Animal and Human Nature in Gilgamesh PLL 377

The Separation of Wild Animal Nature

and Human Nature in Gilgamesh:
Roots of a Contemporary Theme
PATRICK BARRON

In his forward to Joseph Meeker’s The Comedy of Survival, Konrad

Lorenz concurs with Meeker’s view that “a morality which
encourages man to detach himself from his animal origins and
to regard all nature as subject to him does not offer our best
hopes for the future” (xvi). Treatments of animals in literature
(and art in general) can be defined, to a certain extent, accord-
ing to the ways in which the human-animal division is depicted.
Some works tend to anthropomorphize animals in order to
artificially close the human-animal gap, such as Aesop’s fables,
the stories of the so-called “nature faker” writers Ernest T. Seton,
Charles Roberts, and William Long,1 and the film Free Willy.
Others dramatize the human desire to escape or at least come to
terms with the constraints of the civilized world while searching
for a lost, wild aspect to human character and origins, such as
Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Jack London’s Call of the Wild, Dian
Fossey’s Gorillas in the Mist, and Doug Peacock’s Grizzly Years. And
yet others depict the “realistic” resignation of a humanity mo-

1Ralph Lutts, in The Nature Fakers, speaks of the problematic issues surrounding the
anthropomorphizing of animals: “despite the anthropomorphic pitfalls (of both the
nature fakers and their critics), the notion that animals can reason had a positive
ethical impact: it forged a new moral link between people and nature based on a moral
kinship with animals” (147); “to develop human interest in their animal heroes, the
authors had to present their animals in human terms, caught in plots that human
readers could directly relate to. But their protagonists were not human. . . . Now in the
late twentieth century, we face similar forces that continue to foster anthropomor-
phic, sentimental, death-denying and distorted or partial understandings of the
natural world” (203).

377
378 PLL Patrick Barron

rosely accepting its inevitable compromise with civilization to

abandon the side of its nature more closely aligned with both
wild animals and the wilderness, as in London’s White Fang and
William Faulkner’s “The Bear”.
Examining the literary theme and mechanics of the separa-
tion of wild animals and humans reveals greater implications,
including the human desire to leave civilization and return to
the wild, human attempts to reconcile the loss of contact with
wild animal nature, and potentially destructive and tragic after-
effects. The principal “text” of exploration, Gilgamesh, cannot
rightly be called a single, unified story. It exists today in myriad,
fragmented Sumerian, Hittite, Babylonian, and other versions
that scholars have had to piece together in order to assemble
coherent accounts. However consistent in principal themes and
plot these various renditions appear to be, they are still the topic
of hot debate. This irregularity, as well as its immense separation
from us in time—over 4000 years—makes specific textual refer-
ence to Gilgamesh difficult, to say nothing of direct comparisons
with more recent literature. With all of these apparent road-
blocks, an obvious question begs attention in relation to literary
studies: “why bother with Gilgamesh?”
Four reasons in particular persuade me to use this highly
problematic and ancient text: one, it is the first extant work of
literature known in the world; two, it is widely considered to be
the most important literary work of the ancient world; three, its
thematic basis stems principally from the separation of human
nature and wild animal nature; and four, as a “root text”
exhibiting this separation—a central and troubling cultural
theme that has continued up to the present—it strongly deserves
attention, however intractable it may seem. Without going back
to the origins of a problem, how can we ever hope to understand
it? The examination of such a key text as Gilgamesh, in spite of the
aforementioned challenges, is critical to unlocking the roots of
the central, problematic dilemma of the severance of humanity
from wild animal nature.
Animal and Human Nature in Gilgamesh PLL 379

My examination of Gilgamesh in relation to contemporary

literary themes is not without precedence. In “The Wild Man,”
D. A. Wells traces the theme of the wild man from Gilgamesh to
Hartmann van Aue’s Iwein.2 Peter Hays makes a more recent
connection in “Yossarian and Gilgamesh,”3 where he posits that
many characters in Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-22 are analogous
to, if not intentionally based upon, counterparts in Gilgamesh.
Hays relates Yossarian to Gilgamesh, Snowden to Enkidu, Nately’s
whore to Inanna,4 and Aarfy to Humbaba. In “Gilgamesh, Lolita
and Huckleberry Finn”5 Charles Beye traces the history of the
epic narrative form in the western world from its roots in
Sumeria, through Ancient Greece, and up to present times.
Specifically he discusses the two masterpieces of Twain and
Nabokov in relation to what he considers their thematic models:
the Iliad and Odyssey, the early books of the Bible, and particu-
larly, Gilgamesh.
More recently, two works have appeared that not only relate
Gilgamesh to modern literary traditions, but also directly investi-
gate the problematic portrayal of non-human nature in Gilgamesh
as a significant literary and cultural prototype. Robert Pogue
Harrison, in Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, views Gilgamesh as
a primary document, crucial to understanding later cultural and
literary themes dealing with much of civilized humanity’s de-
structive relationship with forests. Louise Westling, in The Green
Breast of the New World, looks specifically at prototypical issues of
gender and landscape in Gilgamesh and in Inanna, and later at
their development through time and forms in American litera-

