Enkidu, Humbaba, and the Gorgons

On civilizing heroes, and embracing and then killing the wild

"The dream was marvelous but the terror was great; we must treasure the dream whatever the terror." - The Epic of Gilgamesh

Wayfarer, by the late, very missed Dan Hillier (1973-2024). I think this is what Enkidu might look like if he were around today.

Familar themes

Many people have a sense of déjà vu when they read the Epic of Gilgamesh, because so many elements from it seem to be recycled in later works, such as the early books of the Bible, the labors of Heracles, and Homer’s epics.

As I was researching and writing about Medusa/Gorgons for Medusa as a Loathly Lady (Part I) and Medusa Part II (It's Snakes All the Way Down, Baby!) I became fascinated by suggestions that there are connections between Greek Gorgons and Humbaba, the “demon” guardian of the Cedar Forest whom Gilgamesh and his friend Enkidu hunt down and kill.

But first, a little context for those who haven’t yet read the Epic:

This collection of tales, which relate the fictional exploits of a (probably real) king from the 3rd millennium BCE, bears many interpretations. The perspective I’m sharing in this essay is that the stories give voice to the claims and demands of civilization upon human beings, and to humans’ claims upon still-wild lands, which involve usurping the powers that act within them as stewards. Ultimately, they illustrate what we now see as the inevitable march of civilization and the conquest of the wild.

The first half of the oldest part of the epic introduces King Gilgamesh. He is handsome, strong, and also restless, because no men or women can satisfy his lust for power and domination. He is also cruel by nature, and wantonly abuses his subjects in every possible way just because he can — no one is able to stop him. The people of Uruk complain to their gods about their king’s tyranny, and the goddess Aruru creates, out of clay and silence, a new hero who “knows not a people, nor even a country,” and who will be a “match for the storm of his heart.”

A hunter tells Gilgamesh about a strong and courageous man he has observed in the forest: “Mightiest in the land … [with] strength as mighty as a rock from the sky” [meteoric steel]. His name was Enkidu: “Lord of the Pleasant Place.”

Paper mask of Enkidu by lawruh.

Gilgamesh can’t resist the challenge — finally, it looked like he might get to enjoy a worthy sparring partner! He sends the hunter back to the forest along with the temple prostitute Shamhat, whose "allure is a match even for the mighty.” Their mission was to lure Enkidu out of the wild and into the city of Uruk. Shamhat found him at a watering-hole which the hunter told her Enkidu and his animal companions frequented, and there she exposed her body to him. After either one or two weeks of enjoying Shamhat’s charms (depending on the version of the text you’re reading),¹ Enkidu has fatefully changed.

Enkidu is about to enjoy his first taste of civilization from Shamhat (“the luscious one”), while his deer friends give him the side-eye and peeping Tom Gilgamesh watches from behind a screen of shrubbery. This gorgeous illustration was made by Wael Tarabieh.

In the picture above, we see the beginning of the process of Enkidu’s civilization, at the stage when he is still wild, but something in him is responding to Shamhat’s charms. At first, it’s her body that speaks to him, but after spending seven days with her, Enkidu begins to shave and wear clothing (which he has borrowed from her), and he no longer eats grass and drinks with the other beasts. The text describes this as a defilement of his “body so pure,” for his some of his accustomed mental and physical powers have weakened in his process of identification with his human companion: he has lost his wild instincts and the accustomed swiftness of his legs.

However, along with the desire to put on a civilized appearance, Enkidu has also gained “reason and wide understanding.” (And this puts me in mind of Adam and Eve gaining a broader understanding and the desire to put on clothing, but in the reverse sequence.) Once Enkidu’s animal companions recognize the changes that have come over him, making him more like the hunters who stalk them, the animals flee from him. No longer the “Lord of the Pleasant Place,” Enkidu is now fit to become a companion, equal in powers though not in rank, to the king from the city. He becomes a member and defender of civilization, playing a subordinate role.

Illustration 280592204 © PaulSat | Dreamstime.com

Man’s Best Friend

Gilgamesh and Enkidu Are Starting to Wrestle, by Hassan Nozadian.

Here is how the bromance between Gilgamesh and Enkidu started: Enkidu asks Shamhat about a stranger who is carrying a platter filled with food in the shepherds’ camp where they are spending the night. The man says he’s taking these offerings to a wedding that will be held in Uruk, and he adds that although the king is not the bridegroom, he is still going to be the first to lie with the bride. Enkidu knows this to be a gross injustice, and he enraged and wants to go to Uruk to thwart the power-mad king’s plan. He defiantly takes up a position on the threshold of the bridal bedchamber so the king won’t be able to get past him and ravish the bride.

