Gilgamesh

Elif Shafak

Elif Shafak, born Elif Bilgin, on October 25, 1971, is a Turkish-British novelist, essayist, public speaker, political scientist and activist.
Writing in Turkish and English, she has published 21 books, but is best known for her novels, which include The Bastard of Istanbul, The Forty Rules of Love, Three Daughters of Eve and 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World.
Her works have been translated into 57 languages and have been nominated for several literary awards. She has been described by the Financial Times as "Turkey's leading female novelist," with several of her works having been bestsellers in Turkey and internationally.
Her works have prominently featured the city of Istanbul, and dealt with themes of Eastern and Western culture, roles of women in society, and human rights issues. Certain politically challenging topics addressed in her novels, such as child abuse and the Armenian genocide, have led to legal action from authorities in Turkey that prompted her to emigrate to the United Kingdom.
Shafak has a PhD in political science. An essayist and contributor to several media outlets, Shafak has advocated for women's rights, minority rights, and freedom of speech.
Publications
10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World
- Shortlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize, named a Best Book of the Year by Bookpage, NPR, Washington Post, and The Economist
- A moving novel on the power of friendship in our darkest times. In the pulsating moments after she has been murdered and left in a dumpster outside Istanbul, Tequila Leila enters a state of heightened awareness. Her heart has stopped beating but her brain is still active-for 10 minutes 38 seconds. While the Turkish sun rises and her friends sleep soundly nearby, she remembers her life-and the lives of others, outcasts like her.
- Tequila Leila's memories bring us back to her childhood in the provinces, a highly oppressive milieu with religion and traditions, shaped by a polygamous family with two mothers and an increasingly authoritarian father. Escaping to Istanbul, Leila makes her way into the sordid industry of sex trafficking, finding a home in the city's historic Street of Brothels. This is a dark, violent world, but Leila is tough and open to beauty, light, and the essential bonds of friendship.
- In Tequila Leila's death, the secrets and wonders of modern Istanbul come to life, painted vividly by captivating tales of how Leila came to know and be loved by her friends. As her epic journey to the afterlife comes to an end, it is her chosen family who brings her story to a buoyant and breathtaking conclusion.

Publications

Three Daughters of Eve
- Peri, a married, wealthy, beautiful Turkish woman, is on her way to a dinner party at a seaside mansion in Istanbul when a beggar snatches her handbag. As she wrestles to get it back, a photograph falls to the ground--an old polaroid of three young women and their university professor. A relic from a past--and a love--Peri had tried desperately to forget.
- Three Daughters of Eve is set over an evening in contemporary Istanbul, as Peri arrives at the party and navigates the tensions that simmer in this crossroads country between East and West, religious and secular, rich and poor. Over the course of the dinner, and amidst an opulence that is surely ill-begotten, terrorist attacks occur across the city. Competing in Peri's mind however are the memories invoked by her almost-lost polaroid, of the time years earlier when she was sent abroad for the first time, to attend Oxford University. As a young woman there, she had become friends with the charming, adventurous Shirin, a fully assimilated Iranian girl, and Mona, a devout Egyptian-American. Their arguments about Islam and feminism find focus in the charismatic but controversial Professor Azur, who teaches divinity, but in unorthodox ways. As the terrorist attacks come ever closer, Peri is moved to recall the scandal that tore them all apart.
- Elif Shafak is the number one bestselling novelist in her native Turkey. In Three Daughters of Eve, she has given us a rich and moving story that humanizes and personalizes one of the most profound sea changes of the modern world.

Publications

Architect's Apprentice
- A colorful, magical tale set during the height of the Ottoman Empire, from the acclaimed author of The Island of Missing Trees (a Reese's Book Club Pick)
- In this novel, Turkey’s preeminent female writer spins an epic tale spanning nearly a century in the life of the Ottoman Empire. In 1540, twelve-year-old Jahan arrives in Istanbul. As an animal tamer in the sultan’s menagerie, he looks after the exceptionally smart elephant Chota and befriends (and falls for) the sultan’s beautiful daughter, Princess Mihrimah. A palace education leads Jahan to Mimar Sinan, the empire’s chief architect, who takes Jahan under his wing as they construct (with Chota’s help) some of the most magnificent buildings in history. Yet even as they build Sinan’s triumphant masterpieces—the incredible Suleymaniye and Selimiye mosques—dangerous undercurrents begin to emerge, with jealousy erupting among Sinan’s four apprentices.
- A memorable story of artistic freedom, creativity, and the clash between science and fundamentalism, Shafak’s intricate novel brims with vibrant characters, intriguing adventure, and the lavish backdrop of the Ottoman court, where love and loyalty are no match for raw power.