2The Wild Man from the Epic of Gilgamesh to Hartmann von Aue’s Iwein: Reflections on the
Development of a Theme in World Literature. Belfast: The Queen’s University of Belfast,
1974.
3Notes on Modern American Literature. 4 (1980): 9-10.

4For the sake of clarity, in this paper this character will always be referred to by her
Sumerian name: Inanna. Ishtar is the Babylonian variant.
5Classical and Modern Literature. 9.1 (1988): 39-50.
380 PLL Patrick Barron

ture. This paper utilizes much of the theoretical basis provided

by these two works, but rather than focusing on forests or
gender, it examines the crucial separation of humanity from
wild animal nature. Its principal objective is to demonstrate that
the severance of Enkidu from wild animal nature is at the very
heart of Gilgamesh, that this separation is as much the responsi-
bility of Inanna as of Gilgamesh, and that the destructive results,
including deforestation, the killing of a sacred animal, and a
further disturbance in gender power relations, are much less the
simple “fault” of Gilgamesh as they are the complicated results
of a culture dissociated from wild animal nature and hooked on
what Joseph Meeker calls “the tragic mode.”
Meeker, in The Comedy of Survival: Studies in Literary Ecology,
notes that the problematic issue of the separation of animals
(and wild nature) from humans can be linked to ideas funda-
mental to both literary tragedy and ecological crisis. He makes
it clear that the tragic view of life has not caused the current
ecological crisis, but rather that “the tragic tradition in literature
and the disastrous misuse of the world’s resources both rest
upon some of the same philosophical ideas” (59). He lists three
such ideas: “the assumption that nature exists for the benefit of
mankind, the belief that human morality transcends natural
limitations, and humanism’s insistence upon the supreme im-
portance of the individual personality” (42). These commonly
held ideas as found in tragic literature, he states, can be an
“appropriate source of information about the humanistic en-
dorsement of ecological error, for tragedy is unusually inclusive
of the values of civilization” (41).
All three of the beliefs that Meeker identifies are very
evident in the tragic Epic of Gilgamesh. Ideas in tragic litera-
ture—in this case the prototypical literary model of the
human-animal separation in Gilgamesh—greatly inform our
understanding of the current form of the problem. The
following discussion provides a close reading of Gilgamesh as
a tragedy whose very “tragic flaw” (if a work of art can be said
Animal and Human Nature in Gilgamesh PLL 381

to have one) is the crucial separation between wild animal

nature and humanity. In the course of this reading, the paper
addresses greater implications of the separation, including
the oftentimes misdirected striving of humans to make inti-
mate contact with wild animal nature, human attempts to
reconcile the loss of contact with wild animal nature, and
potentially destructive and tragic consequences of the essen-
tial separation.
Traced back to its central presence in the world’s earliest
known literary work of Gilgamesh, the motif of human-animal
separation provides a prototype of a disturbing cultural theme,
vestiges and imitations of which haunt our literature up to the
present.6 In Gilgamesh, through an encounter with a sacred
prostitute, the wild man Enkidu loses his intimate contact with
wild animals forever, is “humanized,” and finally “civilized.” He
is then brought to the city of Uruk where he meets Gilgamesh
and becomes his inseparable companion. Together they destroy
a sacred cedar forest, behead its bestial protector Humbaba,
spurn the love of the Goddess Inanna, and kill the Bull of
Heaven. In consequence of these destructive acts, Enkidu dies,
and Gilgamesh is left to wander half-crazed, searching in vain to
resurrect his beloved friend. The myth is a clear example of the
sort of destructive and isolationist, tragic literary theme that Meeker
believes both reflects and perpetuates “ecological error.”