Gilgamesh doesn’t appreciate getting cock-blocked, and the two of them wrestle in the streets with such violence that the city’s walls and timbers shake. Gilgamesh is stronger, and eventually defeats Enkidu, but each one is so impressed with the other that they put their anger aside, and Enkidu concedes that Gilgamesh is the rightful king of Uruk. They pledge fidelity to one another, kiss, and embrace, and Gil’s mom gives their friendship her blessing by declaring that Enkidu is her adoptive son and Gil’s brother.

Gilgamesh and Enkidu, by Ludmila Zeman.

But of course this isn’t just a story about two friends, or even about how a cruel and egotistical king became fully human by experiencing true friendship and coming to terms with his mortality: as I mentioned above, the Epic of Gilgamesh is also a fictional justification of the logic and “inevitability” of civilization, because it presents it as a heroic quest that can make a mortal worthy of the “immortality” of having his story told for endless ages.

The State of Nature vs the Primeval City

Enkidu’s condition before he is contacted by Shamhat corresponds to a concept often called the “state of nature” in the European philosophical condition. In this theoretical or mythical model, humans originally lived free of laws, customs, religion, kings, nationhood, and — of course — cities. While these ideas about human origins have been found in some early Sumerian texts, in Andrew George’s Introduction to the translation of the Epic I read,² the Assyriologist reminds readers that this postulate was not at all universal when the tablets of the Epic were created.³

Rather, George says there is more evidence that the most common official stories about the human social order posit the city and monarchic social structure as primeval: kings were created by city-dwelling gods as superior beings who are uniquely qualified to establish and uphold the divine order on Earth. And, crucially, besides their civic and military duties, kings were also responsible for the maintenance of the gods’ temples and cult centers, and for keeping them well provisioned.

From the gods’ (i.e. the religion’s) perspective, the institution of kingship is proper and just, and this is why the gods decided to intervene when the tyrant Gilgamesh was oppressing the people of Uruk — refraining from doing so would have called the justice of the entire set of political and religious arrangements into question.

However, the gods couldn’t just reach down and slap some sense into Gilgamesh. Plain violence wouldn’t do the trick, and all the advantages of civilization had proven futile in curbing his excesses. What was needed was not moral persuasion and more culture, but for the king to put his strength to a worthy test. He needed to get away from the temptation to harm his own people, and seek out adventures that would benefit himself and others. Gilgamesh speaks explicitly about what he wants: “I will establish forever a name eternal.”

But he can’t do it alone. Two of the areas where Enkidu’s abilities exceed Gilgamesh’s are in his knowledge of the spirits that guard wild lands, and the art of dream interpretation. However, such skills are of no consequence without someone who knew where to apply them; i.e., Gilgamesh, who needed them in order to succeed in his quest. Yet Gilgamesh could not attain extraordinary/mythic status as a “culture hero” when the game was played by taking more and building more than others would have been able to without access to his friend’s extraordinary powers.

Neither of the two was a complete human or divine being on his own: the goddess Aruru created Enkidu as 2/3 animal (wise in instinctual ways, physically and mentally animal-like, and a protector of animals) and 1/3 human, while Gilgamesh is 1/3 human and 2/3 divine. Together, the two friends form a whole that is more than the sum of their parts, which is what helps Gilgamesh to choose to be better.

N.S. Anderson, in his blog The AnthropoEccentric, comments on this complementarity:

But for me the wild man and the natural world he represents is not opposed to the civilized man and the polis.  He is not a human being in a raw state of nature, whether that means he is yet to posses or that he has utterly lost the faculties and qualities of civilized existence that make him properly human. No, the wild man is not a negative or privative figure, one suggesting poverty or deprivation of humanity, but rather an affirmative figure. Gilgamesh is, after all, a petulant tyrant before he forges his brotherhood with Enkidu. Only once he embraces the creature who is as much ass, donkey, and panther as man, the creature with a connection to a world that is older than humankind, that precedes the world of civilization and lies at its foundation, only then is Gilgamesh able to mature, to elevate himself as a man.

For the Babylonians, urban society wasn’t just good for humans — they were properly defined as humans who participate in goodness through urban society. Humans must channel all three powers: human/animal/divine to achieve their own ends, and the ends of the gods and rulers they serve. Shamhat, as a temple prostitute who undertakes missions for her king, would be well aware of this, and would have wanted her pupil to learn these fundamental values as well as outward manners.