Publications

The Bastard of Istanbul
- A “vivid and entertaining” (Chicago Tribune) tale about the tangled history of two families, from the author of The Island of Missing Trees (a Reese's Book Club Pick)
- "Zesty, imaginative . . . a Turkish version of Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club." —USA Today
- As an Armenian American living in San Francisco, Armanoush feels like part of her identity is missing and that she must make a journey back to the past, to Turkey, in order to start living her life. Asya is a nineteen-year-old woman living in an extended all-female household in Istanbul who loves Jonny Cash and the French existentialists. The Bastard of Istanbul tells the story of their two families--and a secret connection linking them to a violent event in the history of their homeland. Filed with humor and understanding, this exuberant, dramatic novel is about memory and forgetting, about the need to examine the past and the desire to erase it, and about Turkey itself.

Publications

The Island of Missing Trees
- Winner of 2022 BookTube Silver Medal in Fiction. Shortlisted for Women's Prize for Fiction. "A wise novel of love and grief, roots and branches, displacement and home, faith and belief. Balm for our bruised times."
- Two teenagers, a Greek Cypriot and a Turkish Cypriot, meet at a taverna on the island they both call home. In the taverna, hidden beneath garlands of garlic, chili peppers and creeping honeysuckle, Kostas and Defne grow in their forbidden love for each other. A fig tree stretches through a cavity in the roof, and this tree bears witness to their hushed, happy meetings and eventually, to their silent, surreptitious departures. The tree is there when war breaks out, when the capital is reduced to ashes and rubble, and when the teenagers vanish. Decades later, Kostas returns. He is a botanist looking for native species, but really, he's searching for lost love.
- Years later a Ficus carica grows in the back garden of a house in London where Ada Kazantzakis lives. This tree is her only connection to an island she has never visited--- her only connection to her family's troubled history and her complex identity as she seeks to untangle years of secrets to find her place in the world.
- A moving, beautifully written, and delicately constructed story of love, division, transcendence, history, and eco-consciousness, The Island of Missing Trees is Elif Shafak's best work yet.

Elif Shafak (The Guardian, Aug.3, 2024)

Turkish prosecutors have launched investigations into writers of fiction including the award-winning novelist Elif Shafak, in what campaigners are describing as a serious threat to free speech.
The move comes in the wake of a vicious debate on social media in which novelists tackling challenging subjects – such as child abuse and sexual violence – have been accused of condoning these practices.
“Anything that has any passage on sexual abuse of children in Turkish literature, they want to investigate it,” Shafak said. “This is a very new focus for them. And of course the irony is that this is a country in which we have an escalating number of cases of sexual violence against both women and children. Turkish courts are not taking action, the laws have not been changed. So in a country where they need to take urgent action to deal with sexual violence, instead they’re prosecuting writers. It’s the biggest tragedy. It has become like a witch-hunt.”

Elif Shafak (The Guardian, Aug.3, 2024)

In 2006, Shafak was tried and acquitted for “insulting Turkishness” after prosecutors noticed a character in her novel The Bastard of Istanbul referred to the massacre of Armenians in the first world war as genocide. While the writer does acknowledge sexual abuse appears in some of her fiction, she rejected entirely the idea that this could mean she condones it.
“They don’t make a distinction . . . If a writer writes about these subjects –paedophilia, sexual violence, sexual harassment – those sentences are taken out of the book as if you’re defending sexual harassment,” she said. “It’s just the opposite. All my life I’ve fought for women’s rights, children’s rights, minority rights, so to me this kind of accusation is so baseless. And also it means writers cannot write about these subjects any more."

Elif Shafak (The Guardian, Aug.3, 2024)

According to her publisher in Turkey, Dogan Kitap, Shafak “has always been a writer for women, children and minority rights.” “Issues such as sexual harassment and incest are social wounds,” Kitap said. “And of course literature is about social wounds. Elif Shafak is one of the best Turkish authors who talk about victims and the injured individuals. Her books are gifts not only for us but for world literature.”
Turkey has one of the highest rates of child marriage in Europe, according to an anti-child marriage organisation. . . . According to Shafak, similar issues exist in other countries across the Middle East.
“We need a strong women’s movement and gender awareness,” she said. “Literature can take an important part in this conversation. But now they are attacking writers.”

Gilgamesh tablet

The Gilgamesh Dream Tablet sits atop a table onstage during a ceremony hosted by the Smithsonian Institution to repatriate the antiquity to Iraq.
A small clay tablet dating back 3,500 years and bearing a portion of the Epic of Gilgamesh that was looted from an Iraqi museum 30 years ago and recently recovered from the United States and formally returned to Iraq on Tuesday.
The $1.7 million cuneiform tablet, known as the Gilgamesh Dream Tablet, is one of the world’s oldest surviving works of literature and one of the oldest religious texts—pre-dating the Bible and Greek mythology.
It was found in 1853 as part of a 12-tablet collection in the rubble of the library of Assyrian King Assur Banipal.

