GILGAMESH AND ENKIDU SLAY HUMBABA - Pt. One
This is PART ONE of what has grown intoa three part interpretation of the slaying of Humbaba according to the cuneiform tablets of the Babylonian EPIC OF GILGAMESH. None of this would have been possible for me without the remarkable translations and transliterations of Assyriologist, Andrew R. George and the contributions of the highly esteemed Iraqi Assyriologist, Professor Farouk al-Rawi.
Were it not for the fact that the Babylonians (and their predecessors, the Sumerians) wrote on clay tablets which have withstood the ravages of several millennia, we would know almost nothing of Gilgamesh. Although thousands of clay tablets have survived to this day, many of them are broken so translations of the EPIC OF GILGAMESH are often fragmented, and entire sections missing entirely. The parts of the epic we do have come from various sources which differ slightly from one another. Some are written in Old Babylonian while others are in Akkadian. What I have tried to do is knit the various versions together into a consistent and singable story. Depending on the particular dialect and period of the cuneiform script, Gilgamesh is sometimes written as “Gishgimash” or “Bilgamesh”, while Humbaba is sometimes “Humbawa” or “Huwawa”. To avoid confusion for modern listeners (and for myself), I have used only the conventional pronunciations of these names.
Would the ancient Babylonians and Akkadians have sung these stories? If they did, would they have sung them as they are written in the cuneiform tablets? It is highly probable that these stories were performed but the cuneiform writings were not regarded as scriptural “holy books”, and I doubt they were intended to be sung exactly as written. I believe the tablets were more like memory “joggers”, and a small section could be taken by a skilled musician and used as a basis for improvisation. Most ancient listeners would already have been familiar with the story, so they could have enjoyed any part of it, knowing how it all began and how it ended.
There are wonderful moments in the epic that are often overlooked. Did you know that, by some accounts, Enkidu and Humbaba had been friends in the days when Enkidu was a “wild man” running with the herds? Did you know that Humbaba, although he was terrifying, was not a “monster”? He was the guardian of the cedar forest, appointed by the god Enlil to safeguard the trees. Did you know that Gilgamesh’s mother, the goddess Ninsun, adopted Enkidu as her own son, and declared from that moment on, that Gilgamesh and Enkidu were brothers? All these things can be discovered by listening carefully to the tale.
I have used three types of lute in this video: the large Anatolian “diwan saz”, a standard long neck saz and, for the goddess Ninsun, a Persian setar. All these lutes, because of the way they are tuned, are essentially three-string instruments similar to those used by Babylonian and Akkadian musicians. The large drum is a Sumerian “balag”, a buffalo hide replica of the instrument depicted in a bas relief in the Sumerian city of Girsu. I have also used a variety of wind instruments such as the “zurna” and “duduk”, but I cannot play them and sing, or play the lute, at the same time!
There was an episode of the television series STAR TREK (TNG) some years ago, in which the Klingon officer, Lieutenant Worf, was telling stories of the mythological founder of the Klingon empire, Kahless, to a group of young people. One bored young Klingon stood up and said dismissively, “We’ve heard these stories before!” Worf quietly replied, bristling with Klingon self control, “We do not tell these stories because we have not heard them before. We tell them because they are the story of the Klingon soul.” So it is with the EPIC OF GILGAMESH.