As Sophus Helle writes in Aeon,

To be human was a distinctly social affair. And not just any kind of society: it was the social life of cities that made you a “true man.” Babylonian culture was, at heart, an urban culture. Cities such as Uruk, Babylon or Ur were the building blocks of civilisation, and the world outside the city walls was seen as a dangerous and uncultured wasteland.

Second, we learn that humanity is a sliding scale. After a week of sex, Enkidu has not become fully human. There is an intermediary stage, where he speaks like a human but thinks like an animal. Even after the second week, he still has to learn how to eat bread, drink beer and put on clothes. In short, becoming human is a step-by-step process, not an either/or binary.

In her second invitation to Uruk, Shamhat says: “I look at you, Enkidu, you are like a god, why with the animals do you range through the wild?” Gods are here depicted as the opposite of animals, they are omnipotent and immortal, whereas animals are oblivious and destined to die. To be human is to be placed somewhere in the middle: not omnipotent, but capable of skilled labour; not immortal, but aware of one’s mortality.

In short, the new fragment [the one which narrates a second week of sex] reveals a vision of humanity as a process of maturation that unfolds between the animal and the divine. One is not simply born human: to be human, for the ancient Babylonians, involved finding a place for oneself within a wider field defined by society, gods and the animal world.

Assault on the Cedar Forest

The two friends were longing to go adventuring together, and they were put up to an ambitious plan by Shamash, the god of the sun.

A hand-colored woodcut depicting the cedars of Lebanon made by Edward Riou, after Coignet, published in the French travel journal Le Tour du Monde in 1861. The oldest cedar is about 3000 years old.⁴

According to Enkidu, the Cedar Forest stretched 10,000 leagues in every direction. Some versions tell that it lay to the East, in the Zagros Mountains, while other accounts say it was to the west, in Lebanon. In any case, this vast magical grove was a kind of paradise that belonged to the gods, who entrusted it to their “demonic” steward, Humbaba. Enkidu had been familiar with the forest during his savage life before he met Shamhat and Gilgamesh: apparently, in his ignorant/blessed state he could enter and leave at will, just as safe as any other beast.

Enkidu and the elders of Uruk are skeptical about the chances the duo have of pulling off a successful mission. But, if they are to attempt it anyway, Enkidu must serve as a guide, due to his familiarity with the forest and knowledge of Humbaba’s powers and manner of attack.

Fifty young men from the city joined the power couple for their expedition, and armaments and axes to fell the trees were procured for all. Along the way, Gilgamesh made offerings of flour to Shamash each night, and each night the god sends him a vivid dream. Although Gilgamesh was distressed by his dreams, Enkidu assured him that everything looked auspicious: they should be able to slay Humbaba, plunder the trees, and return to Uruk victorious.

Before seeing them off, the elders also add: “In the river of Humbaba, for which you yearn, wash your feet, dig a well.” As if civilizing his waters (with the well) and also dirtying them (with their feet) would be the first step in turning events toward their favor. Putting one’s feet higher than another was also a well-known symbol of subjugation in the iconography of this region of the world — so it seems that the fix is in, right here in the beginning.

The murder of Humbaba and the looting of the forest

Humbaba (aka Huwawa)⁵ is usually described as a huge chimera with fiery breath and a terrifying gaze. However, when he walks through his forest the animals are at peace, and know joy. A recently recovered clay tablet from the museum of Sulaymaniyah further illustrated his actions as steward: “Where Humbaba came and went there was a track, the paths were in good order and the way was well trodden … Through all the forest a bird began to sing: A wood pigeon was moaning, a turtle dove calling in answer. Monkey mothers sing aloud, a youngster monkey shrieks: like a band of musicians and drummers daily they bash out a rhythm in the presence of Humbaba.”⁶

Fragment of a terracotta plaque depicting Humbaba and a cedar tree. Cited as Cat 83 by Sarah B. Graff, whose dissertation I reference in the footnotes.

Humbaba “guards the cedars so well that when the wild heifer stirs in the forest, though she is sixty leagues distant, he hears her”. All of these texts that refer to his aural acuity illustrate that this “demon” was deeply, intimately connected with all the life of his forest in ways that even Enkidu was not — though Enkidu was aware that such skills existed. (Remember: he was made not only from clay, but also from silence. This special sense of hearing and knowing was important in Sumerian culture, and was considered a supernatural power:

Until [Inanna’s] ear opens to the Great Below, her understanding is necessarily limited. In Sumerian, the word for ear and wisdom is the same. … It is said of Enki, the God of Wisdom and the King of the Watery Deep, who lives directly above the underworld, that his ears are “wide open” and that “he knows all things.”⁷

Still, he was ferocious, as the guardian of such a precious grove (or commodity in the eyes of greedy men) should be: Humbaba’s cry was like a hurricane; his mouth was fire; his breath “dealt death.” He also possessed an invincible might, thanks to owning seven “auras” (magical force fields, sometimes also translated as “terrors”).

