Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2009 JANER 9.1Also available online brill.nl/jane DOI: 10.1163/156921209X449152

THE WALL OF URUK: ICONICITIES IN GILGAMESH

KEITH DICKSON

We all secretly venerate the ideal of a lan-guage which in the last analysis would deliver us from language by delivering us to things.

M. Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World

Abstract

The Wall of Uruk: Iconicities in Gilgamesh. This article examines the invita-tion in the SV prologue to Gilgamesh (I 1-28) as a device to engage the reader in a series of iconic acts that aim to preserve heroic glory. Since two artifacts in particularthe wall of Uruk and the inscribed tabletmediate these acts, I investigate the nature of artifacts in general in the poem, and specifically focus on three: the corpse of Enkidu, his funeral statue, and the divine fruit in the garden at the end of Tablet IX. These three stand related to each other as a series of iconic representations of the emplacement of life within various bodies. In the context of these representations, the lapis lazuli tablet on which Gilgamesh allegedly inscribes his tale also figures as a kind of body: a relatively permanent one that appropriates the readers voice through the act of recitation to grant Gilgamesh perpetually renewable life.

The invitation in the prologue to the Standard Version (SV) of the Babylonian Gilgamesh epic remains compelling despite even its long exposure to time and scholarship, which is no small feat.1 This has much to do with the degree of engagement it evokes from the reader. As audience, each one of us individually is sum-moned by the narrators voiceas was Ur-shanabi by the voice of Gilgamesh himself in the final tablets ring-composed coda (XI: 323-329)to survey the concrete structure of Uruk, examine the oven-fired brickwork of its walls, and acknowledge that theseven sages or apkallu themselves laid the foundations on which the

1 All references (by tablet and line) and quotations from Gilgamesh rely on the translation by George (2003). Other translations consulted are those of Foster (2001: 3-95); George (1999); Bottro (1992); Tournay and Shaffer (1992); and Dalley (1989: 39-153).

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hero subsequently built.2 Along with Ur-shanabi I am urged not just to look, but also to mount the rampart and walk upon it back and forth (I: 18 = XI: 323), marking out its density and extent with my own moving body. In an apparent shift back to the medium of sightbut to sight now informed by the bodily effort involved in the climb and the pacing of the wallsUruks greater dimen-sions (city, date-grove, clay-pit, temple) are then measured off and tallied, amounting to a total expanse of roughly five square miles. The prologue then goes even farther than Ur-shanabi could, invit-ing me forward to see and touch, unlock and open a cedar box with clasp of bronze, lift up its lid and take from it a tablet made from lapis lazuli (I: 24-27).3 At this point what has been so far a progression of increasingly more tactile experiencefrom sight to embodied movement, then to touch and the felt weight of cedar lid and cool stone slabperhaps surprisingly modulates into an act of oral recitation. This essay aims to map that shift.

The attention that has often been drawn to the circular conceit linking audience in Tablet I with Ur-shanabi in Tablet XIa neat conflation of analepsis and prolepsis (de Villiers 2005: 123-124.)has perhaps made it easier to overlook a similar kind of mirroring that occurs within the opening lines of the prologue itself to link the audience more closely with Gilgamesh. For the progression from

2 On the literary and documentary history of this tour of the city, see Tigay (1982: 146-149) and Hurowitz (1992: 1, note 1, with references). On the rhetorical impact of the prologues direct, personal address to the reader, see Oppenheim (1977: 258-259) and Moran (1991: 16-17).