Gilgamesh tablet (from PBS news, Dec. 8, 2021)

The tablet was looted from an Iraqi museum during the 1991 Gulf War. Officials believe it was illegally imported into the United States in 2003, then sold to Hobby Lobby and eventually put on display in its Museum of the Bible in Washington.
Federal agents with Homeland Security seized the tablet from the museum in September 2019. A federal judge in New York approved the forfeiture of the tablet in July this year.
On Tuesday, the tablet was handed over to Iraqi authorities in a ceremony at Iraq’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the presence of UNESCO officials as well as the Iraqi Foreign Minister and Iraq’s minister of culture, tourism and antiquities.
“We were able to recover about 17,926 artifacts from several countries, namely America, Britain, Italy, Japan and the Netherlands,” Hussein said.
UNESCO has described the process of recovering the valuable artifact as the culmination of decades of cooperation between the U.S. and Iraq, both of which are signatories to the UNESCO Convention of 1970.

Gilgamesh tablet (from PBS news, Dec. 8, 2021)

It’s part of an increasing effort by authorities in the U.S. and around the world to return antiquities pilfered from their home countries. In years past, such items probably would never have made it back. The black market for these relics is vast, as are criminal networks and smugglers dealing in stolen items and falsifying ownership data.
“By returning these illegally acquired objects, the authorities here in the United States and in Iraq are allowing the Iraqi people to reconnect with a page in their history,” said Audrey Azoulay, director general of the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. “This exceptional restitution is a major victory over those who mutilate heritage and then traffic it to finance violence and terrorism.”

Gilgamesh tablet (from PBS news, Dec. 8, 2021)

For the acting head of Homeland Security Investigations which found and investigated the origins of the tablet, the repatriation is personal. Steve Francis’ parents were born in Iraq, part of a small sect known as Chaldean Iraqis who are Christian, and he was assigned to a U.S. Customs unit in 2003 that was sent to Iraq to help protect looted artifacts. “It’s really special to me. I’m a Chaldean Iraqi and leading the agency that did this work,” Francis said. “It is really something.”
Authorities are also repatriating a Sumerian Ram sculpture that was seized during a separate case. The sculpture, from 3000 B.C., was used for religious vows in Sumerian temples. Investigators believe it had been stolen from an archaeological site in southern Iraq, then passed off as part of a collection that had been discovered years earlier. Homeland Security Investigations teams, curious about the size of the collection, looked it up and discovered the ram was not among the listed items. The dealer eventually fessed up.

Gilgamesh tablet (from PBS news, Dec. 8, 2021)

Homeland Security Investigations has returned more than 15,000 items in 40 countries, including at least 5,000 artifacts to Iraq since 2008. Many of the cases have come from the agency’s office in New York, where a team of agents is investigating the trafficking of cultural property and stolen artifacts, which have included other tablets and clay seals.
The owners of Oklahoma City-based Hobby Lobby, devout Christians, collected artifacts for the Bible museum on a large scale. Prosecutors said Steve Green, the president of the $4 billion company, agreed to buy more than 5,500 artifacts in 2010 for $1.6 million in a scheme that involved a number of middlemen and the use of phony or misleading invoices, shipping labels and other paperwork to slip the artifacts past U.S. customs agents.
Prosecutors say Hobby Lobby was warned by its own expert that acquiring antiquities from Iraq carried “considerable risk” because so many of the artifacts in circulation are stolen. But Green, who had been collecting ancient artifacts since 2009, pleaded naiveté in doing business with dealers in the Middle East.

Epic of Gilgamesh (wikipedia)

The Epic of Gilgamesh is an epic poem from ancient Mesopotamia. The literary history of Gilgamesh begins with five Sumerian poems about Gilgamesh (formerly read as Sumerian "Bilgames"), king of Uruk, some of which may date back to the Third Dynasty of Ur (c. 2100 BCE).
These independent stories were later used as source material for a combined epic in Akkadian. The first surviving version of this combined epic, known as the "Old Babylonian" version, dates back to the 18th century BCE and is titled after its incipit, "Surpassing All Other Kings". Only a few tablets of it have survived.
The later Standard Babylonian version dates to somewhere between the 13th to the 10th centuries BCE and bears the incipit "He who Saw the Deep(s)", or "He who Sees the Unknown." Approximately two-thirds of this longer, twelve-tablet version have been recovered. Some of the best copies were discovered in the library ruins of the 7th-century BCE Assyrian king Ashurbanipal.

