen the face of death. The answer is spoken more than found, and the work does not hide that. But it is spoken by the one man who has escaped, and the next tablet tells how, and why that escape was a grant that will never be made again.
Movement V
The eleventh tablet holds the Flood, told in Uta-napishti’s own voice: the survivor’s testimony set inside the story of the man who cannot survive. He builds the boat and caulks it; the storm comes, and the gods themselves cower like dogs, the goddess cries out like a woman in labour, and all mankind is turned to clay. He weeps as he opens the hatch. The boat lodges on Mount Nimush; he sends out birds; he makes an offering, and the gods gather like flies over it. Ea rebukes the gods: punish the sinner, not all mankind.
Then the tests. Gilgamesh is tested with sleep, and sleeps; the loaves set beside him go stale, and prove it. He brings up a plant from the bottom of the Deep, and loses it to a snake that sheds its skin. He weeps. He comes home with nothing, and shows Ur-shanabi the wall of Uruk in the words of the prologue: climb it, walk it, inspect the brickwork. The man failed to escape death; the city stands, and the story is on the tablet in the reader’s hands. The ring closes there.
The series as transmitted does not end there. Tablet XII renders the second half of a Sumerian poem of Bilgames and the netherworld, and in it Enkidu, dead and mourned, is alive again, goes down to fetch the king’s lost ball and stick, and rises as a ghost. It is part of the twelve-tablet series and is scored as part of the one work, and it costs the work’s necessity, its form and its inner law: it stands outside the ring the first and eleventh tablets made. Without it the work would stand higher; with it, the work stands as it came down.
Act III · The Twelve
The spine of the first eleven tablets is compelled at almost every joint. Enkidu is made because the king oppresses Uruk, and made human through Shamhat so that he can meet him; the friendship seeks fame in the Cedar Forest; the insult to Ishtar, which reads like a comic interlude, brings the Bull of Heaven, the Bull brings the gods’ sentence, and the sentence is Enkidu’s death, which drives every step of the ninth to the eleventh tablets. The Flood is not a digression but the answer: Uta-napishti’s immortality was a grant never to be repeated. The sleep and the snake close the last doors. The darkness under the mountain, counted out double-hour by double-hour, is the time the journey takes; and the tripled speech, in which three hosts ask why his cheeks are hollow and he answers each in the same lines, carries a man repeating his grief. Two things hold the axis lowest of the twelve. Tablet XII, a twelfth of the series, is added after the ring of the first and eleventh tablets has closed and reopens the work on another premise, bringing back a dead man; nothing before it requires it. And the formulas run long: the five dreams on the road to the forest repeat their stages almost word for word, and messages spoken once are spoken again whole on delivery.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and it holds: a person learns death not as a doctrine but through the body of the one he loves, and knowing it does not cure it. Gilgamesh has heard that men die and answered with the glory of a name; he learns it only beside his friend, whom he would not give up for burial until a worm fell from his nose, as he tells the alewife. Nothing he can do, in strength, travel or piety, reverses it: the one man made immortal got there by a Flood no one can repeat, and Gilgamesh cannot keep awake for a week, let alone for ever. What he can make is the city and the record. A second disclosure runs under it: the making of the human from the wild is a gain and a loss at once, as the gazelles run from Enkidu after Shamhat. What holds the figure there is the manner of the telling. The truth is the oldest of truths, and much of it is spoken in set speeches rather than found by the action: Uta-napishti states the condition, that man is snapped off like a reed, that the dead and the sleeping are alike and no one has seen the face of death, in the voice of the wisdom texts around the poem. Uruk’s oppression is sketched, and broken passages take from the argument at points.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The heights, where they come, are of the first order and of every kind. The dreadful: Enkidu’s dream of the house of dust, where the dead are clothed like birds in feathers, eat clay and sit in darkness, with crowned kings among them stripped of their crowns. The grief: Gilgamesh calling on the forest paths, the rivers and the beasts to mourn, veiling his friend like a bride and pacing like a lioness robbed of her cubs. The uncanny: the twelve double-hours under Mount Mashu, counted one by one in total darkness until light breaks on a garden of jewelled trees. The cosmic: the Flood, the gods cowering like dogs, the goddess crying out like a woman in labour, all mankind turned to clay, Uta-napishti weeping as he opens the hatch, and then the gods gathering like flies over the offering. The bitter: the snake that takes the plant and sheds its skin as it goes. What holds the figure there is frequency. The heights are separated by long plains of formula and by breaks in the clay: the preparation and the road to the forest rise little, the episode of Ishtar is satire, and much of the forest itself is lost, so that its grandeur is known only in parts.