3 Walker (1981: 194) notes the parallel to the deposition of royal inscriptions in the foundations of buildings; see also Moran (1991: 17-18) and, more generally, Ellis (1968). The conceit of the tablet is certainly not unique. Its status as a literary topos in the Mesopotamian tradition has been noted by Oppenheim and others, and its style identified as that of a gestural, mannerist claim to textual authorityas if Gilgamesh himself were the author of the inscription no less than of the wall. Oppenheim (1977: 258) is suspicious of how seriously an original audience was meant to have taken this claim, finding it more likely instead that its use presup-poses a reader who is sophisticated enough to accept it as a literary fiction and not as proof of the authenticity of the text. He concludes that the reference to the tablet, and no less the earlier invitation to examine the walls, establish a rela-tionship between author and his readers on the level of pure imagination (259). It may be asked, of course, on what other level a textual relationship ever exists, but his point is still well taken. Oppenheims comments are motived principally by his thesis that the introit is strictly literary rather than the product of an oral, bardic tradition, and that it properly assumes an audience of readersor at least of a public that lives in a social context that makes it possible to hear the epic read (259). See also Tigay (1982: 144-145) and Pongratz-Leisten (1999: 80-90) on the topos in both royal inscriptions and epic literature.

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sight to embodied movement to reading in the invitation (I: 13-28) actually amounts, mutatis mutandis, to a reprise of the heros own general progress in lines 1-12. There He who saw the Deep, who saw the secret and uncovered what was hidden (I: 1, 7), becomes the one who afterwards returned to Uruk, inscribed on a stele all (his) labours (I: 10), and then proceeded to build the very rampart and wall I am called to inspect (I: 11-12).

The actions the prologue invites me to perform are structured by a kind of implicit imitatiostylized and perhaps even mannerist, but for all that nonetheless still mimetic.4 Just as Gilgamesh saw the Deep, I am asked to see [the] wall of Uruk and view its parapet (I: 13-14), survey the foundation platform, inspect the brickwork (I: 19). Of course, the distance here between original and simulacrum might well seem too great to support the analogy between the object of the heros vision and what I must now imag-ine lies before me. What he presumably saw was the aps itself, the foundation of the world as such, on which Ea once built his own dwelling, the worlds primordial ediface (Enuma Elish I: 71-78).5 What narrows that distance, however, is recognition of the degree to which material construction figures in Mesopotamian mythic nar-ratives and civil engineering no less as the icon of genuinely primal, cosmogonic works.6 Insofar as all human foundationsespecially

4 On the complex issues of literacy and orality in Mesopotamian literature, see the essays collected in Vogelzang (1992), especially 23-69 (B. Alster, Interaction of Oral and Written Poetry in Early Mesopotamian Literature), 227-245 (P. Michalowski, Orality and Literacy and Early Mesopotamian Litarature), and 265-278 (M. Vogelzang, Some Aspects of Oral and Written Tradition in Akkadian). On the shift from orality to writing as an influence on the scribaliza-tion of wisdom in Mesopotamia, see van den Toorn (2007).

5 On the polysemy of the term nagbu (either subterranean aps or totality) in the opening line of the SV prologue, see George (2003: 444-446), who also discusses a related ambiguity in the phrase i$di: ma:ti (foundation, basis of the country), which might be understood to have a literal, cosmological reference, for the realm of men was believed to stand on top of the cosmic abode of Ea; see also Castillo (2001: 91-92). For English texts of the Enuma Elish, see Foster (1993: 351-402) and Dalley (1989: 228-277).

6 On the status in ancient Near Eastern thought of man-made edifaces as simulacra of the primal, cosmogonic structures wrought by the gods, van Leeuwen (2007: 67) observes: Both Mesopotamians and Israelites grounded human wisdom in the divine wisdom, which gave order, meaning and life to the cosmos as a whole. Creation was portrayed as a macrocosmic housewith its fields, waters, and variegated activitiesto which temples and ordinary houses with their lands cor-responded as microcosms. His essay is a detailed study of this iconic relationship. On the same issue, see also Hurowitz (1992), especially Appendix 5 (Temples, Temple Building and Divine Rest) and Appendix 7 (The Cosmic Dimensions

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(but by no means exclusively) the regal, monumental onesinten-tionally mirror that first cosmic basis, what Gilgamesh saw and what the text invites me to see are metaphorically one and the same, in particular since it is the apkallu who are said to have established the foundation on which Gilgamesh built the wall of Uruk.7