Epic of Gilgamesh (wikipedia)

The first half of the story discusses Gilgamesh (king of Uruk) and Enkidu, a wild man created by the gods to stop Gilgamesh from oppressing the people of Uruk. After Enkidu becomes civilized through sexual initiation with Shamhat, he travels to Uruk, where he challenges Gilgamesh to a test of strength. Gilgamesh wins the contest; nonetheless, the two become friends. Together they make a six-day journey to the legendary Cedar Forest, where they ultimately slay its Guardian, Humbaba, and cut down the sacred Cedar.
The goddess Ishtar sends the Bull of Heaven to punish Gilgamesh for spurning her advances. Gilgamesh and Enkidu kill the Bull of Heaven, insulting Ishtar in the process, after which the gods decide to sentence Enkidu to death and kill him by giving him a fatal illness.
In the second half of the epic, distress over Enkidu's death causes Gilgamesh to undertake a long and perilous journey to discover the secret of eternal life. Finally, he meets Utnapishtim, who with his wife were the only humans to survive the Flood triggered by the gods. Gilgamesh learns from him that "Life, which you look for, you will never find. For when the gods created man, they let death be his share, and life withheld in their own hands."
The epic is regarded as a foundational work in religion and the tradition of heroic sagas, with Gilgamesh forming the prototype for later heroes like Hercules and the epic itself serving as an influence for Homeric epics. It has been translated into many languages and is featured in several works of popular fiction.

Epic of Gilgamesh (wikipedia)

Content of the Standard Babylonian version tablets, based on Andrew George's translation.

Tablet one
- The story introduces Gilgamesh, king of Uruk. Gilgamesh, two-thirds god and one-third man, is oppressing his people, who cry out to the gods for help. For the young women of Uruk this oppression takes the form of Gilgamesh raping brides on their wedding night. For the young men (the tablet is damaged at this point) it is conjectured that Gilgamesh exhausts them through games, tests of strength, or perhaps forced labour on building projects. The gods respond to the people's pleas by creating an equal to Gilgamesh who will be able to stop his oppression.
- This is the invincibly strong Enkidu, covered in hair, who lives in the wilderness with his herd of animal relatives. He is spotted by a trapper, whose livelihood is being ruined because Enkidu destroys all his traps. The trapper tells the sun god Shamash about the man, and it is arranged that Enkidu will be seduced by Shamhat, a temple prostitute, as the first step in taming him. After six days and seven nights (or two weeks, according to more recent scholarship) of lovemaking, Enkidu is 'weakened'; his herd flees in horror into the steppe. Enkidu is shocked by his loneliness, but Shamhat tries to comfort him: "Do not grieve, you now have knowledge, like the gods." Gilgamesh, meanwhile, has been having dreams about the imminent arrival of a beloved new companion and asks his mother, the goddess Ninsun, to help interpret these dreams.

Epic of Gilgamesh (wikipedia)

Tablet two
- Shamhat takes Enkidu to a shepherd's camp, teaching him to be civilised: his hair is cut, and he learns to eat human food and drink beer. In the shepherds' camp, to whose way of life he has become accustomed, Enkidu is appointed night watchman. Learning from a passing stranger about Gilgamesh's treatment of new brides, he is incensed and travels to Uruk to intervene at a wedding. When Gilgamesh attempts to visit the wedding chamber, Enkidu blocks his way, and they fight. After a fierce battle, Enkidu acknowledges Gilgamesh's superior strength and they become friends. Gilgamesh proposes a journey to the Cedar Forest to slay the monstrous demi-god Humbaba in order to gain fame and renown. Despite warnings from Enkidu and the council of elders, Gilgamesh is not deterred.
Tablet three
- The elders give Gilgamesh advice for his journey. Gilgamesh visits his mother, Ninsun, who seeks the support and protection of the sun-god Shamash for their adventure. Ninsun adopts Enkidu as her son, and Gilgamesh leaves instructions for the governance of Uruk in his absence.

Epic of Gilgamesh (wikipedia)

Tablet four
- Gilgamesh and Enkidu journey to the Cedar Forest. Every few days they camp on a mountain, and perform a dream ritual. Gilgamesh has five terrifying dreams about falling mountains, thunderstorms, wild bulls, and a thunderbird that breathes fire. Despite similarities between his dream figures and earlier descriptions of Humbaba, Enkidu interprets these dreams as good omens, and denies that the frightening images represent the forest guardian. As they approach the cedar mountain, they hear Humbaba bellowing, and have to encourage each other not to be afraid.

Epic of Gilgamesh (wikipedia)

Tablet five
- The heroes enter the cedar forest. Humbaba, the guardian of the Cedar Forest, insults and threatens them. He accuses Enkidu of betrayal, and vows to disembowel Gilgamesh and feed his flesh to the birds. Gilgamesh is afraid, but with some encouraging words from Enkidu the battle commences. The mountains quake with the tumult and the sky turns black. The god Shamash sends 13 winds to bind Humbaba, and he is captured. Humbaba pleads for his life, and Gilgamesh pities him. He offers to make Gilgamesh king of the forest, to cut the trees for him, and to be his slave.
- Enkidu, however, argues that Gilgamesh should kill Humbaba to establish his reputation forever. Humbaba curses them both and Gilgamesh dispatches him with a blow to the neck, as well as killing his seven sons. The two heroes cut down many cedars, including a gigantic tree that Enkidu plans to fashion into a door for the temple of Enlil. They build a raft and return home along the Euphrates with the giant tree and (possibly) the head of Humbaba.