6In The Green Breast of the New World, Louise Westling compares William Faulkner’s
“The Bear” to Gilgamesh:
remarkable similarities exist between the story’s main shape and the Gilgamesh
Epic—a wild man mediator between the prince and the forest, male bonding
that substitutes for alliances with women, the magical beast who is the forest’s
guardian and who is associated with feminine powers at the heart of nature, the
killing of the beast in a context of great ambivalence, the resulting destruction
of the forest and death of the wild man guide, a long period of grief and
renunciation, and an unshakeable doom for the protagonist. Faulkner’s
atavistic yearnings have drawn him back into patterns of the earliest epic tales
of uneasy combat with the landscape and its life, patterns of masculine thought
that are at least five thousand years old. (121)
382 PLL Patrick Barron

Mesopotamian tradition holds that the original story was

conceived by the exorcist-priest, Sîn-leqi-unninni (Tigay 12),
who is believed to have been a contemporary of Gilgamesh, the
fifth king of the first dynasty of Uruk, (which would place him at
some point between 2700 to 2500 B.C.) (13). Accounts of the
story exist from early Akkadian versions from the Old Babylonian
period (2000-1600 B.C.); the Middle Babylonian (1600-1000
B.C., including translations into the Hittite and Hurian lan-
guages; as well as “first millennium” versions, including the first
copy known to scholars, which was found in the remains of the
library of Ashurbanipal, the Assyrian king (668-627 B.C.) who
assembled the greatest library of the pre-Hellenistic Near east in
his capital, Nineveh (11). The story’s survival for over two
thousand years of oral and written traditions “from the south of
Babylonia up to Asia Minor” attests to the great value Gilgamesh
held (Kluger 15); the epic today is widely viewed as the most
important literary creation of ancient Mesopotamia (Tigay 10).7
The king Gilgamesh is described in the story as being two-
thirds divine, one-third human, aggressive, arrogant and vio-
lent. At the very start of the story he demands “from an old
birthright, the privilege of sleeping with brides before the
husbands were permitted” (Mason 15), and he oppresses the
populace and harnesses their strength to build protective walls
around Uruk and Eanna, Inanna’s temple. Rivkah Schärf Kluger
comments in her Jungian interpretation of the work, The Arche-
typal Significance of Gilgamesh, that this great wall-building feat “is
a cultural task . . . [and] every cultural achievement is connected
with some sacrifice of nature . . . but if this goes too far, as it seems
to do here, nature becomes rebellious” (28). Indeed, much is
out of balance, and an attempt at reconciliation is soon made.

7I here follow primarily the translations of Gardner and Maier (who follow the first
millennium Akkadian version) and the verse narrative rendering of Herbert Mason
(based primarily on translations and studies by Heidel, Speiser, Kramer and Thomp-
son).
Animal and Human Nature in Gilgamesh PLL 383

Lamenting their oppression, the people voice their complaints

to the gods. They are answered by the great goddess8 who
pinched off clay and threw it into the wilderness: in the wilderness she makes
Enkidu . . . his body was covered thickly with hair, his head covered with hair
like a woman’s; he knew neither people nor homeland; . . . he fed with the
gazelles on grass; with the wild animals he drank at waterholes; with the
hurrying animals his heart grew light in the waters. (68)

Rather than a savior sent to battle the oppressive reign of

Gilgamesh, the creation of Enkidu seems rather to counterbal-
ance the radically civilized persona of Gilgamesh. The mix of
these two volatile extremes of total wildness and complete
civilization backfires, however. Instead of establishing equilib-
rium, the pairing results in the manipulation and then destruc-
tion of the wild element, Enkidu.
Enkidu, described as being innocent of “fear or wisdom”
(Mason 16), frees the animals caught by hunters and destroys
their traps.9 Westling suggests that “Enkidu’s life among wild
creatures also prefigures the monster Humbaba who guards the
sacred cedar forest and its inhabitants” (20) and whom, ironi-
cally, Enkidu later assists Gilgamesh in killing. Westling also calls
attention to the “curious doubling technique” of Enkidu’s
creation, “whose hairy appearance seems to match Gilgamesh’s
disorderly, uncivilized behavior” (20). Similarly, Kluger sees
Enkidu as “the primeval man, the animal-like man, . . . the divine
chthonic counterpart of Gilgamesh. . . . [He] is a new image of
the primeval man corresponding to the level of consciousness
which is represented by Gilgamesh” (30). In addition to viewing
Enkidu as an underworld correlate to Gilgamesh, or Gilgamesh

8Aruru is one of her many names (Gardner and Maier 70).

