The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia Part 22

The third book of the Epic describes the expedition of the two heroes against the tyrant Khumbaba, whose home was in the cedar-forest of Elam.

They found a way into its magical depths, gazing in wonder at the height of the trees, and beholding the mountain of the cedars, "the mystic" seat of the G.o.ds, the shrine of Irnini; "before the mountain the cedars lifted up their luxuriant foliage; deep was their shadow and full of pleasaunce."

Khumbaba was overcome and slain; but Gilgames once more dreamed a dream, wherein the heavens thundered, the lightning flashed, and the earth shook, and which portended disaster to Ea-bani and his friend.

The sixth and following books describe how the dream was fulfilled. Istar saw and loved Gilgames in the strength of his manhood, and asked him to be her bridegroom. "If thou wilt be my husband," she declared-

"I will let thee ride in a chariot of lapis-lazuli and gold, thou shalt harness each day great mules (to thy yoke); the odours of cedar shall enter our house ...

Kings, lords, and princes [shall bow] at thy feet; [the increase] of mountain and plain shall they bring thee in tribute."

Gilgames, however, rejected the offer of the G.o.ddess in scorn, and taunted her with her fickleness and cruelty and the miserable end of all who had loved her in the past-

"Tammuz, the spouse of thy youth, thou ordainest weeping for him year by year.

The bright-coloured wood-pigeon didst thou love; thou didst smite him and break his wings; in the woods he sits and cries, 'O my wings!'

Thou didst love a lion perfect in might; seven times seven didst thou dig for him a pit.

Thou didst love a horse, glorious in battle; whip and spur and bridle didst thou decree for him.

Fourteen hours didst thou make him gallop; weariness and thirst didst thou lay upon him; for his mother, the G.o.ddess Silili, thou ordainest weeping.

Thou didst love the shepherd Tabulu, who poured out the salt continually for thee; day by day did he slay for thee the sucklings.

Thou didst smite him, and change him into a wolf.

His own shepherd-boys drove him away, and his own dogs bit his flesh.

Thou didst love Isullanu, the gardener of thy father, who was ever bringing thee fruit; day by day he made bright thy dish; thou didst lift thine eyes to him, and speak softly to him: 'Isullanu mine, let us eat the gourds together; put forth thine hand and touch one ...'

Isullanu answered her: 'Of me what requirest thou?

Has my mother not baked, have I not eaten, that I should eat such food?

Thorns and thistles are hidden therein' (?).

When thou didst hear these his words, thou didst smite him, and change him into a column (?), and didst plant him in the midst of [the garden?]."

Istar flew to her father Anu in heaven, and demanded from him vengeance upon Gilgames for the slight he had put upon her. Accordingly a monstrous bull was created, which ravaged the country, and threatened the life of Gilgames himself. But Gilgames was more than a match for the monster. With the help of Ea-bani the bull was slain, and its huge horns carried in triumph through the streets of Erech; while Istar stood in impotent rage on the walls of the city, lamenting the death of the bull, and calling on her harlot priestesses to weep over it with her.

But the death of "the divine bull" had evil consequences for the two heroes. The curse of Istar falls upon them; Gilgames himself is smitten with a grievous sickness, and Ea-bani dies after lingering in pain for full twelve days. Gilgames is inconsolable; vainly he protests against the law of death which carries away the strong equally with the weak, the hero equally with the common man. The ninth book thus begins-

"Gilgames for his friend Ea-bani weeps bitterly and lies outstretched upon the ground.

"'Shall I not die like Ea-bani?

Grief has entered my body; I fear death, and lie outstretched upon the ground.' "

Accordingly he determines to visit Xisuthros,(331) the hero of the Deluge, who dwelt beyond the river of death, whither he had been translated without dying, and learn from him the secret of immortality.

The road was long and difficult; mortal man had never trodden it before.

But there was divine blood in Gilgames; and as the Greek Herakles forced his way to Hades, so he too forced his way beyond the limits of our human world. First he had to pa.s.s the twin mountains of Mas, in the northern desert of Arabia, which guard the daily rising and setting of the sun, whose summit touches the "zenith of heaven," while "their breast reaches downwards to Hades." Men with the bodies of scorpions guarded the gateway of the sun, the horror of whose aspect was "awesome," and whose look "was death." But "the scorpion-man" and his "wife" recognised that the stranger was partly divine, and he was allowed to pa.s.s in safety through the open doors. Once beyond them he entered a region of thick darkness. For the s.p.a.ce of twelve double hours he groped his way through this land without light, when suddenly he emerged from it into the bright light of day. Here grew a marvellous tree, whose fruit was the precious turquoise(332) and lapis-lazuli, which hung from it like cl.u.s.ters of grapes.