When Gilgamesh and Enkidu entered the wondrous Cedar Forest: “They gazed at the mountain of cedars, the dwelling-place of the gods and the throne of Ishtar. The hugeness of the cedar rose in front of the mountain, its shade was beautiful, full of comfort; mountain and glade were green with brushwood.” (Narrator, aside: cutting down these cedars would not be the Gilgamesh’s first grave insult to Ishtar!)

They crew sets to work: fifty-two men cutting down trees makes quite a racket, and this quickly draws Humbaba’s attention. He comes roaring up to them from his home in Ishtar’s sacred grove: “Who is this that has violated my woods and cut down my cedar?”

Enkidu shouts at Humbaba that the two of them are much stronger than the demon, but Humbaba, who knows Gilgamesh is a king, taunts the king for taking orders from a nobody like his wild-man buddy. Turning his face into a hideous mask, he threatens the pair, and Gilgamesh runs and hides. Enkidu shouts at Gilgamesh, inspiring him with courage, and Gilgamesh comes out of his safe space and the two of them engage Humbaba in combat.

They wouldn’t have stood a chance against the demon, but for help from the god Shamash. The sun god raises winds against the guardian of the cedars, and the heroes are able to prevail. On his knees, with Gilgamesh's sword at his throat, Humbaba begs for his life and offers Gilgamesh all the trees in the forest, his auras, and eternal servitude. While Gilgamesh is considering the deal, Enkidu intervenes, telling Gilgamesh to kill Humbaba before any of the gods who support Humbaba arrive and stop him, and he reminds his friend that if he does it, he will be famous forever.

Two Heroes Are Fighting With the God of the Cedar Forest, by Hassan Nozadian.

Gilgamesh dealt the first blow to Humbaba’s neck, and Enkidu smote him a second time. Enkidu also struck the third and fatal blow: “Then there followed confusion for this was the guardian of the forest whom they had felled to the ground. For as far as two leagues the cedars shivered when Enkidu felled the watcher of the forest, he at whose voice Hermon and Lebanon used to tremble.”

Just before he died, Humbaba screamed out a curse upon Enkidu: "Of you two, may Enkidu not live the longer, may Enkidu not find any peace in this world!" (Narrator: and Enkidu does, indeed, after the men’s return to the city and an unfortunate episode involving Ishtar’s Bull of Heaven, sicken and die.)⁸

With Humbaba out of the way, Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and their men chop down the rest of the forest, making sure to fell the tallest cedar, which would be used to make a city gate. When this is done, the two heroes fashion a raft from the logs and and ride it home, carrying Humbaba’s head and his seven auras in a leather sack as booty. The god Enlil, whom Humbaba served, was so infuriated that he distributed the auras to the rivers, the reed-beds, the lions, the palace, the forests, and the underworld goddess Nungal.

This beautiful ceramic relief panel depicting Gilgamesh was created by Neil Dalrymple, part of a commission for the Museum of Myth and Fable in Shropshire.

Humbaba and the Gorgons: a few similarities in iconic and narrative images

Iconic images:

Those who who are familiar with Medusa’s myths must be feeling like they’ve heard this story before. In her doctoral dissertation, Sarah B. Graff⁹ writes that Vincent Scheil made the first tentative identification of this terracotta mask …

… as the head of a Gorgon. But that didn’t quite make sense: the object was found at Sippar, the cult center for the sun-god Shamash, who was responsible for omens — and had also ordered the hit job on Humbaba. The sinuous lines are not snakes, and it was only in 1924 that it was correctly identified by Sidney Smith with Humbaba. The mask is in the collection of the British Museum, and we’ll get back to what purpose it most likely served in a little while.

There’s pretty widespread awareness now by that Medusa was not simply a “monster.” As I have described in the etymological postscript in Medusa, Part II - It's Snakes, Baby, All the Way Down! Medusa's name actually means "Queen." She was not so much known as the steward or guardian of the land where she dwelled; rather, she was — most likely — originally a guardian of mysteries of life and death, and was later demoted to a mere priestess.

One point of contrast between their stories is that while Perseus became the founder of a city after taking Medusa’s head, this was a priori impossible for Gilgamesh, if we accept the premise that cities were a primeval condition in Mesopotamian myths.