9In the Old Babylon version, as well as the Hittite version, Enkidu is raised by the
animals and suckled on their milk (Tigay 200). Possible precedents for his character
include the semi-nomadic Amorites, but more likely are versions of primitive or
primordial man, all of who share in common a lack of the basic traits of human
civilization (202-4).
384 PLL Patrick Barron

as somehow “uncivilized” in his violent behavior (is not a central

tenet of human civilization— at least in our history and experi-
ence of it—violence?), Enkidu and Gilgamesh are also clearly
representative of two extremes: total wild animal nature-associ-
ated man, and total civilization and domestication-associated
man. Together they form an extremely volatile pair, roughly
seen as split correlates of a greater social self. But the mix is never
whole. Because of Enkidu’s traumatic severance from wild
animal nature, the coupling is doomed to failure; its very basis is
ruptured, shattered from within.
Enkidu repeatedly appears at the watering hole of a hunter
described by Gardner as “a mediating figure between the wilder-
ness and the city” (72). The hunter sees Enkidu as threatening
and frightening, and he sends word of (and a plan to capture)
the wild man to Gilgamesh: he asks for “one of the temple
women, a love-priestess who can turn Enkidu from the animals
he lives with” (Gardner and Maier 8). At the behest of Gilgamesh,
the priestess, known as Shamhat (Tigay 210; Jackson 9), goes to
Enkidu and seduces him; for six days and seven nights they
repeatedly make love. When at last they rise, Enkidu looks for his
animal friends but finds that they have all fled:
He felt a strange exhaustion,
As if life had left his body.
He felt their absence.
He imagined the gazelles raising the dry dust
Like soft brush floating on the crests of sand
Swiftly changing direction, and the serpents
Asleep at the springs, slipping effortlessly
Into the water, and the wild she-camel
Vanishing into the desert. His friends
Had left him to a vast aloneness
He had never felt before. The lions returned
To the mountains, the water buffalo
To the rivers, the birds to the sky. (Mason 18)

Enkidu attempts to run after the animals, but his knees fail him;
stricken with grief, he goes through the first of several periods of
Animal and Human Nature in Gilgamesh PLL 385

depression, here caused by the permanent loss of his

identification with animal nature. Shamhat then proceeds to
humanize and civilize Enkidu by teaching him the language and
laws of human society, clothes him, builds up his ego, and
eventually takes him to the city.10
Shamhat performs the key function of dissociating Enkidu
from wild animal nature and of associating him with civilized,
human culture—a culture very much divorced from any mean-
ingful and long-lasting connection with wild animal cultures.11
Due to her crucial function in domesticating Enkidu, as well as
because she is as much a servant to Inanna as to Gilgamesh,
Shamhat—particularly her role in ritualized sexual relations—
deserves some explanation. The translated term for the title of
Shamhat varies from “prostitute” (Mason 17) to “sacred temple
girl” (Jackson 7) to “harlot” (Tigay 17) to “temple prostitute”
(Ferry 7). Kluger helps clarify the origins of this problematic
figure, properly called a hierodule, which “means, literally,
‘servant of the god’” (32). She states that hierodules were found
in Cyprus, Greece, North Africa, and Sicily, in addition to
Babylon. They held very important positions in the temples of
ancient Mesopotamia, and their functions, connected to the
worship of a deity, included sexual rites:

10There seem to be two notions in primordial tradition of how civilization was

transmitted to humanity: in Cattle and Grain, through intermediary deities, the great gods
present humans “with the implements and products of husbandry, which are the bases
of civilized life and which are jointly termed ‘sustenance’” as well as the “m e s,” which
“are the various norms and traits of civilized life, such as kingship, sexual intercourse,
truth, priesthood, crafts, heroism, and so forth” (Tigay 204-5). In the other, rather than
deities, semi-divine beings, or sages, instruct humankind “in everything which would
tend to domesticate (‘tame’ or ‘civilize’) human life,” as well as “the patterns of the
land”—roughly equivalent to the “m e s” (205). Each of the traditions distinguishes
between human, as against subhuman life, behavior and animal (206).
11Potential contemporary parallels in her role—as a woman somehow closer to wild
animal nature, and thus able to establish intimate human contact—may include the
primate researchers Dian Fossey, Jane Goodall, and Biruté Galdikas.
386 PLL Patrick Barron

