Mountains in the Epic of Gilgamesh

The Epic of Gilgamesh is widely regarded as the world’s oldest surviving work of literature. The oldest examples of human writing, trace back to the same Mesopotamian societies that produced it. Any investigation into the history of ideas therefore begins with texts like Gilgamesh and its contemporaries, the religious and mythological works recovered from cuneiform tablets in archaeological digs.

It is in the representational forms of human creation, like literature and art, that the historian of ideas finds the best evidence to work with. Material remains can tell us a great deal about what our ancestors did, and can hint at what they thought. But it is in our ancestors’ utterances and depictions that we find the clearest articulations of ideas, and clearest relationships between them.

Because I’m working on a project about the intellectual and cultural history of mountains, I was naturally curious to see what the oldest writing might say about them. As humanity’s earliest work literature, Gilgamesh was the obvious place to start. There’s a second reason to start here, too. Mesopotamian ideas shaped regional ideas, including those of the Semitic cultures that emerged in Mesopotamia’s wake and came to dominate the region. It’s worth noting here that Akkadian, one of the languages in which Gilgamesh was written, is itself a Semitic language like Hebrew and Arabic. Simply put, Mesopotamian thought is foundational in the global history of ideas.

Mesopotamia’s regional influence is well established. There are strong parallels, for instance, between the Flood story in the Old Testament story in the Old Testament and the much older Flood story recounted by Uta-napishti in Gilgamesh. The epic’s reach may extend even further: scholars have noted resemblances between Gilgamesh and Greek heroes like Heracles. But my aim here isn’t to dwell on these similarities, or to account for how the ideas traveled.¹ It’s to do something simpler — to give an account of mountains in the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Mountains in Mesopotamia

Before turning to the text, some geography is in order. I want to start with the physical mountains of Mesopotamia.

Mesopotamia lies mostly within present-day Iraq. The name comes from the Greek for the land “between two rivers,” and the two rivers are the Tigris and the Euphrates. Both rise in the mountains to the northwest, in present-day Turkey and Syria, then run down through the Iraqi desert before emptying into the Persian Gulf in the southeast. The land between them — especially toward the southeastern stretch where they converge — is far more fertile than the surrounding country, and an ideal place to settle. Even today, a large share of Iraq’s population lives along the banks and watersheds of these two rivers.

The Tigris and Euphrates nearly meet at present-day Baghdad before widening apart again. They finally join at Al-Qurnah — literally the “corner,” “connection,” or “joint” in Arabic — north of Basra before flowing into the Persian Gulf.

For most of their course through Mesopotamia, the two rivers run through desert. There are no mountains downstream; they are far off to the north. This is to say, mountains are conspicuously absent from a good part of the Mesopotamian landscape. Yet, their presence is felt, carried south in the life-giving waters of the rivers that are born in them.

Mountains in Gilgamesh

Mountains figure prominently in the plot of the Epic of Gilgamesh. They are associated with wilderness and wild vitality — the opposite of the domesticating influence of the city — as well as with the dwelling place of the gods, with divine insight and revelation, and with being gateways into other realms.

“He Who Saw the Deep”

The very first words of the epic hint at mountains, or at least at the importance of verticality:

He who saw the Deep…²

Because Mesopotamian works were referred to by their opening words, “He Who Saw the Deep” may well have been what ancient readers called the poem — its title, in effect.

“The Deep” foreshadows what Gilgamesh will eventually encounter when he seeks out Uta-napishti, who lives in a land beyond a mountain and beyond a great body of water (more below). But “Deep” is a poetic rendering of the logogram IDIM (𒁁), which can mean “underground water” or the “source” and “headwaters” of a river.³ Since the headwaters of Mesopotamia’s two great rivers do originate in mountains, the etymology of “the Deep” is suggestive of a mountain environment. Though we must remember that not all rivers originate at altitude.

And yet I wonder whether the relationship is quite so straightforward. If “the Deep” names a physical place — the place where Uta-napishti lives — then to reach it Gilgamesh must first climb a mountain pass at Mount Mashu (more on this shortly), guarded by the Scorpion-people, and then cross a vast sea. To get there, in other words, one must cross a mountain gateway. But when Uta-napishti recounts how he won everlasting life, he says the god Enlil settled him at the “mouth of the rivers,”⁴ a location usually associated with sea level. A river’s mouth can be, after all, remarkably different than its source in terms of altitude.

As George comments in a footnote, “The Tigris and Euphrates were considered in antiquity to sink underground in the southern marshes and emerge again in the far east.”⁵ Thus it is perhaps best to read “the Deep” as a literal depth from source to sea and as a poetic figure for profundity and remoteness: some far-off, hidden realm beyond the ordinary order of things, beyond the known and civilized world. And this reading is supported by a recurring theme in Gilgamesh: a mountain acts as a gateway to the beyond or “the Deep.”

Mountains as Wilderness

Mountains, then, are a threshold between the world of civilization and the wilderness, the world of the unknown. They stand in contradistinction to cities, towns, and settled life — a distinction the epic reinforces again and again, and one that is built into the very languages of cuneiform.

Take the language first. There are several cuneiform logograms for “mountain” and “hill,” the main ones being KUR (𒆳), HUR.SAG (𒄯𒊕), and SA.TU (𒊓𒌅). Logograms often carry a cluster of related meanings depending on context, and these could also mean “territory,” “country,” “open country,” “desert,” or “foreign land.” That foreignness is best understood in relation to the urban centers of Mesopotamia itself: the mountain is a place without human civilization, literally and figuratively beyond the city. It is wilderness — a place outside or beyond.