However, there is still much that the characters of Medusa and Humbaba have in common: both were divine beings, and both were tragically mortal. After their murders, both Humbaba and Medusa were beheaded by the conquering heroes and had their heads carried away in leather sacks¹⁰ (to neutralize their terrifying gaze — at least initially, within the flow of the stories).

Later, though, these fearsome heads — displaying a certain kind of immortality — enjoyed a very long afterlife as apotropaic symbols that were especially popular around the vulnerable or liminal spots in buildings. In other words, they were not a vanquished “evil” power — they represented a power that was still wanted to scare off something even more fearsome than Medusa and Humbaba themselves.

And this brings up an interesting paradox: having a head predate its body doesn’t make sense. So perhaps their decapitation marks a turning point in how the stories about these beings were told.

Images of Humbaba’s head greatly outnumber representations of Gilgamesh. Art historian Sarah B. Graff thus engages in speculation, in Footnote #44 that Humbaba’s lore predates the Epic. As she puts it, if the iconic images were the “earliest expression of Humbaba’s form in a visual medium, this could imply a greater emphasis on the stand-alone power of the demon and his severed head rather than on the narrative details of the story itself. These first attempts at depicting Humbaba could thus have drawn on earlier traditions for depicting a fearsome creature, unrelated to the epic text, that were then absorbed by Humbaba.” Gorgoneion symbols, too, predate full-body representations of Gorgons in Greek art.

All the images of Humbaba classified as “iconic” by Graff possessed (most of) the following grotesque characteristics: a broad face, large eyes, grimacing/rictus mouth with bared teeth, nose with a broad, flat tip, and symmetrical hanging facial locks. a nose with broad, flat tip; and vertically striated locks or facial folds hanging from nose to chin — many of which are traits that we also see in Gorgon heads.

As Graff tells us, “iconic” Humbaba images (those which only depicted his head, from a full-frontal position, with no other attributes or characters) had a liminality to them that made them “especially well suited to highly charged, transitional contexts such as temple and palace entrances, territorial borders, and representations of sexual intercourse and death.”

Here is an image of Humbaba’s visage, with some polychrome still visible:

Terracotta mask of Humbaba cited as Cat. 59 by Sarah B. Graff.

Compare with this Gorgoneion, which seems to have radiant energy (like Humbaba’s auras? ) around the head. (Or maybe they resemble the feathers in Pantheistic Bes’s headdress — scroll down to take a look at that.)

Terracotta antefix (ca 500 BCE) in the collection of the British Museum.

Two differences in the iconography are that while Gorgons usually display their tongues, Humbaba does not, and the corners of the Gorgons’ mouths usually turn upward, while Humbaba’s mouth usually turns downward. Either way, the expression is meant to be seen as a threatening grimace, and possibly an omen or threat of death to enemies/the unprepared in its imitation of a corpse’s rictus grin.

Narrative images:

In what Graff describes as “narrative” images — those which depict action, usually the scene where Gilgamesh and Enkidu kill Humbaba — there are also similarities. Older Gorgon iconography often depicted them, when their full bodies were shown, in the distinctive Knielauf (literally “knee-running”) position. Like this kylix from 575 BCE:

This archaic style suggests speed and dynamism, which was certainly part of the Gorgons’ set of characteristics (e.g., Medusa’s sister Euryale is described as the “Far Springer”).

For comparison, here is a depiction of Humbaba’s death scene where even the conquering heroes have their knees bent. In these Assyrian images, the bent knees probably symbolize the intensity of the figures’ struggle, while in styles of art that develop later they will become a shorthand for speed.¹¹

This modern impression made of a Neo-Assyrian period cylinder seal (property of Dr. Leonard Gorelick) is shared at the Melammu Project page.

It isn’t possible, on the basis of available evidence, to definitively prove that the story of the city-founder Perseus killing Medusa was derived from the city-hero Gilgamesh killing Humbaba. However, the iconographic parallels in the narrative images are striking, and a possible link has been suggested by Christina Tsouparoppoulou in a “Cyprian cylinder seal, which depicts a demon-giant beaten down to one knee and about to be slain by ‘Perseus,’ who is armed with the Assyrian-Cyprian sickle or harpe. It is a typical depiction of the demon versus the hero in Ancient Near Eastern art (characteristics include the depiction of the head and body in full front, with the legs in profile)."

Getting to the point, Tsouparopoulou boldly claims: “The iconography of this cylinder seal bears striking resemblance to Assyrian depictions on seals of the slaying of Humbaba by Gilgamesh and Enkidu, while also with depictions of Gorgon in Greece later in the 6th century BCE.”