Epic of Gilgamesh (wikipedia)

Tablet six
- Gilgamesh rejects the advances of the goddess Ishtar because of her mistreatment of previous lovers. Ishtar becomes angry and denies Gilgamesh entry into E-Ana, interfering with his business. Ishtar asks her father Anu to send Gulaana—the Bull of Heaven to avenge her. When Anu rejects her complaints, Ishtar threatens to raise the dead who will "outnumber the living" and "devour them," as well as screaming loud enough to be heard by the heavens and earth. Anu states that if he gives her the Bull of Heaven, Uruk will face 7 years of famine. Ishtar provides him with provisions for 7 years in exchange for the bull. Ishtar leads the Bull of Heaven to Uruk, and he causes widespread devastation.
- Drinking continuously without being satisfied, the Bull lowers the level of the Euphrates river, and dries up the marshes. He opens up huge pits that swallow 300 men. Without any divine assistance, Enkidu and Gilgamesh kill him and offer up his heart to Shamash. When Ishtar cries out, Enkidu hurls one of the hindquarters of the bull at her. The city of Uruk celebrates, but Enkidu has an ominous dream about his future failure.

Epic of Gilgamesh (wikipedia)

Tablet seven
- In Enkidu's dream, the gods decide that one of the heroes must die because they killed Humbaba and the Bull of Heaven. Despite the protestations of Shamash, Enkidu is marked for death. Enkidu curses the great door he has fashioned for Enlil's temple. He also curses the trapper and Shamhat for removing him from the wild. Shamash reminds Enkidu of how Shamhat fed and clothed him, and introduced him to Gilgamesh. Shamash tells him that Gilgamesh will bestow great honors upon him at his funeral, and will wander into the wild consumed with grief. Enkidu regrets his curses and blesses Shamhat instead.
- In a second dream, however, he sees himself being taken captive to the Netherworld, a "house of dust" and darkness whose inhabitants eat clay, and are clothed in bird feathers, supervised by terrifying beings. For 12 days, Enkidu's condition worsens. Finally, after a lament that he could not meet a heroic death in battle, he dies. In a famous line from the epic, Gilgamesh clings to Enkidu's body and denies that he has died until a maggot drops from the nose of the corpse.

Epic of Gilgamesh (wikipedia)

Tablet eight
- Gilgamesh delivers a lament for Enkidu, in which he calls upon mountains, forests, fields, rivers, wild animals, and all of Uruk to mourn for his friend. Recalling their adventures together, Gilgamesh tears at his hair and clothes in grief. He commissions a funerary statue, and provides grave gifts from his treasury to ensure that Enkidu has a favourable reception in the realm of the dead. A great banquet is held where the treasures are offered to the gods of the Netherworld. Just before a break in the text there is a suggestion that a river is being dammed, indicating a burial in a river bed, as in the corresponding Sumerian poem, The Death of Gilgamesh.

Epic of Gilgamesh (wikipedia)

Tablet nine
- Tablet nine opens with Gilgamesh roaming the wild wearing skins, grieving for Enkidu. Having now become fearful of his own death, he decides to seek Utnapishtim ("the Faraway"), and learn the secret of eternal life. Utnapishtim and his wife are the only couple of humans artificially created by the gods who were allowed to survive the great flood and even endowed with divine immortality in gratitude for food sacrifices to the gods.
- Gilgamesh crosses a mountain pass at night and encounters a pride of lions. Before sleeping he prays for protection to the moon god Sin. Then, waking from an encouraging dream, he kills the lions and uses their skins for clothing. After a long and perilous journey, Gilgamesh arrives at the twin peaks of Mount Mashu at the western end of the earth. He comes across the tunnel of the sun god Shamash, which no man has ever entered, guarded by two scorpion monsters, who appear to be a married couple. The husband tries to dissuade Gilgamesh from passing, but the wife intervenes, expresses sympathy for Gilgamesh, and (according to the poem's editor Benjamin Foster) allows his passage. Entering the tunnel's gate, he follows the path of Shamash in total darkness and actually manages to reach the eastern exit within 12 ‘double hours’, just before he would have been caught up by the sun god, burning him alive. Astonished, he enters the marvellous Garden of the Gods, a paradise in which trees full of delicious jewels grow.