The archaic attitude which created this holy prostitution is difficult for many
modern people to grasp, particularly if they are not conscious of their
complexes. The hierodule sent with the hunter is called a harimtu, a woman
who was herem, which means ‘under the ban of the godhead,’ i.e., dedicated
to the deity, in our case to [Inanna]. (32)

At this point, following the lead of Westling, it is useful to

briefly refer to another Sumerian myth, Inanna, which is in-
scribed on clay tablets dating from around 2,000 B.C. Inanna is
in many ways the exact thematic opposite of Gilgamesh. Rather
than emphasize sexual disunion and represent the severance of
human and non-human nature, Inanna celebrates sexual union
and the harmony of humanity with domesticated non-human
nature—such as agriculture and animal husbandry. Also, as
Westling states, “metaphoric and narrative references to the
land and growing things upon it reveal that this early culture saw
the fruit- and grain-bearing earth as analogous to women’s
bodies” (15). On the opposite extreme from tragedy, as Westling
points out, Inanna demonstrates Meeker’s “comic” mode, valu-
ing “inclusiveness, compromise and paradox of comedy over the
destructive heroic idealism of tragedy” (17). In a ritualized
marriage, Inanna unites with the shepherd Dumuzi12 in order to
spark fertility in the cultivated fields, yet, as Westling states,
conflict is evident between the pastoral world of Dumuzi and the
farming one of Inanna. Dumuzi is alternatively identified with
plants and bulls, as Westling notes: “it seems as though the hymn
is attempting to synthesize these two contesting definitions of
masculinity, a vegetative one in harmony and subordinate to the
fertile landscape, and a more active animal one moving about its
surface” (16).
The figure of the hierodule in Gilgamesh differs from the
Inanna of the hymns in her intentions: instead of partaking in
ritualized sexual relations to stimulate the fertility of the land,

12I see Dumuzi as a rough equivalent to the volatile “two-souled character” suggested
by the pairing of Enkidu and Gilgamesh in Gilgamesh.
Animal and Human Nature in Gilgamesh PLL 387

she “lures (Enkidu) away from total submersion in the animal

world” (Kluger 40).13 The result, rather than contributing to
fruitfulness and harmony, not only causes the animals to totally
reject Enkidu, but leads to the immediate damaging of the
“bride house” (Gardner and Maier 9) or “family house” (Mason
24)—the temple in which, as Westling suggests, the ritual mar-
riage between (the priestess representing) Inanna and Gilgamesh
is about to take place.
Westling draws attention to the fact that both Meeker and
Lorenz “neglect the critical importance of gender conflict that
can be seen emerging much earlier [than the ancient Greeks
and their use of the tragic form] in the heroic warrior code of the
. . . Epic of Gilgamesh” (18). When Meeker’s exploration of the
comic and tragic literary modes, including his forays into ethol-
ogy, is more directly combined with Westling’s own analysis of
the role of gender and landscape in literature, however, the
specific role of the human-animal separation as a critical literary
theme can be greatly explicated, and in fact comes to the
forefront. The source of the eventual strife and chaos in Gilgamesh
is equally a result of tearing Enkidu from the wilderness as of
Gilgamesh and Inanna’s disunion. Rather than seeing an invio-
lable sense of ritualized, cultural harmony evident in Inanna, the
tensions between Inanna and Dumuzi evident already in this
work show up much exacerbated—between Inanna and
Gilgamesh—in Gilgamesh. These unresolved tensions lead to the
civilizing of Enkidu, as well as the tragic consequences of the
story. In this version, fault in the key severance is shared by both
Gilgamesh and Inanna—figures, it must be kept in mind, that

13The shift from the animal to the human realm that sacrifices Enkidu’s bestial
prowess, speed, and identity in exchange for civilized human intellectual capacity
appears to have been drawn from two folklore motifs: “the transfer of qualities from
one being to another through intimate contact (embracing, kissing, intercourse)”
and the “role of woman as seducer toward civilization. . . . A number of folktales tell
of hermits who lived with animals until they were drawn to civilization by women who
seduced them” (Tigay 208).
388 PLL Patrick Barron