Credit: Greek Art on Flikr. This ca. 550 BCE frieze is located on Temple C at Selinunte, Palermo. Perseus’ patroness Athena stands protectively on the far left, and Perseus is halfway though the act of decapitating Medusa. Naturally, he isn’t looking at her! And that’s why he doesn’t seem to notice Pegasus springing forth from her hip.

Another possible parallel: Bes, the Egyptian god of childbirth

Scholars have also identified the Egyptian god Bes as a parallel figure.¹² Bes is often depicted with bent legs, a fact that is commented upon by Graff, who does not suggest a satisfying reason for the resemblance, though she notes that it resembles the knielauf position described above. (Maybe he’s bowlegged because of his dwarfism? ) His face is broad, his eyes large and bulging, and his beard and the lines on his face somewhat reminiscent of the lines that are always present on Humbaba’s face. The curls of his beard might also be said to resemble the locks of the Gorgon’s beard in the kylix I showed above.

Here’s a bronze statuette of Bes dated to approx. 525 BCE; it’s in the collection of the Cleveland Museum, and can be viewed on Wikipedia.

Bes’s heyday roughly overlapped with Humbaba’s, and both predate the period of widespread popularity of Gorgoneia.

A bell¹³ in the form of Bes’s head, 332-30 BCE; it is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and can be viewed on Wikipedia. Unlike Humbaba and the Gorgons, Bes often keeps his mouth closed, but when it’s open, he usually just shows his tongue, and doesn’t seem threatening.

Another interesting parallel are the apotropaic figures from spells in the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Below, a statuette of Pantheistic (syncretic) Bes displays the head of Bes, the body of Harpocrates, the feathered headdress of Amon, sun disk of Ra, perhaps four wings referring to Horus, heads of jackals on the feet perhaps referring to Anubis, beneath them a serpent, and a pedestal with orbiting animals that resemble lion or lizard. While some syncretic deities were late arrivals in Egypt, Pantheistic Bes dates back to at least the Middle Kingdom (ca 2000 BCE — contemporaneous with some of the oldest tablets recording Gilgamesh’s story).

Another Pantheistic Bes, from the Walters Art Museum:

His wings bring me right back to the Gorgons, and those facial lines are very reminiscent of Humbaba. Look at enough ancient art and you start finding parallels everywhere. Keep at it long enough, and you’ll surely go insane!

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Gutsy!

And now, let’s look at something really wild … Humbaba’s visage is sometimes depicted with what looks like a plateful of udon noodles covering it. Some have suggested that they represent a labyrinth,¹⁴ though I don’t find that hypothesis convincing.

Because sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes a resemblance is coincidence. And look — Humbaba’s title mentioned in the image above tells us why his face looks that way: he’s the God of the Fortress of Intestines! (Not the god of a palace labyrinth!)

So yes, these sinuous curves made from one long piece of clay represent intestines. And here’s why we know that: there’s an inscription on the back side of the mask that says so!

Why intestines? Haruspicy or extispicy was the art of divination from the entrails of a sacrificial animal. The practice was often linked with kingship and the augury of the success or failure of a reign and the wisdom needed to rule well. (Sounds like bullshit, eh? Well, according to the historian Suetonius, it was the haruspex Spurinna who warned Julius Caesar that he should “beware the Ides of March!” So maybe there’s something to it?)

Inside the mask is an inscription in Akkadian cuneiform that reads: “If the coils of the colon resemble the head of Huwawa, (this is) an omen of Sargon who ruled the land. If ...., the house of a man will expand” and it was signed “(Written by) the hand of Warad-Marduk, diviner, son of Kubburum, diviner.” Some scholars believe that the prophecy recorded here predicts the military conquests and reign of Sargon of Akkad, a character whose name you may be familiar with from the fantasy film The Scorpion King 2: Rise of a Warrior (2008).

Here’s a photo of the back of the mask, from the British Museum's page:

Sidney Smith¹⁵ cites another divination manual that reads: “If the entrails are like the face of Humbaba, a rebel will rule all the land,” and suggests that this mask could have been meant to serve as a diagnostic reference tool for members of the bārû priesthood to look at. By comparing the terracotta model with the particular entrails they were examining at the time of a sacrifice, they could see if the fresh entrails did or did not resemble Humbaba’s face, and thus whether a prediction of a king being overthrown by a rebel was warranted.

However that wasn’t all: “if a woman gives birth to the image of Huwawa —the king and his sons will go out from the city (in exile).” (Cited by Graff, p. 103.)