Epic of Gilgamesh (wikipedia)

Tablet ten
- Gilgamesh meets alewife Siduri in her pub. First she assumes that he would be a murderer or thief because of his disheveled appearance, but Gilgamesh tells her about the purpose of his journey. She attempts to dissuade him from his quest, but sends him to Urshanabi the ferryman, who will help him cross the sea to Utnapishtim. Gilgamesh, out of spontaneous rage, destroys the stone charms that Urshanabi keeps with him. Gilgamesh tells his story, but when he asks for help, Urshanabi informs him that he has just destroyed the objects that can help them cross the Waters of Death, which are deadly to the touch. Urshanabi instructs Gilgamesh to cut down 120 trees and fashion them into punting poles. When they reach the island where Utnapishtim lives, Gilgamesh recounts his story, asking him for his help. Utnapishtim reprimands him, declaring that fighting the common fate of humans is futile and diminishes life's joys.

Epic of Gilgamesh (wikipedia)

Tablet eleven
- The Sumerian Genesis describes the Abzu as a cosmic freshwater ocean surrounding our planet created in its midst, the same as Babylon's map. A breathable bubble of air clings to earth's surface; the mountains of Lebanon and Zagros serve as pillars of the freshwater sky; and the tunnel enables the sun god to rush at night from west to east. There, close to sunrise and Siduris pub, lies Dilmun, Utnahpishtim's island, where Gilgamesh dived into the depths, founding the herb of eternal life. The sluice gates set into sky are an important detail: through them, the gods with their skills at building irrigation systems were able to fertilise Mesopotamia with rain, but also to unleash the great flood.

Epic of Gilgamesh (wikipedia)

Tablet eleven
- Gilgamesh observes that Utnapishtim seems no different from himself, and asks him how he obtained his immortality. Utnapishtim explains that the gods decided to send a great flood. To save Utnapishtim the god Enki told him to build a boat. He gave him precise dimensions, and it was sealed with pitch and bitumen. His entire family went aboard together with his craftsmen and "all the animals of the field." A violent storm then arose which caused the terrified gods to retreat to the heavens. Ishtar lamented the wholesale destruction of humanity, and the other gods wept beside her. The storm lasted six days and nights, after which "all the human beings turned to clay."
- Utnapishtim weeps when he sees the destruction. His boat lodges on the Mt. Nimush, and he releases a dove, a swallow, and a raven. When the raven fails to return, he opens the ark and frees its inhabitants. Utnapishtim offers a sacrifice to the gods, who smell the sweet savor and gather around. Ishtar vows that just as she will never forget the brilliant necklace that hangs around her neck, she will always remember this time. When Enlil arrives, angry that there are survivors, she condemns him for instigating the flood. Enki also castigates him for sending a disproportionate punishment. Enlil blesses Utnapishtim and his wife, and rewards them with eternal life. This account largely matches the flood story that concludes the Epic of Atra-Hasis.

Epic of Gilgamesh (wikipedia)

Tablet eleven
- The main point seems to be that when Enlil granted eternal life it was a unique gift. As if to demonstrate this point, Utnapishtim challenges Gilgamesh to stay awake for six days and seven nights. Gilgamesh falls asleep, and Utnapishtim instructs his wife to bake a loaf of bread on each of the days he is asleep, so that he cannot deny his failure to keep awake.
- Gilgamesh, who is seeking to overcome death, cannot even conquer sleep. After instructing Urshanabi, the ferryman, to wash Gilgamesh and clothe him in royal robes, they depart for Uruk. As they are leaving, Utnapishtim's wife asks her husband to offer a parting gift. Utnapishtim tells Gilgamesh that at the bottom of the sea there lives a boxthorn-like plant that will make him young again. Gilgamesh, by binding stones to his feet so he can walk on the bottom, manages to obtain the plant. Gilgamesh proposes to investigate if the plant has the hypothesized rejuvenation ability by testing it on an old man once he returns to Uruk. When Gilgamesh stops to bathe, it is stolen by a serpent, who sheds its skin as it departs. Gilgamesh weeps at the futility of his efforts, because he has now lost all chance of immortality. He returns to Uruk, where the sight of its massive walls prompts him to praise this enduring work to Urshanabi.

Epic of Gilgamesh (wikipedia)

Tablet twelve
- This tablet is mainly an Akkadian translation of an earlier Sumerian poem, "Gilgamesh and the Netherworld" (also known as "Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the Netherworld" and variants), although it has been suggested that it is derived from an unknown version of that story.
- The contents of this last tablet are inconsistent with previous ones: Enkidu is still alive, despite having died earlier in the epic. Because of this, its lack of integration with the other tablets, and the fact that it is almost a copy of an earlier version, it has been referred to as an 'inorganic appendage' to the epic. Alternatively, it has been suggested that "its purpose, though crudely handled, is to explain to Gilgamesh (and the reader) the various fates of the dead in the Afterlife" and in "an awkward attempt to bring closure," it both connects the Gilgamesh of the epic with the Gilgamesh who is the King of the Netherworld, and is "a dramatic capstone whereby the twelve-tablet epic ends on one and the same theme, that of "seeing" (= understanding, discovery, etc.), with which it began."