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Myth built, and load-bearing at every joint. The wild man and the king are made as doubles: the gods shape Enkidu from clay as Gilgamesh’s equal, and Gilgamesh first dreams him as a lump fallen from the sky. The two halves of the work are the two halves of the pair: the first conquers with the friend, the second searches without him. The friend’s death is the hinge of the action, not an episode in it. The journey past the sun’s road, through darkness and across the waters to the Flood’s one survivor, is the descent and return in its earliest extended form, and it comes back with nothing but the knowledge of its failure; the plant from the bottom of the Deep, whose name says that the old man grows young, lost to a snake that sheds its skin, is the myth of lost immortality built into the plot. And it stays particular: a king of a real city, its walls measured in the prologue, a door of cedar for Enlil’s temple, a boat lodged on Mount Nimush; a hero who is rash and a poor sleeper, and gods in council who reason like a committee. Many patterns later called archetypal first stand here. Held off the very top because the gods’ episodes, Ishtar, the Bull and the council, are received from older Sumerian matter and cult more than built anew, and because Tablet XII grafts a second netherworld onto the first.
Score: 9.5 / 10
The inheritance is the Sumerian court poetry of Bilgames: separate songs in praise of a king, in which Enkidu is a servant. The largest step was taken before this version, in the Old Babylonian poem, which joined the episodes into one life with a turn: praise of a hero becomes the story of his failure, Enkidu is raised to friend and double, and the king fails at immortality, at sleep, at keeping a plant. This version inherits that turn and departs again within it. The older poem opened in praise of a king who surpassed all kings; this one opens on the man who saw the Deep, praised for what he learned rather than what he did, and makes the epic a wisdom text and a record, set down on a tablet for the reader to take out, with the ring closed at the walls. The Flood is told inside it as the survivor’s own story, so that the oldest catastrophe answers one man. And the whole, a king’s epic whose king is refused what he seeks, turns against the royal praise that was the form’s tradition. What holds the figure there: the decisive turn was an earlier poem’s, made over centuries by several hands; this version was made in a scribal culture that prized fidelity; and the field is too broken to show what the departure cost its maker.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The ring is the argument: the prologue tells the reader to climb the wall of Uruk, inspect its brickwork and find the tablet of lapis lazuli in its box; at the end of the eleventh tablet Gilgamesh, home with nothing, shows the boatman Ur-shanabi the same wall in the same words. The man failed to escape death; the city stands, and the story is on the tablet the reader holds. A prose chronicle of the deeds, or a hymn, could not know that. The nesting does the same work: the Flood is told in Uta-napishti’s own voice, the one survivor’s testimony set inside the account of the man who cannot survive. Within the ring the form works by pairs and returns: the doubled hero, the dreams that teach the reader to read signs, Enkidu’s seven nights with Shamhat answered by the king’s seven days of sleep, the counted double-hours that make duration a thing undergone. What holds the figure there: Tablet XII stands outside the closed ring and blurs the shape the ring made; the seams where older poems were joined show in places; and the gaps leave parts of the form unknowable, so that a reader cannot always tell where the shape is the poem’s and where it is the scribe’s.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Evidence of return is of two kinds. In antiquity the work was remade for more than a millennium, Sumerian songs to Old Babylonian epic to the Standard Babylonian version, translated into the languages of its neighbours and copied as a school text: each age found more in it. Since 1872 it has been under continuous re-examination, and the questions stay open in each generation of readers: whether the end is consolation or defeat, whether the walls redeem the failed quest or merely remain; whether the friendship is love; whether Enkidu’s making into a man is a fall or a gain; why the series kept its twelfth tablet, as appendix or as coda; what the Flood means told as one man’s history. Beside them run readings of the felling of the Cedar Forest as a crime against a living forest, of Shamhat as civiliser, of kingship and its abuse, and of the epic as a reflection on writing, and its readers outside the study of cuneiform keep finding others. New tablets keep changing the text, which few works can claim. What holds the figure there is span: the modern record is about a century and a half, short beside Homer’s or Dante’s, and much of its labour has gone to rebuilding the text rather than to reading a settled one.