What about images of Humbaba where it looks like he has a walrus-style moustache? It’s kind of the same thing: Graff tells us that the Akkadian word tīrānu is defined as coils of the colon and also as whorls of hair (p. 99). There is a latent suggestion even that the deep lines that run between Humbaba’s nose and jawline still suggest them, almost as if they are pushing against the clay itself.¹⁶

Order or disorder?

One of the predominant interpretations of the Epic of Gilgamesh is that it represents every man or woman’s necessity of reckoning with death. Making a prediction that someone will die, however, is trite and even boring: that everyone will eventually die is an inescapable fact of life. What’s more interesting is how deaths are understood.

Death conceived as a principle of life, is orderly and fair, but death in the singular — the death of an individual who is missed and mourned — is always chaotic for their surviving loved ones. When the death happens by murder, these loved ones (often) cry out for blood vengeance, which can lead to ever more chaotic spirals of violence and even warfare. Humbaba, a spirit sometimes addressed as “Humbaba, the powerful demon who does not pardon,”¹⁷ lost his life due to gods conspiring against him and giving aid to his killers. He was unable to strike back at them himself, but he was a canny fellow who knew that justice would come around for Enkidu, who had not only led Gilgamesh to his house, but had also struck the killing blow.

Humbaba not only warned his rivals verbally, but also implicitly promised payback when he turn[ed] his face into a hideous mask at the moment Gilgamesh and Enkidu engaged him in mortal combat. This was the omen-face that foretokened death, and I believe it is the visage that would be described in various places as resembling intestines.

The intestines of a slaughtered beast are surely the very image of something that is no longer alive. And there is another association between Humbaba’s face and death, which Sidney Smith points out: “It was a bad sign for a woman to give birth to the form of a Huwawa,” and a misbirth [miscarriage, stillbirth] might have “the features of a Huwawa, or of a feminine counterpart, Humbabitum.” Was Humbaba blamed for these babies’ deaths, in the way that Lilith and other psychopomp spirits would come to be blamed for the deaths of newborns by parents who were furious over having their little ones taken away?

In the groves of symbols, stories, and omens, cause and effect can be difficult to disentangle.

An orderly cosmos can be known through myths and stories, and upheld through rituals and other conformal actions, but it isn’t foolproof: fortune is fickle, and glimmers of foresight may appear through divination, which Gilgamesh and Enkidu resort to, frequently.

A polysemous world: the path suffused with numinosity, a quavering feeling that everything is portentous, happening as if by prediction. A hazy presage, like a mirage. Pin it down and it disappears. A crow. A wild duck.

Where did it go?

Randomness is entropy, Claude Shannon’s measure of information. Patternless chaos is maximal meaning, incompressible and incomprehensible.

Augury degenerates into priestcraft, priestcraft into force.¹⁸

This has been the way of the world.

My postscript is that although the mythic imagination is in theory unlimited, it is a crime that cries to the depths of the underworld, the farthest mountain peaks when traditions of stewardship are extirpated for the sake of the glory of men and their cities. For there are some things that cannot be regenerated easily, or perhaps at all, and risking this is true madness. Gilgamesh’s gambit paid off, because he and Enkidu have achieved immortality as culture heroes whose stories are still told, but it is my hope that Humbaba — and those like him — will be revived and will push back against the ecocidal “civilizing” insanity.

Gilgamesh is Dead, by Hassan Nozadian.

Below is Seven Hundred Million, by Dan Hillier, the late artist whose picture Wayfarer I used at the beginning of this essay. Be sure to read the very moving words that accompany Hillier’s presentation of this piece, which he wrote shortly before he died. Yes, we all must die — but what a wonderful tapestry our breaths help weave while we are still alive!

1. When an overlooked fragment that described two weeks of love-making (instead of the six days and seven nights known in previously-known texts) was found and translated, The Times trumpeted the discovery under the salacious headline “Ancient Sex Saga Now Twice As Epic.” But there is a much deeper significance to the extra time than just twice the amount of sexy action:

Per Sophus Helle on Aeon,

The first week of sex might have given him the intellect to converse with Shamhat, but he still thinks in animal terms: he sees Gilgamesh as an alpha male [ugh! when will this trope die? - M.R.] to be challenged. After the second week, he has become ready to accept a different vision of society. Social life is not about raw strength and assertions of power, but also about communal duties and responsibility … In a nutshell, what we see here is a Babylonian poet looking at society through Enkidu’s still-feral eyes. It is a not-fully-human perspective on city life, which is seen as a place of power and pride rather than skill and cooperation.