In turn, the labor of his journey home along a distant road (I: 9) is matched, however faintly, by my own physical effort to take the stairway . . . go up to the wall . . . and walk around (I: 15, 18) to view the citys total expanse. In both cases, sight leads to embodi-ment in the form of the return of Gilgamesh home and my own return, via the trope, from wherever I might be at the opening of the prologue to virtually the same place the heros distant road once brought him. My return is of course perhaps best under-stood as temporal just as much as spatial, since my movement in space back to the wall is actually a movement back in time to the original time of its construction. The course of the imitatio intends to lead my steps to where his own went generations earlier, and to the very place where his heroic journey culminatednamely, to the site of Uruk.8

Finally, Gilgameshs inscription of his labors is literally echoed in my recitation of the text engraved on the tablet taken from the cedar box. This engages once again the theme of return, but here with reference less to location and time than to the production of the narrative itself. Moreover, the relation between inscription and recitation is not one of sameness but instead complementarity; his writing and my reading aloud what he has written are in fact collaborative events. One depends upon the other: the silent act of writing on stone, that is, requires voicing to bring its narrative back to lifefrom mute glyph to audible enunciationand thereby

of Cities and Temples). On the theme in general, see also Edzard (1987).7 On the apkallu, primordial sage-craftsmen, especially with reference to the

common connection between wisdom and building construction, see Sweet (1990: 47), who later comments (51) on the typical Mesopotamian understanding of wisdom as the intelligence and skill that enable one to perform practical deeds, particularly for the benefit of the gods. Note in this context the high frequency of references in Mesopotamian royal inscriptions to divinely-based wisdom as the means for projects specifically related to engineeringespecially temple-building and the restoration of ruined cities.

8 In its most basic form, the traditional heroic narrative proceeds along the circular track of Departure outward and subsequent Return, travel to the limits of the world and then the long trek home again. On this narrative structure, see Campbell (1968: 3-46), along with Raglan (in R. Segal 1990: 89-175) and Propp (1968) for earlier typologies of the heroic narrative.

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also to bring it back to the attention of an audience on whose renewed memory of the hero depends the heros own perpetually renewable fame. Jesper Svenbro, in the course of his extended anthropology of reading in ancient Greece, remarks as follows on the relationship between the author and the reader of inscrip-tions (1993: 44-45):9

At the moment of reading, the reader finds himself before a written word that is present in the absence of the writer. Just as he foresees his own absence, the writer foresees the presence of his writing before the reader. The reading constitutes a meeting between the reader and the written marks of someone who is absent. The writer . . . counts on the reader and the reading aloud that the reader will accomplish, for in a culture in which klos [glorious fame] has a fundamental part to play, what is written remains incomplete until such time as it is provided with a voice. . . . The text is thus more than the sum of the alphabetic signs of which it is composed. These signs will guide the voice that will permit the vocalization of the text, its sonorous realization. This, then, is the way in which the text includes the voice that its mute signs are lacking. If the text is to find total fulfillment, it needs the voice of the reader, the reading voice.

As long as it remains silent, the heros life was indeed a terminal one after all, a history of acts consigned now to the mute and unre-coverable past; once it appropriates new voice through recitation, however, that life speaks anew and therefore somehow lives again. What Svenbro refers to as sonorous realization applies equally well to Gilgamesh as to the Greek inscriptions that are his subject. The implicit imitatio of the SV prologue, in which the reader performs a stylized, bodily re-enactment of the heros career, also speaks to this theme. Both kinds of engagement, moreover, sonorous no less than physical, entail the readers involvement with things in the text and with the text itself as a thing.10

A look at the things involved will bear this out. George (2003: 446) and others (cf. Tigay 1982: 144-145) plausibly assume that the pas-sage from Gilgamesh in question requires the original stele or nar (I: 20) to be identical to the lapis lazuli tablet in line 27, and that as

9 On the connection in Greek culture between mute written signs and public recitation, especially in the context of heroic glory, see also Nagy (1983 and 1990: 202-222), along with Vernant (1974: 9-25) and C. Segal (1982).