Epic of Gilgamesh (wikipedia)

Tablet twelve
- Gilgamesh complains to Enkidu that various of his possessions (the tablet is unclear exactly what – different translations include a drum and a ball) have fallen into the underworld. Enkidu offers to bring them back. Delighted, Gilgamesh tells Enkidu what he must and must not do in the underworld if he is to return. Enkidu does everything which he was told not to do. The underworld keeps him. Gilgamesh prays to the gods to give him back his friend. Enlil and Suen do not reply, but Enki and Shamash decide to help. Shamash makes a crack in the earth, and Enkidu's ghost jumps out of it. The tablet ends with Gilgamesh questioning Enkidu about what he has seen in the underworld.

Gilgamesh (BBC)

The Epic of Gilgamesh is the oldest recognised epic poem. [It is older than the Bible, older than Greek mythology. Parts of its stories are mirrored in the Hebrew Bible.
The tablet is written in the Akkadian language in cuneiform script - a system of writing on clay used in ancient Mesopotamia thousands of years ago. Scholars discovered it in 1853, when a 12-tablet version was found in the ruins of the library of an Assyrian king, Assur Banipal, in northern Iraq.
The events revolve around King Gilgamesh of Uruk - an area corresponding to southern Iraq. The myth is based on a real king who ruled sometime between 2,800 and 2,500 BC.
As the story goes, King Gilgamesh was a demigod of superhuman strength whose powers were inherited from his mother. Accompanied by a companion, a man raised by animals, he killed the Bull of Heaven, representing the violence of the gods, and tried to discover the secret to eternal life.
In another adventure he swam to the bottom of the sea to collect an immortalising plant, which was then stolen from him by a serpent. The Dream tablet recounts a part of the epic in which the hero describes his dreams to his mother, who interprets them as announcing the arrival of a new friend, who will become his companion. "His strength is as mighty as a lump of sky rock . . . You will see him and your heart will laugh," she tells him.

In another column of the tablet, a woman takes Gilgamesh's companion to a shepherd's camp for a sexual encounter.

Gilgamesh (Wikipedia)

This is a possible representation of Gilgamesh as Master of Animals, grasping a lion in his left arm and snake in his right hand, in an Assyrian palace relief (713–706 BC), from Dur-Sharrukin, now held in the Louvre.
As a hero in ancient Mesopotamian mythology and the protagonist of the Epic of Gilgamesh, an epic poem written in Akkadian during the late 2nd millennium BC, he was possibly an historical king of the Sumerian city-state of Uruk, who was posthumously deified.
His rule probably would have taken place sometime in the beginning of the Early Dynastic Period, c. 2900–2350 BC, though he became a major figure in Sumerian legend during the Third Dynasty of Ur (c. 2112 – c. 2004 BC).

Gilgamesh (Britannica)

The fullest extant text of the Gilgamesh epic is on 12 incomplete Akkadian-language tablets found in the mid-19th century at Nineveh in the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal (reigned 668–627 BCE). The gaps that occur in the tablets have been partly filled by various fragments found elsewhere in Mesopotamia and Anatolia. In addition, five short poems in the Sumerian language are known from tablets that were written during the first half of the 2nd millennium BCE; the poems have been entitled “Gilgamesh and Huwawa,” “Gilgamesh and the Bull of Heaven,” “Gilgamesh and Agga of Kish,” “Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the Netherworld,” and “The Death of Gilgamesh.”
The Ninevite version of the epic begins with a prologue in praise of Gilgamesh, part divine and part human, the great builder and warrior, knower of all things on land and sea. In order to curb Gilgamesh’s seemingly harsh rule, the god Anu causes the creation of Enkidu, a wild man who at first lives among animals. Soon, however, Enkidu is initiated into the ways of city life and travels to Uruk, where Gilgamesh awaits him. Tablet II describes a trial of strength between the two men in which Gilgamesh is the victor; thereafter, Enkidu is the friend and companion (in Sumerian texts, the servant) of Gilgamesh.

Gilgamesh (Britannica)

In Tablets III–V the two men set out together against Huwawa (Humbaba), the divinely appointed guardian of a remote cedar forest, but the rest of the engagement is not recorded in the surviving fragments.
In Tablet VI Gilgamesh, who has returned to Uruk, rejects the marriage proposal of Ishtar, the goddess of love, and then, with Enkidu’s aid, kills the divine bull that she sends to destroy him.
Tablet VII begins with Enkidu’s account of a dream in which the gods Anu, Ea, and Shamash decide that Enkidu must die for slaying the bull. Enkidu then falls ill and dreams of the “house of dust” that awaits him. Gilgamesh’s lament for his friend and the state funeral of Enkidu are narrated in Tablet VIII.
Afterward, Gilgamesh makes a dangerous journey (Tablets IX and X) in search of Utnapishtim, the survivor of the Babylonian Flood, in order to learn from him how to escape death. When he finally reaches Utnapishtim, Gilgamesh is told the story of the Flood and is shown where to find a plant that can renew youth (Tablet XI).
But after Gilgamesh obtains the plant, it is seized and eaten by a serpent, and Gilgamesh returns, still mortal, to Uruk. An appendage to the epic, Tablet XII, relates the loss of objects called pukku and mikku (perhaps “drum” and “drumstick”) given to Gilgamesh by Ishtar. The epic ends with the return of the spirit of Enkidu, who promises to recover the objects and then gives a grim report on the underworld.