are much less individual humans than larger social selves repre-
sentative of overreaching cultural desires and patterns.
Returning to Gilgamesh, we witness the immediate, tragic
effects of Enkidu’s severance from wild animal nature. As soon
as he arrives in the city of Uruk, Enkidu meets Gilgamesh and
blocks his way at the very threshold of the bride house. They
viciously fight, evenly matched, until near exhaustion, they fall
and crush the doors of the sacred house. Their ensuing friend-
ship is described in very intimate terms; it seems—especially in
light of the foiled bride house ceremony—that their new rela-
tionship takes the place of the ritual marriage. It soon becomes
poignantly clear that an accommodating, inclusive, and “comic”
story pattern that above all exhibits reverence for (cultivated)
nature—as evident in Inanna—has been usurped by the violent
and heroic, tragic plundering of the wilderness and assault on
animal life: together Enkidu and Gilgamesh plot an attack on
the great cedar forest and its protector, the bestial nature
divinity Humbaba. Initially Enkidu expresses great fear of
Humbaba:
I learned, Enkidu said, when I lived
With the animals never to go down
Into that forest. I learned that there is death
In Humbaba. Why do you want
To raise his anger? (Mason 28)

Gilgamesh pays him little heed and, after some persuasion,

convinces both Enkidu and the elders of Uruk that the enter-
prise is sound. The disastrous consequences of their decision are
first made evident when Enkidu touches the gate to the great
cedar forest; his left hand becomes paralyzed and then pain
spreads throughout his entire left side. That night he is unable to
sleep and ironically is frightened by real and imagined animals:
But alone and awake the size and nature
Of the creatures in his mind grow monstrous,
Beyond resemblance to the creatures he had known
Before the prostitute had come into his life.
Animal and Human Nature in Gilgamesh PLL 389

He cried aloud for them to stop appearing over him

Emerging from behind the trees with phosphorescent eyes.
(Mason 36-7)

Images of his former companions, whom he had run with and

freed from traps, now appear as frightening monsters. The
trauma and dissociation Enkidu has been made to undergo
begin to make themselves terribly evident. Enkidu here is akin
to an enslaved, or at least seduced, former wild animal made
to undergo traumatic cultural experimentation. He also may
be likened to a wolf who, when domesticated, is used to kill
other wolves—as soon becomes apparent in his battle with
Humbaba. During this first night in the forest, a heavy weight
and dread settles upon Enkidu’s chest and he cries out, but
Gilgamesh, enthralled in a dream foretelling his (solitary)
victory, hears nothing.
The next day Gilgamesh begins to chop down the cedar
trees. Drawn by the sounds of destruction, Humbaba appears,
and the two humans then manage to kill him. Just before dying,
Humbaba pleads for his life, but strangely it is Enkidu who
argues against sparing him and, together with Gilgamesh, deliv-
ers the final blows, beheading him. Harrison suggests that the
cutting off of Humbaba’s head symbolizes the cutting down of
the cedar forest, and that the “glory” of the exploit lies in part
with the fact that timber was a precious commodity for the
Sumerians, since the plains of Mesopotamia at that time lacked
forests (16-17).14 Timber gathering expeditions were often
dangerous enterprises, entailing much travel and often fighting
local forest-dwelling tribes, which may help explain why

14J. Hansman, in his article “Gilgamesh, Humbaba and the Land of the Erin-Trees,”
explores the historical basis for the timber expedition motif in ancient Sumeria, and
traces the identity of the forest country—kur-gi
-erin-kud (land of the living, or, land
of the cut down erin-trees, which was probably Elamite territory—deforestation had
obviously occurred earlier) (24), “erin-tree” (a species of cedar, probably Juniperus
excelsa) (31), and Humbaba (the guardian of the land of the living, or the chief god
of Elam) (34).
390 PLL Patrick Barron

Gilgamesh considers that the forest-cutting exploit may provide

him with monumental fame. Harrison, however, offers another,
more compelling possible reason:
If Gilgamesh resolves to kill the forest demon, or to deforest the Cedar
Mountain, it is because forests represent the quintessence of what lies beyond
the walls of the city, namely the earth in its enduring transcendence. . . . He
imagines that he could transcend the walls that enclose him through an act
of massive deforestation. (17)