10 See Pongratz-Leisten (1999: 85-86) for discussion of the intended audience in so-called nar-texts, which (in both inscriptional and literary forms) make explicit appeal to an other to see, hear, call out, or voice what has been written. On nar in general, see e.g. Gterbock (1934: 62-86); Gurney (1955); Ellis (1968: 145-147, 166-167); Longman (1991: 44-47); and especially Pongratz-Leisten (1999), with references.

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a consequence I am expected to imagine that I hold in my hands the very stone on which Gilgameshs own hand etched the tale. This is a precious conceit, as Oppenheim points out, and certainly a fragile one, on which we are probably not meant to push too hard.11 It is perhaps enough that the content of what is read aloudall the misfortunes, all that the hero went through (I: 28)precisely matches that of what was writtenall [his] labours (I: 10)inas-much as the narrative proper of Gilgamesh, coinciding with the introit (Surpassing all [other] kings . . . [29]) of the earlier, Old Babylonian (OB) version, begins at this point.12 The mimetic and performative acts with which the prologues invitation opens, that is to saysight, movement, appropriation of the tabletnow culminate in the recitative performance of the poem itself. In this sense, at least, the modulation noted earlier, from bodily experience to what would seem to be the qualitatively different experience of reading a text aloud, is possibly not so surprising after all. Reading the tablet, no less than touching and pacing the wall, involves rep-resentation in the form of a kind of renewal via re-embodiment of the hero. They differ chiefly in the materialsflesh and soundin and through which this realization takes place.

This is of course its aim. The conceit itself is actually the reflex of a wider and deeper theme that supports the literary convention and expresses motives that appear just as foundational to the genre of epic as the wall is to Uruk. The best way to appreciate this is to recognize that the bodily imitatio and the equally mimetic and collaborative act of reading aloud in the opening lines of Gilgamesh are not direct but instead mediated activities. Each, moreover, is mediated by a simple artifact: the wall of Uruk and the inscribed stone text, respectively, are the devices by which the spatial, tem-poral, and narrative distance between reader and authorial hero is narrowed. Were it not for the wall, Gilgamesh would not be pres-ent via the product of his hands, which (given his status as king) in fact reprises the foundational, cosmogonic act of a god; were there

11 Difficult and impertinent questions follow on the assumption that Gilgamesh himself is the author of the tablet; see Oppenheim (1977: 257-259). Moran (1991: 17-19) draws attention to the parallel between the tablet in the SV prologue to Gilgamesh and the pseudo-autobiographical stele of Naram-Sin. See also van den Toorn (2007: 27-28); and Tigay (1982: 144-146), with references.

12 On the literary history of Gilgamesh, and especially the differences between the Old Babylonian (OB) and Standard (SV) versions of the text, see Tigay (1982), with summary in Maier (1977: 40-49) and George (2003: 22-33).

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no engraved tablet, in turn, the very agency that made the wall a metonym for that cosmic foundation would be inaccessible. The fact that neither of those things is actually present in my experi-ence as a readerassuming I do not in fact stand on the wall of the city and take a slab of lapis from a cedar boxis not especially relevant to the point; and here Oppenheims reasonable comments seem a little obtuse.13 The real point is that, however mannered the conventions that give rise to this undeniably literary trope, what underlies them are implicit claims that (1) both a functional and also perhaps even a literal equivalence holds between tablet and wall; and (2) precisely as artifacts, tablet and wall are instrumental in engaging the reader in a set of stylized acts that endorse the heros accomplishments and perpetuate his life by confirming that both have been transformed into (ideally) renewable things. Both are the media for the fulfillment of an aim that is central to this narrative, and probably also to epic as such.