At last Gilgames reached the sh.o.r.e of the ocean, which, like a serpent, encircles the earth. Here ?iduri, or ?abitum "the lady of Saba,"(333) sat upon "the throne of the sea." But she locked the gate of her palace, and forbade him to cross the ocean; none had ever pa.s.sed over it except the sun-G.o.d in his nightly voyage from west to east. Once more, however, the element of divinity that was in Gilgames prevailed; ?abitum acknowledged that he was more than a mere man, and allowed his right to seek his ancestor beyond the river of death. Arad-Ea, the pilot of Xisuthros, was summoned; trees were cut and fashioned into a boat, and for a month and fifteen days Gilgames and his pilot pursued their voyage over the sea.

Then "on the third day" they entered "the waters of death." The hero was bidden to cling to the rudder and to see that the deadly water did not touch his hand. Twelve strokes of the oar were needed before the rapids were safely pa.s.sed, and the boat reached the sh.o.r.e that lay beyond the realm of death. Here Gilgames beheld Xisuthros "afar off" "at the mouth of the rivers." At once he communicated to him the object of his journey: how and why had Xisuthros escaped the universal law of death? The answer is contained in the eleventh book of the Epic, which recounts the story of the great Deluge.

Ever since its discovery by George Smith in 1872, the Babylonian story of the Deluge, which has thus been introduced into the Epic of Gilgames, has attracted the special attention of both scholars and the public. On the one side it agrees with the story of the Deluge handed down to us by the copyists of the Chaldaean historian Berossos, and so is a witness to his trustworthiness; on the other side, its parallelism with the account of the Deluge in the Book of Genesis is at once striking and startling. But the version of the story embodied by Sin-liqi-unnini in his Epic was but one out of many that were current in Babylonia. We have a fragment of another which so closely resembles that of the Epic, as to have been long believed to form part of it; indeed, it is possible that it comes from a variant copy of the Epic itself. Fragments of another version have lately been found by Dr. Scheil in a Babylonian tablet which goes back to the reign of Ammi-zadok, the fourth successor of Khammurabi.(334) Even the version contained in the Epic seems to be a combination of two earlier ones, or rather to be based upon at least two different versions of the legend. The story, in fact, must have been of immemorial antiquity in Babylonia; Xisuthros and his ship are depicted upon some of the earliest seals, and Babylonian chronology drew a sharp line of division between the kings who had reigned before and after the Flood. In the Epic Xisuthros is a native of Surippak on the Euphrates, but the story must originally have grown up at Eridu on the sh.o.r.es of the Persian Gulf. Like the story of the struggle with Tiamat, it typifies the contest between the anarchic elements of storm and flood and that peaceful expanse of water in which the fishermen of Eridu plied their trade, and out of which the culture-G.o.d had ascended. It is significant that up to the last it was En-lil of Nippur who was represented as sending the Flood that destroyed mankind, while Xisuthros was saved by Ea.

The Babylonian story of the Deluge has been so often translated and is so well known, that there is no need for me to repeat it here. It is sufficient to note that Xisuthros, like Noah, owed his preservation to his piety. In the final scene, when Bel (En-lil) is enraged that any one should have escaped from the destruction he had brought upon mankind, Ea pacifies him with the words: "Punish the sinner for his sins, punish the transgressor for his transgressions; be merciful that he be not [utterly]

cut off, be long-suffering that he be not [rooted out]." The Deluge was a punishment for sin, and it was only just, therefore, that the righteous man should be saved.

The translation of Xisuthros with his wife to the paradise beyond the grave is evidently regarded by the author of the Epic as a further reward for his piety. But we may suspect that this was not its original cause. In the myth of Adapa, the first man, we find Anu laying down that the mortal who has penetrated into the secrets of the G.o.ds must receive the gift of immortality and become as one of the G.o.ds himself, and it would seem that the same idea inspired the belief in the translation of the second father of mankind. Xisuthros too had learned the secret counsels of the G.o.ds; with the help of Ea he had outwitted Bel, and it was therefore needful that the gift of immortality should be conferred on him, and that he should dwell like them in the land which death cannot reach.