In The Idea of Wilderness, Max Oelschlaeger adds that the slaying

of Humbaba symbolically represents “the relentless Sumerian
encroachment on the ancient forests and the triumph of civili-
zation over the wilderness,” as well as parallels “the recognition
by the Paleolithic mind of apostasy: human existence seems to
entail an awareness that transgressions against nature are inevi-
table” (39). The killing of Humbaba clearly represents an assault
of Enkidu upon his own kind; in short, he has been coerced into
attacking the center of his own deep, wild animal being. It is here
that the separation of Enkidu from wild animal nature has
begun to come full circle and produce grisly, self-inflicted
wounds. It is no wonder that Enkidu suffers bodily paralysis and
mental anguish; he has unwittingly—or as a result of madness
and/or love for Gilgamesh—attacked the core of his own es-
sence.
Soon after the killing of Humbaba, in apparent connection
to the earlier, failed ritual marriage, Inanna approaches
Gilgamesh and offers to make him her lover. Gilgamesh not only
rejects her but heaps a mountain of insults upon her, including
the question: “which of your lovers have you loved forever?
Which of your little shepherds has continued to please you?”
(Gardner and Maier 149). Enraged, Inanna turns to her father15
for help in avenging the insult. They decide to send the Bull of
Heaven to wreak havoc upon Uruk, and thus punish both

15The high god Anu.

Animal and Human Nature in Gilgamesh PLL 391

Enkidu and Gilgamesh. Yet, in the ensuing battle the two men
kill this sacred beast; afterwards, Enkidu goes so far as to throw
a bloody hunk of the animal into Inanna’s face, thereby insulting
her further.16 Here again, Enkidu attacks an animal, a being he
had once protected. Is Enkidu, in addition to aiding Gilgamesh
in his violent insult, enacting a form of self-hate and destruction?
At any rate, it is clear that his traumatic dissociation from animal
kind has grown to extreme proportions; in his rapacious attacks
upon Humbaba and the Bull of Heaven, Enkidu has reached the
brink of self-annihilation.
In fact, the council of the gods decrees that Enkidu must die
for having destroyed Humbaba and the Bull of Heaven. He soon
grows mortally ill and reflects on all that he has lost: “everything
had life to me, . . . the sky, the storm, the earth, water, wandering,
the moon and its three children, salt, even my hand had life”
(Mason 48). Then, considering his fate and the role of the gods,
he curses both the hunter and the hierodule Shamhat who had
transformed him into a civilized human. The sun god17 hears
Enkidu and upbraids him, reminding him of the pleasures and
honors he received in his friendship with Gilgamesh; Enkidu
relents, blesses Shamhat, and then tells Gilgamesh of a horrific
dream of the netherworld he has experienced (Gardner and
Maier 12). He soon thereafter dies. He is doubly insulted here;
not only is he not left to die fully remonstrating his domestica-
tion—which in the clarity of his death-throes he only begins to
do—but he is made to praise the “gift” of this domestication.

16Paul Shepard, in The Others: How Animals Made Us Human, comments on the role
of the bull: “Heroes took over bull power in the pursuit of eternity. Sacred bovids,
beginning with the fecund cow and advancing to the virile bull, were finally degraded
to mere substance in the hands of humanized deities. Throughout the Old World men
interceded in rites associated with the goddess and her ‘corrupt’ tyranny of the animal
demon. This masculine triumph was foreshadowed in the myth of Enkidu, a Sumerian
hero of the first bullfight, marking the transition of bull power to men themselves
(215).
17Also called Shamash (Gardner and Maier 12).
392 PLL Patrick Barron

This grand, forced cover-up of the terrible failure and cruelty of

Enkidu’s “humanization” has many parallels in, for example,
rationales for the contemporary capturing of wild animals,
particularly primates, for experimentation, breeding, hunting,
and exhibition purposes. Enkidu’s death signals the true end of
potential renewal in Gilgamesh; the rest is merely an account of
false hopes and repeated, vain attempts at a resurrection of the
link to wild animal nature as embodied in Enkidu. His impor-
tance and true significance was never appreciated before—in
fact he was simply the object of a traumatic, cultural experimen-
tation—so there is little or no reason at this point to believe that
any resolution will be achieved in the remainder of Gilgamesh. In
fact, none is.
Gilgamesh, thus severed from his most intimate companion
in life, is left to wander bereft and crazed with the loss. He
attempts, by travelling to Utnapishtim, the only human to escape
death, in some way to bring Enkidu back to life. The only vestige
of hope with which he returns home—a life-giving plant—is
immediately lost to a snake who eats it and then sheds its skin. It
is clear that the journey, futile from the very start, has ended in
complete and utter failure. The tragic ramifications of Enkidu’s
separation from wild animal nature have reached their ultimate,
desperate, and hopeless end.
Animals are present throughout the whole of Gilgamesh; all
the tragic losses of the work involve them, from Enkidu’s sepa-
ration with his wild animal companions (and probable family) to
Gilgamesh’s loss of the sacred, youth-giving plant to the serpent.
The human-animal separation underlines every aspect of the
work. It defines the nature of the ecological tragedy that occurs
throughout Gilgamesh. The prerogatives of Gilgamesh and the
heroic, masculine, and “tragic” epic certainly take precedence
over those of Inanna and the inclusive “comic” hymns to fertility.
In fact, in Gilgamesh Inanna, as well as Gilgamesh, plays a role in
the fundamental and problematic separating of Enkidu from
wild nature and animals—the key “fall from grace” that spurs on
Animal and Human Nature in Gilgamesh PLL 393