Their functional equivalence is not hard to see. Insofar as both tablet and wall are artifacts made by the hand of Gilgamesh himself, both survive him to make the absent hero present, and in a form more durable than were his once exquisite body and spectacular acts. He now lives on in (and somehow also as) this wall of Uruk and this inscribed narrative; in a sense yet to be fully explored, he has become them. As already suggested, however, there is an impor-tant difference between wall and tablet. Two issues are involved here; despite how intimately bound they are in fact, for the sake of argument they need to be dealt with separately. On the one hand, there is the artifact as product, as a thing that in one sense leads a life of its owna life simultaneously cultic, utile, political, economic, for instanceindependent of that of its maker (who in this case is in fact long dead), though in another sense it never severs the connection to the one who made it. That connection is sometimes simply expressed by the makers name, whether actu-ally inscribed on it (as in royal depositions) or in some other way associated with the product. Both tablet and wall bear the mark of his hand at the same time as they remain clearly different from him: they survive while he does not.

On the other, there is the artifact as index of an agency moved by the specific intention to preserve itself by somehow making itself concrete. This is perhaps a less straightforward sense of artifacts, a

13 See above, note 3.

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sense easily conflated with the idea of the artifact as product, but nonetheless (and especially within the world of epic) a critically distinct one. This is because artifacts in epic are more than just the carriers of tags, simple witnesses of their authors presence at some time or another (indefinite or specified) in the past. As such a tag, in fact, the wall of Uruk would differ only in degree, not in kind, from lines scratched on a rock, even if those scratches happened to spell the name Gilgamesh or Kilroy. Epic heroes do not dedicate their livesand the genre of epic as such is not devotedto the deposition of objects that merely assert a quondam presence. Those objects are meant instead to concretize and thereby also somehow to maintain a life, both to embody it as fact and also perpetually to keep it living. In the case of tags, the material on which the name is written is in one sense immaterial to the writing; its relation to the name it bears is a superficial one, simply that of medium to inscription. Epic artifacts (and the epic as itself an artifact) instead intend a deeper and more intimate relation, one that offers something resembling genuine embodiment, rather than just a surface on which to etch a name. As products, both tablet and wall serve as signs of the absent Gilgamesh, and thus maintain for him a presence in the world generations after time has demolished his own material body. As indices of the agency that produced them, in turn, they both offer themselves as instruments for the sort of imitatio encouraged by the invitation in the SV prologue. That is, they provide the concrete means for various kinds of mimetic, surrogate enactments that aim to bring the hero back to life. To appreciate both these issues separately and in their connection with each other, we need first to look more closely at the nature and function of other manufactured objects in the poem.

Artifacts in Gilgamesh turn out to be comparatively few in number. The material landscape of the poem is stark and almost minimal-ist, especially when set next to the rich inventory of things that fill the Homeric epics, for example, that appear and then disap-pear almost epiphanically throughout the Sanskrit Mahabharata, and that lurk behind the characters in the tale of Beowulf. The list here is relatively short: clothing, ale, baked bread, an amulet, a few thresholds and doors, ritual implements (censer) and crafted offerings (throw-stick, flask, flute, throne, clasp, bangles), weapons (axe, sword, dirk, knife), roads, buildings, gates, a bed, a statue, two boats, punting-poles, a wall, a cedar box, a tablet made of lapis

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lazuli.14 These are the props of the drama, so to speak; though to call them that falsely suggests that they play a merely ancillary role in the story. More often than not, on the contrary, they tend to lead the story from one episode to the next, or at least to act as crucial signposts along its course. Moreover, rather than providing ground for dismissing the artifacts in Gilgamesh as unimportant, their relative lack of clutter instead lends them considerable weight. The things that appear in the text are freighted with significance; most seem to lead what Appadurai has aptly called a rich social life.15 Few if any are neutral, few simply lie inert in the world of the tale, as if in a kind of flat background detached from the characters that move among them. Instead, most exercise real transactional force. Through use, gifting, and exchange, that is to say, artifacts both symbolize and also effect real changes in the poem. This is because they are never mere objects, but instead things thoroughly traversed by intentionality16whether as indices of categories in whose terms the human world is organized, as the instruments by which specific aims are furthered, as products that come at the end of a process of refinement of raw material and thereby embody cultural advance, or else as the simple objects of human desire.