True to his primeval character, En-lil of Nippur was the author of the Deluge. His ministers, Nin-ip, Nusku, and En-nugi, carry out his commands, while "the spirits of the earth lift up their torches." But the poet of the Epic has spoilt the primitive symmetry of the picture by introducing the triad into it along with the storm-G.o.d Hadad of later times, and so making the destruction of mankind not the work of En-lil alone, but of the G.o.ds generally in common council. The result has been a want of coherence in the elements of the story; Istar(335) consents to the death of the children she has borne, only to repent of it subsequently when she sees them filling the sea "like fish," and to weep with the rest of the G.o.ds over the havoc that has been wrought. Perhaps Professor Jastrow is right in his suggestion that two separate versions of the story have been united together, in one of which it was the single city of Surippak and its inhabitants that were destroyed, while in the other the Deluge was universal. However that may be, Ea disclosed the determination of En-lil to his faithful servant, "the son of Ubara-Tutu." According to one part of the story, the disclosure was made through a dream; according to another part, by a device similar to that which gave the Phrygian Midas his a.s.s's ears. The G.o.d whispered the meditated deed of Bel and the means of escaping it to one of those reed-huts which stood by the sh.o.r.e of the Persian Gulf, and in which Xisuthros-despite the fact that he is called "a man of Surippak"-was born. The rustling reeds communicated to him the secret, and he in turn told his "lord Ea" that he had understood the message.

The ship was built, and by the advice of Ea the too-inquisitive inquirers were informed that the builder was transferring his allegiance from Bel, the lord of the land, to Ea, the G.o.d of the sea.(336) All sorts of provisions were stored in it, together with "the seed of life," each after its kind-"cattle of the field, wild beasts of the field, and the sons of the craftsmen." Then the helm was placed in the hands of Buzur-Sadi-rabi, the steersman, the door of the ark was closed, and the storm broke upon the earth. For seven days and nights it raged; man and his works were swept away, and the ark alone survived with its living freight. When at last Xisuthros opened his window and looked out, a desolate waste of waters was all that could be seen. Above it the lofty peak of the mountain of Nizir(337) in the north-east finally appeared; here the ship grounded, and seven days afterwards Xisuthros sent forth a dove to see if the earth were dry. But the dove "went to and fro, and returned." Next he sent forth a swallow, which returned also to the ark; and lastly a raven, which "ate, waded and croaked, and did not return." So the Chaldaean Noah knew that the waters of the Flood had subsided: and accordingly he opened the door of the ark and let the animals within it depart towards "the four quarters of heaven." Then he offered sacrifice on the summit of the mountain, setting beside it vases of smoking incense ranged "seven by seven." The G.o.ds smelt the sweet savour of the offering, and rejoiced that there were men still left to prepare it for them. They gathered, we are told, "like flies above the offerer," while Beltis lifted up "the bow that Anu had made."

En-lil alone refused to be reconciled. He vented his wrath at the escape of Xisuthros and his family upon the Igigi or angels, who, as spirits, were more under his control than the G.o.ds. But Ea took the blame upon himself, and, after declaring that the righteous must not suffer with the guilty, persuaded Bel to promise that though he might send the wild beast, the famine, and the pestilence upon mankind, the earth should never again be visited by the waters of a flood. Then Bel entered the ship, blessed Xisuthros and his wife, and translated them to the other world.

After hearing the story, Gilgames fell into a deep sleep, which lasted six days and seven nights, while the wife of Xisuthros prepared magic food, which she placed at the head of the sleeper. When he awoke he ate it, and his sickness departed from him. But his skin was still covered with sores, and it was therefore necessary that he should bathe in the purifying waters of the ocean before the full strength and beauty of his youth came back to him.

Xisuthros now tells him of the plant of immortality which grows, covered with thorns, at the bottom of the ocean. The hero accordingly ties heavy stones to his feet, and dives for it; and though the thorns pierce his hands, he brings a branch of it to the surface, and prepares to carry it to the world of men. But the gift of immortality was not for men to possess. On his voyage home Gilgames stops awhile at a fountain of cool water, and while he bathes in it a serpent perceives the odour of the plant, and steals it away. Vainly the hero laments its loss, the plant that "changes age into youth " could never be brought to a world the law of which is death.