the terrible and cumulative series of disastrous events that

ultimately lead to ecological tragedy: the destruction of wild
nature (the cedar forest and Humbaba), the dismemberment of
the sacred animal (the Bull of Heaven), the death of wild animal-
bonded humanity (Enkidu), and the “divorce” of god and god-
dess (Gilgamesh and Inanna) leading not to growth but to sterility.
Gilgamesh sends Shamhat to civilize Enkidu, but she is, after
all, a harimtu, dedicated to Inanna. Directly after the destruc-
tion of the cedar forests and Humbaba, Inanna appears. She
does not, as might be expected, upbraid the two men, but
minimizes the gods’ grief over the loss of Humbaba and entreats
Gilgamesh’s love; Enkidu, the interloper, is ignored. Her wrath
is finally and only incurred upon receiving a personal insult,
after which she risks sending the Bull of Heaven—the final
sacrifice which ensures the death of Enkidu. It appears that the
opposing and competing pressures of variants within
Mesopotamian culture in the end crush Enkidu: Inanna’s heavily
ritualized fertility religion, and the upstart, violent, and heroic
individualism of Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh rebels against the
constraints of the gods—in particular the fertility religion of
Inanna—and lashes out against nature, but in so doing sacrifices
the wild man Enkidu who, thanks to both Gilgamesh and
Inanna, has already been traumatically torn from the wilderness.
Ironically, without this primeval human, neither civilized order
nor domestic harmony may exist. A central tenet of Gilgamesh is
that when humans deny themselves direct identification with
and access to wild, animal nature, despite all possible resuscita-
tive efforts of civilization—however well intentioned and desir-
ous of “cultivated” order—confused social strife and ecological
crisis will result.
394 PLL Patrick Barron

WORKS CITED
Ferry, David. Gilgamesh: A New Rendering in English Verse. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1992.
Gardner, John and John Maier, trans. Gilgamesh: Translated from the Sîn-
lequ-unninn? Version. New York: Knopf, 1984.
Hansman, J. “Gilgamesh, Humbaba and the Land of the Erin-Trees.” Iraq.
38 (1976): 23-36.
Harrison, Robert Pogue. Forests: The Shadow of Civilization. Chicago:
University of Chicago, 1992.
Jackson, Danny, trans. The Epic of Gilgamesh. Wauconda: Bolchazy-
Carducci, 1992.
Kluger, Rivkah Schärf. The Archetypal Significance of Gilgamesh: A Modern
Ancient Hero. Einsiedeln: Daimon Verlag, 1991.
Lutts, Ralph. The Nature Fakers: Wildlife, Science and Sentiment. Golden:
Fulcrum, 1990.
Mason, Herbert, trans. Gilgamesh, A Verse Narrative. New York: Mentor,
1970.
Meeker, Joseph. The Comedy of Survival: Studies in Literary Ecology. New York:
Scribners, 1972.
Oelschlaeger, Max. The Idea of Wilderness, from Prehistory to the Age of Ecology.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991.
Shepard, Paul. The Others: How Animals Made Us Human. Washington D.C.:
Island Press, 1996.
Tigay, Jeffrey. The Evolution of the Gilgamesh Epic. Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania, 1982.
Westling, Louise. The Green Breast of the New World: Landscape, Gender, and
American Fiction. Athens: The University of Georgia, 1996.

PATRICK BARRON is the author of Circle of Teeth: 55 Poems and Circling Brooks, a novel.
Currently he is editing and translating An Anthology of Italian Environmental Literature
(Italica Press). He teaches English at City College of San Francisco, and is completing
a Ph.D. in environmental literature at the University of Nevada, Reno.