Articles of clothing are an obvious case in point, since they serve as one of the principal signifiers in a familiar system of signs through which distinctions between nature and culture are expressed.17 A vestimentary code structures much of what takes place in the poem, guiding the story along a well-marked trajectory and also bringing

14 For the sake of this short sketch, and somewhat arbitrarily, I include only those real manufactured objects mentioned by the principal narrator of the SV. Shamhats reference to drums (I: 229), for example, as an instance of embedded narration, is excluded from the list, as is the axe of Gilgameshs dream (I: 278). Likewise excluded, as metaphorical, are the net with which Enkidu is compared (IV: 13) and the rope that forms part of the traditional adage in V: 76.

15 See Appadurai (1988). The bibliography on material culture is extensive. See also, for instance, Bonnot (2002); Brown (2004); Knappett (2005); and Riggins (1994), with references.

16 For an extreme position on agents and objects as purely correlative entities, see the comments of Latour (quoted by Knappett 2005: 31): Consider things, and you will have humans. Consider humans, and you are by that very act interested in things. Bring your attention to bear on hard things, and see them become gentle, soft or human. Turn your attention to humans and see them become electric cir-cuits, automatic gears or softwares. We cannot even define precisely what makes some human and others technical On agents and artifacts, see Pickering (1997); on the distinction between objects and things, see Brown (2004: 1-22).

17 On the nature/culture opposition in Gilgamesh, see especially Mobley (1997: 220-223); Tigay (1982: 202-203); and Kirk (1970: 146-147).

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about significant transformations in its characters. The dressing of Enkidu by Shamat, the self-adornment of Gilgamesh after his defeat of Humbaba, the filthy pelts that later signify the heros lapse from civilization into a state of wildness, the immaculate robe loaned to Gilgamesh by Uta-napishtimall function as indices of position and value along a continuum that runs from beast to divinity. At the same time, however, they do more than simply indicate: Enkidus attire is both a sign of his acculturation and also one of the things (along with grooming, for instance) that in a very real, practical sense render him civilized. That is, clothing figures as both prod-uct and also as a kind of agencyin this latter function, behaving more like a signal than a sign, in fact,18 not merely to reference but even to trigger a particular effect. Clothes do make the man. The same is true of foods, and with respect to precisely the same issue. Food specific to human beings qualifies as artifact because it represents the transformation of raw, natural stuff into something different, whether through an overt process of cooking or else by the subtler heat of fermentation. The contrast between the diets of animals (water and grass) and humans (beer and bread) in the Gilgamesh story (I: 110-112, II: 44-51) thereby marks out and also creates fundamental differences among living beings. The alchemy by which animal feed becomes human food likewise affects those who eat the latter: Enkidu is directly humanized by the mere act of eating breadas if, somewhat magically, he becomes what he eats, as the saying goesand the fact that he eats bread (and not grass) conversely signifies that transformation.19

The power of certain things both to signify and to effect real change is critical to advancing the purpose of heroic endeavor, whose aim is precisely to make the heros concrete sign a renewable signal. This becomes clear from an examination of the imagery that underlies the motive Gilgamesh announces for his journey to the Cedar Forest; though preserved only fragmentarily in the SV, it is

18 On the distinction between sign and signal, see Leach (1976), who remarks (23-24): The contrast between signal and index [=sign] is that between dynamics and statics. With a signal, one event causes another event; the signal itself is the message. With an index, the message-bearing entity is an indication of the . . . existence of a message. No cause and effect relationship is involved.

19 If the logic of this claim seems strained, it is because the claim verges on a mythic one in its view both of objects and also of signs as agencies rather than instruments. At the base of this logic is a confusion, often operative in magical thinking, between indices and signals; see Leach (1976: 29-32).

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by now conventional enough. His statement to Enkidu implicitly plays on the contrast between materiality and nothingness, thing and absence (II: 234-235):20

As for man, [his days] are numbered,all that ever he did is but [wind.]