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The field was the cuneiform literature of Mesopotamia in Sumerian and Akkadian, and the scribal culture of the second and first millennium Near East that read it. There was no wider literary field: the work is older than Homer and than the written Hebrew Bible. Intrinsic force is near the first rank: the reorganisation of episodic heroic song into a single life shaped by a question, the first long poem known to make a hero’s search against death its whole action. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within its field the reach is demonstrated, copied and taught across a millennium, translated beyond Mesopotamia, a standard text of its scribal schools. What holds the figure there is the reach beyond it. For about two thousand years the work redirected nothing. The links that have been drawn are argued rather than shown: the Flood narrative stands close to Genesis 6 to 9, but the older poem of Atrahasis stands nearer as a common source, and links to the Odyssey and to Achilles and Patroclus have been argued, by M. L. West among others, and doubted. The delayed reach since 1872 is wide in name and thinner in particulars, and is credited at a discount.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The span is millennia, but the form is charged twice. The text was recovered after long loss: no reader between late antiquity and 1872 knew it. And it is fragmentary: it survives in pieces assembled from many manuscripts that differ, with substantial gaps in several tablets and lines still being found, so that the reader reads a reconstruction. Both charges apply in full, and the figure sits at the floor the recovered and fragmentary texts share. What keeps it from falling below is that the defining arc is fully legible, from the prologue through the death, the quest, the Flood and the return to the walls, with every major episode and speech surviving in some state; and that presence since recovery has been continuous and wide, translated into most written languages, taught in world-literature courses, set by Martinů as an oratorio (1955) and carried into popular culture, as in the Star Trek episode “Darmok” (1991). Fabric: clay is the smallest charge, and has outlived every other medium of its age. The figure stands below every work read without break across millennia.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Judged on the Akkadian as far as it can be; its metre and sound are not heard here, and they are neither credited nor charged. The construction is the clearest evidence, and what can be judged is in command of its means: the prologue’s address to the reader, at once a tour of a city and an instruction to read; the dreams that foreshadow the friend and the forest; the double-hours under the mountain counted line by line; the stale loaves beside the sleeping king that prove the sleep. The Flood is the best-made passage in the work: the boat built and caulked, the storm, the birds sent out one by one. Repetition is used with control, not slackness, and changes the meaning of what it repeats: the same lines return to the same man in three mouths, the worm returns in his telling, and the wall returns in the prologue’s words. What holds the figure there: the epithets, repeated messages and parallel lines are the common stock of Akkadian narrative; the seams of the redaction show where older poems were joined; the five dreams on the road to the forest are heavy for their yield; Tablet XII is carried over from a Sumerian poem with little adaptation; and the broken text leaves much of the making unjudgeable.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the bawdy comedy of Enkidu’s seven nights with Shamhat, or Gilgamesh’s catalogue of Ishtar’s ruined lovers, and the gods cowering from their own Flood. Across the first eleven tablets they obey one law: the gods set a limit, the human lot is death, and a man learns the limit only by crossing toward it; what he gets is the city, the friend and the record. The comedy of the insult to Ishtar is that law, for the king insults the goddess believing himself beyond limit, and Enkidu dies for it. The wild and the civilised, the steppe and the walls, the netherworld and the bottom of the sea all fall under it, and the range is wide. Even the gods’ caprice is lawful in the work’s terms, rebuked from within by Ea: punish the sinner, not all mankind. What breaks the law is Tablet XII: Enkidu, dead and mourned, is alive again, goes down to the netherworld as a servant to fetch the king’s lost ball and stick, and rises as a ghost, and its netherworld is not the house of dust he dreamed. It is part of the series as transmitted and is charged here at full weight, the largest structural fault in the work; the eleven tablets alone would stand higher. The tone also ranges uneasily at points, the farce of the goddess spurned set close beside the grief of the eighth tablet.