Man must die, but what is the lot of the dead? This is the question which forms the burden of the twelfth and last book of the Epic. Gilgames wanders from temple to temple, asking the G.o.d of each if the earth has seized hold of Ea-bani, and if so, what is his fate below. But the G.o.ds are silent; they give neither answer nor sign. At last, however, he reaches the shrine of Nergal, the G.o.d of the dead, and Nergal causes the earth to open and the spirit of Ea-bani to ascend out of it like a cloud of dust. And then the answer is given. He who has friends to care for him will "lie on a couch and drink pure water"; the hero too-

"who is slain in battle, as you and I have seen, his father and his mother support his head, and his wife [weeps] over him.

But he whose body lies forsaken in the field, as thou and I have seen, his ghost rests not in the earth.

He whose ghost has none to care for him, as thou and I have seen, the garbage of the pot, the refuse of food, which is thrown into the street, must he devour."

With this dreary and materialistic picture of the other world the Epic comes to an end. It is a curious contrast to the life in the fields of Alu to which the Egyptian worshipper of Osiris looked forward; and there is little need to wonder that the mind and religious cult of the Babylonian should have been centred in the present life. The Hades in which he was called upon to believe was more dreary even than the Hades of the Homeric Greeks.

The Epic of Gilgames forces two questions upon our attention, both of which have been often discussed. The one is the relation of the story of the Deluge contained in it to the Biblical narrative of the Flood, the other is the relation of Gilgames himself to the Greek Herakles. From the outset it has been perceived that the connection between the Babylonian and Hebrew stories is very close, and that the Babylonian is the older of the two. The birds, for instance, sent out by Xisuthros are three instead of two, as in the Biblical narrative, though the number of times they were despatched is the same in both cases; and the ship of the Babylonian version has been replaced by an ark in the Old Testament account. In fact the Babylonian story has been modified in Palestine and under Western influences. In an inland country an ark was naturally subst.i.tuted for a ship, more especially as the latter contained a house with window and door; even in Babylonia itself, in the processions of the G.o.ds, an ark came to take the place of the ship of primitive Eridu. The olive branch, again, with which the dove returned, according to the Book of Genesis, points to Palestine, where the olive grew; while the period of the rainfall has been transferred from Sebet or January and February, when the winter rains fall in Babylonia, to the "second month" of the Hebrew civil year, our October and November, when the "former rains" began in Canaan.

Similarly, the subsidence of the waters is extended in the Hebrew narrative to the middle of the "seventh month," when the "latter rains" of the Canaanitish spring are over.

But the most remarkable fact brought to light by a comparison of the Babylonian story with that of Genesis is, that the resemblances between them are not confined to one only of the two doc.u.ments into which modern criticism has separated the Biblical narrative. It is not with the so-called Elohistic, or the so-called Yahvistic, account only that the agreement exists, but with both together as they are found at present combined, or supposed to be combined, in the Hebrew text.(338) The fact throws grave doubt on the reality of the critical a.n.a.lysis. As I have said elsewhere:(339) "Either the Babylonian poet had before him the present 'redacted' text of Genesis, or else the Elohist and Yahvist must have copied the Babylonian story upon the mutual understanding standing that the one should insert what the other omitted. There is no third alternative."

The Palestinian colouring of the Biblical version of itself excludes the supposition that the story was borrowed by the Jews in the age of the Babylonian exile. Such a supposition, indeed, would be little in accordance with the feelings of hatred felt by the captives towards their Babylonian conquerors and the religious beliefs and traditions of the latter. But the discovery of the Tel el-Amarna tablets has shown that the culture and literature of Babylonia had made its way to Palestine and even to Egypt long before the Mosaic age. The great literary works of Chaldaea were already known and used as text-books in the West, and, like the story of the first man Adapa, a portion of which was found in Egypt, the story of the Deluge and the second founder of the human race must also have been known there. Gunkel has made it clear(340) that the conceptions and beliefs which underlie the history of the Flood, and find their expression in the statement that "the fountains of the great deep" were broken up, are not only of Babylonian origin, but are also met with in the earliest fragments of Old Testament literature. Before the Israelites entered Canaan, the cosmological ideas of Babylonia had already made their way to it, and been adapted to the geographical conditions of "the land of the Amorites."