Lamassu (The Met)

From the ninth to the seventh century B.C., the kings of Assyria ruled over a vast empire centered in northern Iraq. The great Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II (r. 883–859 B.C.), undertook a vast building program at Nimrud; until it became the capital city under him, Nimrud had been no more than a provincial town.
The new capital occupied an area of about nine hundred acres, around which Ashurnasirpal constructed a mudbrick wall that was 120 feet thick, 42 feet high, and five miles long. In the southwest corner of this enclosure was the acropolis, where the temples, palaces, and administrative offices of the empire were located. In 879 B.C. Ashurnasirpal held a festival for 69,574 people to celebrate the construction of the new capital, and the event was documented by an inscription that read: "the happy people of all the lands together with the people of Kalhu—for ten days I feasted, wined, bathed, and honored them and sent them back to their home in peace and joy."

Lamassu (The Met)

The so-called Standard Inscription that ran across the surface of most of the reliefs described Ashurnasirpal's palace: "I built thereon [a palace with] halls of cedar, cypress, juniper, boxwood, teak, terebinth, and tamarisk [?] as my royal dwelling and for the enduring leisure life of my lordship."
The inscription continues: "Beasts of the mountains and the seas, which I had fashioned out of white limestone and alabaster, I had set up in its gates. I made it [the palace] fittingly imposing."
Among such stone beasts is the human-headed, winged lion pictured here. The horned cap attests to its divinity, and the belt signifies its power. The sculptor gave these guardian figures five legs so that they appear to be standing firmly when viewed from the front but striding forward when seen from the side.
Lamassu protected and supported important doorways in Assyrian palaces.
Stunning 2,700-Year-Old Sculpture Unearthed in Iraq (Smithsonian)
Archaeologists hope to reunite the 18-ton torso of the Assyrian deity with its head, severed by smugglers decades ago.

Stunning 2,700-Year-Old Sculpture Unearthed in Iraq (Smithsonian)

With the wings of a bird, the body of a bull and the head of a human, the lamassu is an imposing figure—especially when the Assyrian deity’s form is rendered in 18 tons of alabaster. That’s what French and Iraqi archaeologists have uncovered at Dur-Sharrukin, an ancient city in northern Iraq.
“I never unearthed anything this big in my life before,” says Pascal Butterlin, an archaeologist specializing in the Middle East at the University of Paris. The 2,700-year-old sculpture measures approximately 12.5 by 12.8 feet and remains largely intact—except for its head, which is missing.
Researchers have long known about the sculpture. It first appears in records from 19th-century excavations, and several other lamassus found nearby now reside at the Louvre. The piece wasn’t mentioned again in public records until the early 1990s, when Iraqi authorities officially excavated it.
A few years later, thieves stole the statue’s head, breaking it into pieces so they could smuggle it out of the country. Experts eventually recovered and restored the head, but “cracks from its dismemberment [are] still visible,” reports the Art Newspaper’s Hadani Ditmars.
Authorities reburied the remaining portion of the statue to safeguard it from looting and attacks. In 2014, residents who lived nearby also helped protect it from destruction by the Islamic State, hiding it before they fled the area.

Stunning 2,700-Year-Old Sculpture Unearthed in Iraq (Smithsonian)

Now, researchers have recovered the statue’s torso as part of a larger project examining the ancient city and recent military activity. “It was a multidimensional archaeology,” says Butterlin of the recent excavation. “It’s the archaeology of conflicts and urban archaeology, and the lamassu is just at the border of both—with multiple lives.”
Commissioned during the reign of Sargon II, the ruler of Assyria between 722 and 705 B.C.E., the statue once stood at the gates of Dur-Sharrukin to provide protection. However, after Sargon died in battle, his son moved the Assyrian capital to Nineveh, “leaving Dur-Sharrukin unfinished and largely forgotten.”
Today, thousands of years later, experts are impressed by its intricate design. As Butterlin tells AFP, “The attention to detail is unbelievable.”
The team is now brainstorming ways to rejoin the statue’s head and torso, since the neck was damaged when thieves cut off the head, as Laith Hussein, director of the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities and Heritage, tells the Art Newspaper.
Once that process is complete, the sculpture’s ultimate fate is still unclear. In the meantime, the re-excavated torso remains at the site, under tight security and protection from the elements.