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Many orders, held in one structure by a single question, and integrated rather than listed. Consciousness, in grief and terror of death, told through dreams and speech. Love and friendship, at the centre. The family, in Ninsun’s prayer for her son and her adoption of Enkidu, and in Uta-napishti’s wife. The city and kingship and its abuse: Uruk’s walls, its temple, the elders’ counsel, the young men exhausted by the king. Labour and the made world: the hunter, the shepherds, the felling of cedar and the making of a door, the building and caulking of the boat, bread and beer. Sexuality, as the gate from wild to human. The natural order: steppe, beasts, forest, mountains, sea and the sun’s road. The sacred: the gods’ council, Shamash’s protection, Ishtar’s anger, temple and offering, dreams. Death and the netherworld, from the house of dust to the funeral rites of the eighth tablet. Cosmic history, in the world before the Flood. All of it turns on one man’s discovery that he will die. Held below the top because women appear chiefly as functions, the harlot, the mother, the goddess, the alewife, the survivor’s wife; because labour and the common people are seen from the palace; and because interior life is borne by speech.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.9 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Archetypal Deep at 9.5, then The Unconcealment and The Bottomless Well at 9.1, and The Sublime, The Living Form, The Imperishable and The Encompassed at 9.0. Myth built into the plot at every joint, from the double made of clay to the plant lost to a snake; death learned through the body of a friend, with nothing that reverses it; questions about its end, its friendship and its last tablet still argued in each generation; the house of dust, the counted darkness and the Flood; a ring that sets the man’s failure against the wall and the tablet; and many orders of life turned on one man’s discovery that he will die.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 8.3, held by Tablet XII, a twelfth of the series added after the ring has closed, which brings a dead man back, and by formulas that run long. Next above it, The Inner Law at 8.6, broken by the same tablet, where Enkidu, dead and mourned, is alive again in another netherworld. Among the gated axes, The Swerve at 8.7, whose largest step was taken by an earlier poem, and Pressure on Tradition at 8.8: a reach outside its own field that is indirect and contested, after two thousand years of silence, credited since 1872 at a discount.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.0, The Made at 8.9, The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Archetypal Deep at 9.5, The Unconcealment at 9.1, The Imperishable at 9.0, Pressure on Tradition at 8.8 and The Swerve at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it covers falls below 8.3, against 7.5), and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 9.0. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the Standard Babylonian version of the epic of Gilgamesh, the twelve-tablet series whose incipit is ša naqba īmuru, “He who saw the Deep”, attributed in Mesopotamian tradition to Sîn-lēqi-unninni, and scored as reconstructed from its manuscripts. It is a recension of the late second millennium BC; its exact date is not verifiable. Tablet XII belongs to the series as it was transmitted and is scored as part of the one work, on every axis. The older versions are context only: the Sumerian poems of Bilgames, separate songs of the late third millennium BC, and the Old Babylonian poem, an integrated epic by about the eighteenth century BC, whose incipit is šūtur eli šarrī, “Surpassing all other kings”; an episode found only in them, such as the alewife’s counsel to enjoy the day, is not credited here. Copying went on into the late first millennium BC; the text then fell out of reading for about two thousand years, until George Smith identified the Flood narrative of the eleventh tablet among the Nineveh tablets in the British Museum and announced it in 1872. The text is assembled from many manuscripts, with substantial gaps in several tablets, and new fragments continue to add lines; the loss is charged to the work’s survival only, and nothing is credited that may have stood in a gap. No text was in hand, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on the Akkadian. Akkadian is quoted only where its words are certain, the two incipits, in transliteration, with the desk’s own English beneath; events are paraphrased, and citations are by tablet. Translations · Andrew George, The Epic of Gilgamesh (Penguin, 1999), close to his critical edition, The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic (Oxford, 2003), for sense, chosen because it marks the gaps and keeps the line; Benjamin Foster’s Norton version and Stephanie Dalley’s Myths from Mesopotamia beside it. None is quoted, and no translation’s shortfall is charged to the work. The metre and sound of the Akkadian are beyond this reading and are neither credited nor charged. Matters that could not be verified, among them the line count of the series, the layout of its tablets, which tablets are best preserved, the places beyond Nineveh where versions and copies were found, the puns and double meanings argued in the dreams and in Ea’s warning, and the particular fragments published in recent years, are not given.