In other words, at the one-week point in the civilizing process Enkidu is at the same moral level as Gilgamesh, and not yet ready to teach him anything new.

2. I own the Penguin Classics paperback edition, and am citing from pp. xlii—xliii.

3. Compare with the story of Adam and Eve in Genesis. There, the first couple enjoyed some aspects of a “state of nature,” but not all of them: for instance, there were rules about which fruits were not to be eaten, and a hierarchy already established with God on top, then angels, then the man, the woman, the animals, and the plants all on lower rungs — and the serpent, sui generis, and somewhat outside the system. While it may seem strange to say there was a “religion” for only two people, naturally the point was not to worry about the point of this odd primeval threesome of Adam/Eve/God, but to instruct people who lived in much numerous societies in what their social order was supposed to be based in.

4. The Cedars of God in Lebanon have been variously plundered and protected over the ages, and are now a UNESCO World Heritage site that can only be visited in the company of a licensed guide.

5. His name is rendered as Huwawa in Old Babylonian and Humbaba in Assyrian and New Babylonian. For the purposes of his essay, other than in directly quoted texts, I’m using the more common form “Humbaba.”

6. This newly-discovered fragment is cited here.

7. This quote from Diane Wolkstein was cited by Sofia Batalha in her blog Cosmic-Chthonic Cartographies. Her citation links to this article on Inanna from the Symbol Reader blog.

8. When the bois get back to Uruk, the goddess Ishtar, who is turned on by Gilgamesh’s manliness and beauty, tries to seduce him. However, the king scorns her advances, insults her, and makes jokes about how badly things went for her former lovers. This is no way to treat a goddess, so she sends the Bull of Heaven (i.e. Taurus) down from the sky to kill Gilgamesh and fuck up Uruk. But Gilgamesh and Enkidu are already up for more challenges, and Gilgamesh slays the bull. However, this is finally going too far, so the gods retaliate by causing Enkidu to get sick and die, which is probably the only thing that could soften Gilgamesh’s heart.

9. Sarah B. Graff’s excellent doctoral thesis, titled Humbaba/Huwawa (2012, New York University Institute of Fine Arts), is available as an open-access PDF here at ProQuest.

10. In the last footnote in Medusa as a Loathly Lady, Part I I mention the interesting connection between the korykos (leather knapsack) and the Corycian Cave, a grotto on Mt. Parnassus (near Delphi) that was associated with prophecy and the half-snake deities Delphyne and Echidna. I don’t know if leather bags were just common and handy in Mesopotamia, or if they also had a connection between sacks and oracles’ caves.

11. See Hopkins (cited below) on Hittite art as the prototype for the half-kneeling running knielauf position of Gorgon figures. He cites a source (Meyer), who says the Hittites had probably borrowed it from Babylonian art, but it s found much more abundantly in Assyrian than in Hittite art. However, “it is in the Mesopotamian valley that we obtain the explanation of the position, probably first portraying the intensity of the struggle, later the suggestion of quick motion” (p. 346).

12. For an example written 90 years ago, see Clark Hopkins, “Assyrian Elements in the Perseus-Gorgon Story.” In American Journal of Archaeology, Vol. 38, No. 3 (Jul — Sep, 1934), pp. 341-358. This article is available here, on JSTOR.

13. I’ve written a lot about bells, land spirits, and prophecy in my essay “Ring of Bones,” which was published by A Beautiful Resistance (Ritona).

Ring of Bones

If you are new to my blog, you might be interested to read my book, The White Deer: Ecospirituality and the Mythic, which was published just less than a year ago by Ritona.

14. Here is a link that reveals the source of this image and text — which have enjoyed modest popularity on Pinterest. It apparently first appeared in Hamlet’s Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge And its Transmission Through Myth (1969), a work that discusses astrological lore as the foundation of ancient myths and other aspects of culture. Disclosure: I haven’t read it.

15. Smith, Sidney. “The Face of Humbaba”. In Liverpool Annals of Archaeology and Anthropology, Vol. 11 (1924), pp. 107 — 114.

16. I’m paraphrasing from this article, which is a spinoff from Graff's thesis.

17. See Hopkins, p. 346.

18. Dale Pendell. The Language of Birds: Some Notes of Chance and Divination. Richmond Vista, CA: Three Hands Press, 2021. (pp. 29, 27, 26, 57.) The root for “mind” ( *men) is also the root for “meaning” and it it appears in “madness,” “mania,” and “mantic” (seer — the root of anything+mancy as divination). Pendell also quotes E.R. Dodds: “The association between prophecy and madness belongs to the Indo-European stock of ideas.”