The epic dramatizes this idea. Gilgamesh’s companion Enkidu first roams the hills and mountains alongside the wild animals, until he is tamed and brought into civilization through the beauty and lovemaking of the priestess Shamhat — a scene that can be read as an early version of a much broader and remarkably durable trope, the idea of woman as the force that settles and domesticates the wild instincts of man. In Sophus Helle’s translation, Enkidu is the “child of the mountains”;⁶ Andrew George’s renders the same line more plainly, saying his “birth-place was the hills.”⁷ Compare Tablet II, where he is “born in the hills,” with an alternate version reading “born in the mountains.”⁸ His domestication and entry into the city of Uruk, fittingly, is described as “coming down from the mountains,” or, in George’s version, “coming from the uplands.”⁹

Enkidu’s alpine origins turn out to be useful. He becomes the guide who leads the pair toward the Cedar Forest to confront their foe, Humbaba. As a child of the mountains, Enkidu “knows the way to the Forest of Cedar… he shall throw open a path, make the mountains passable.”¹⁰ He is, in this sense, literature’s first Virgil, an experienced guide who leads a hero into an unknown realm. Our first Virgil, however, happens to be a wild man of the mountains, a mountaineer of sorts.

The Cedar Forest and Mountain Revelations

On a first reading, you might picture the Cedar Forest — the grove guarded by the enemy Humbaba — as flat woodland, a forest without topography. It isn’t until Tablet V that we definitively learn the forest is an alpine environment, the abundant dwelling place of the gods:

They stood marveling at the forest, gazing at the lofty cedars… They were gazing at the Cedar Mountain, the dwelling of the gods, the throne-dais of the goddesses… the cedar was proffering its abundance, sweet was its shade, full of delight.¹¹

One scholar notes that the idea of gods dwelling on a mountain is a foreign idea imported into southern Mesopotamia from the mountainous north west. W. G. Lambert remarks that the “pantheon residing on a mountain top” came to Mesopotamia via the Amorites.¹² In any case, even if the idea “is not indigenous to southern Mesopotamia,” the fact remains that by the late third millennium, the idea had taken hold across the region as several other Mesopotamian text reference this concept.

The cedar mountain is an abundant place, loud with birdsong, oozing the resins that were so prized for ceremonial incense and medicine.

What Gilgamesh does next is terrible and, frankly, baffling. After he and Enkidu kill Humbaba, Gilgamesh cuts down the cedars and deforests the holy mountain — the very mountain the gods had charged Humbaba with protecting. Even Enkidu seems unsettled by it. He asks:

In your might you slew the guardian — what was this wrath of yours, that you went trampling the forest?¹³

In any event, the approach to the Cedar Forest in the mountains is worth lingering on. Tablet IV follows Enkidu leading Gilgamesh toward the Cedar Forest, and near its opening the two “drew near to Mount Lebanon,”¹⁴ which the text identifies as the forest’s location. As they enter the mountain chain, much of the narrative is given over to the pair camping on mountain peaks, performing rituals and offerings, and praying that the mountains grant Gilgamesh visions:

Gilgamesh went up on to the top of the mountain, he made his offerings of flour to the hill. “O mountain, bring me a dream, let me see a favorable message from Shamash!” Enkidu made for him a house for the Dream God…¹⁵

This same sequence — climbing a mountain, making an offering, praying for a vision, and building a kind of dream-shelter to receive it — recurs at least five times across the tablet, each time producing a dream that the guide Enkidu then interprets.¹⁶

The Epic of Gilgamesh is thus one of the first works of literature — perhaps the first — to stage divine revelation and vision on a mountaintop. The pattern has had a long global afterlife, given how central mountain revelations would become to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Again, it is hard to say if mountain ideas like this one are native to southern Mesopotamia or imported via other peoples like the Amorites who live in the mountainous north west. But the idea clearly resonates throughout the region in early antiquity.

Gilgamesh Ventures Beyond the Mountains

The gods grow angry with Gilgamesh and Enkidu for what they have done, and condemn Enkidu to death. Gilgamesh grieves bitterly for his friend, and — now terrified of his own mortality — sets out to learn the secret of eternal life from Uta-napishti.

His road runs through the mountains. Gilgamesh travels to Mount Mashu, the twin-peaked mountains (two distinct mountains, some scholars believe) that guards the rising and setting of the sun. Mashu is the gate of sunrise, watched over by the Scorpion-people, who regard Gilgamesh favorably for having mastered the the rivers and mountain passes to reach them. As one of them marvels, “never did anyone travel the path of the mountain.”¹⁷ They let him pass:

Go, Gilgamesh! May the mountains of Mashu allow you to pass! May the mountains and hills watch over your going… May the gate of the mountain open before you!¹⁸

Gilgamesh crosses Mashu, travels through a stretch of total darkness, and emerges in an abundant place beside a sea, where a boatman ferries him across to a distant land. There, in a place the epic barely describes, he finds Uta-napishti and asks him about eternal life. Uta-napishti answers with a story.

It is an early flood myth, and its parallels with the account in Genesis are unmistakable. The gods resolve to flood the earth, but one of them tips off Uta-napishti, who builds a boat and loads it with the “seed of all living creatures.”¹⁹ As in the biblical version, the boat comes to rest on a mountain — here, Mount Nimush in present-day Iraqi Kurdistan.²⁰ Like Noah, Uta-napishti releases a bird; when it fails to return, he understands that the waters have receded and dry land has reappeared. And so, on the mountain, he performs a ceremony:

I brought out an offering and sacrificed to the four corners of the earth, I strewed incense on the oak of the mountain.²¹