The story of a deluge was known to Greece as well as to Palestine. There, too, it had been sent by Zeus as a punishment for the impiety of mankind; and Deukalion, the Greek Noah, saved himself and his family in a ship.(341) The peak of Parna.s.sos played the same part in the Greek legend that the mountain of Nizir played in the Babylonian; and the stones thrown on the ground by Deukalion which became men, remind us of the images of clay moulded by the G.o.ddess Mami in the mutilated Babylonian myth of Atarpi, which similarly become men and women.

But it is not so much with the episode of the Deluge as with the whole story of Gilgames and his adventures that Greek mythology claims connection. The desire of finding the biblical Nimrod in the cuneiform tablets long seduced a.s.syriologists into the impossible attempt to identify him with Gilgames; it is not, however, to the Biblical Nimrod, but to the Greek Herakles, that the Babylonian hero is related. The curious parallelism between the twelve labours of Herakles and the twelve adventures of Gilgames may be an accident; but it is no accident that Gilgames and Herakles should alike be heroes who are not kings, and that both alike should be tormented with a deadly distemper which destroyed the flesh. Khumbaba is the tyrant Geryon, the bull slain by Gilgames is the Kretan bull slain by Herakles, and the Nemaean lion reappears in the lion which Gilgames is so often represented on the seals as strangling to death. As Hera persecuted Herakles, so Istar persecuted Gilgames; the journey of the Greek hero into Hades is paralleled by the journey of Gilgames beyond the waters of death; and the tree which he found on the sh.o.r.es of the sea with its fruit of precious stones is the magical tree of the Hesperides with its golden apples which grew in the midst of the western ocean.

It is true that there are many elements in the legend of Herakles which are not derived from Babylonia. But it is also true that, like the cosmogonies of Hesiod or the cosmological philosophy of Thales, there are also elements in it for which we must claim a Babylonian origin. Probably they made their way to Greek lands at the same time as the Cyprian cult of Aphrodite or the myth of Adonis, whose name indicates the road along which the culture of Babylonia had travelled. Recent archaeological discoveries have revealed the fact that in the days when Canaan was a Babylonian province, a civilisation already existed in the aegean, and that an active intercourse was carried on between Egypt and Asia on the one hand, and the islands and sh.o.r.es of the Mediterranean on the other, in which Krete took a leading share. Light is only just dawning on what until lately was the "prehistoric" past of the European peoples; before long a new world will doubtless be disclosed to us, such as that which the decipherment of the cuneiform texts has brought to light.

It is not only in the mythology of primitive Greece that we can trace the influence of the legends embodied in the Epic of Gilgames. The adventures of Gilgames in search of immortality form part of the story of that mythical Alexander who grew up in literature by the side of the Alexander of history. He too had to make his way through a land of thick darkness, and he too finally failed in his endeavour to secure the "waters of life."(342) Man is and must remain mortal; this is alike the teaching of the old poet of Chaldaea and of the romance which the contact of Eastern and Western thought called into existence in cla.s.sical days.

Lecture IX. The Ritual Of The Temple.

The temple of the G.o.d was the centre and glory of every great Babylonian city. The Babylonian States had been at the outset essentially theocratic; their ruler had been a high priest before he became a king, and up to the last he remained the vicegerent and adopted son of the G.o.d. It was round the temple that the city had grown and its population cl.u.s.tered. The artisans worked for it, and the agricultural labourers tilled its fields.

The art of Babylonia originated within the temple precincts; it was for its adornment that the enamelled tiles were first made, and wood or stone or metal carved into artistic shapes, while the endowments which thus fostered the craftsman's art were derived from landed property or from the t.i.thes paid to the priests upon the produce of the soil. The culture of Babylonia was with good reason traced back to the G.o.d Ea.

The place occupied in a.s.syria by the army was filled in Babylonia by the priesthood. The priests could make and unmake their kings. The last monarch of Babylonia, Nabonidos, was a nominee of the priests of Babylon; it was from them, and not from the rights of heritage, that he had derived his t.i.tle to the throne. The great sanctuaries of the country influenced its destinies to the last. The influence of Nippur and Eridu, in fact, was wholly religious; we know of no royal dynasties that sprang from them.