The couplet is structured by a familiar trope:21 in its invisibility, its erratic and shifting nature, and especially in its apparent lack of substance, wind is a common figure for the instability and the resulting evanescence of human accomplishments. Like air, mans deeds are insubstantial; they have no density, as it were, and there-fore neither reality nor true permanence. Transient, they perish along with their wraith-like agents, or (at best) not long afterwards, rendering the agency that produced them futile and ultimately vain, however weighty its initial intent.

Though fragmentary in the SV, this motive for the heroic exploit can be fleshed out by reference to lines preserved in Version A of the early Sumerian poem Gilgamesh and Humbaba (The Lord to the Living Ones Mountain), which enjoyed the status of a favorite copy-text in Old Babylonian schools (George 1999: 149),22 suggesting in turn that its sentiments were in some sense recognizably main-stream. Here what stands as an implicit opposition in the SV passage just quotednamely between wind and some other unnamed thing that is truly substantialnow comes to expression in terms of a more overt contrast between river and mountain, water and stone. Despite its use of different comparanda, the couplet of lines from the SV clearly intend as their substrate precisely the same metaphorical

20 George (2003: 456) speculates: perhaps to distract Enkidu from his misery [viz. over his lack of family], Gilgamesh proposes that the pair make a glorious expedition to the Cedar Forest. This ignores its broader, epic significance.

21 George (2003: 457) glosses the proverb as Life is short and given over to mundane activities, which fails to acknowledge the full metaphorical value of wind as index of insubstantiality. Tigay (1982: 164-165) reads it differently: Gilgamesh argues that fear of the danger should not deter them, since death is mans lot in any case. He suggests that the Akkadian version of the proverb is ultimately dependent on the Sumerian. On Sumerian proverbs in general, see Alster (1975). West (1997: 253), noting that Akkadian sru, the ordinary word for wind, may be used as a metaphor for the vain and insubstantial, cites Old Testament parallels. The image is of course polyvalent. See Leick (1994: 33, 38, 45) on wind as a sexual metaphor. Where wind has substance, it is often disease wind or the destructive wind of stormboth of which do the work of undoing what human hands have made.

22 The translation that follows is that of George (1999: 161-166). For an edition of Version A, see Edzard (1990 and 1991).

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reference. The insubstantiality and transience expressed by the trope of human action as mere wind represent one term in an implied contrast whose sense is essentially identical to what the following lines from Gilgamesh and Humbaba express by the contrast between water and rock, movement and permanence, fluidity and fixity. On the eve of his expedition to the forest, Gilgamesh addresses the god Utu with the words (A 23-33; cf. B 5-16):

In my city a man dies, and the heart is stricken,a man perishes, and the heart feels pain.I raised my head on the rampart,my gaze fell on a corpse drifting down the river, afloat on the water:I too shall become like that, just so shall I be!. . .Since no man can escape lifes end,I will enter the mountain and set up my name.Where names are set up, I will set up my name,where names are not yet set up, I will set up gods names.

Wind and water vs. substance and stone: the same oppositional structure underlies both figures. In the lines just quoted, the heros response to the sight of the floating corpse in the river is the urge to enter the mountain and there set up his name. This image of the corpse operates in two distinct but closely related registers. On the one hand, it is of course his own dead body afloat that Gilgamesh sees. In the later OB and SV Gilgamesh, this first and still somewhat detached visiona corpse drifting . . . afloat in the waterwill become the closer and far more intimate sight of the corpse of beloved Enkidu, the mirror of the heros own inevi-table death. Even more significantly, the dead body in the river is Gilgamesh himself in his most obscene manifestation: no longer fused with subjectivity and life, the corpse is just an inert lump, a dumb thing with no agency, the naked object of a horrified gaze.23 Further, and in direct contrast with the inanimate corpse is the constant movement of the river in which it is adrift, like so much flotsam to be snagged on the bank somewhere downstream, or else to be carried out helplessly into the vast and anonymous waters of the Gulf. Its fleshly corruption and the rivers endless flow are therefore indices of one and the same process. Both lead ultimately to disappearance into namelessnessmythopoeically, disappearance back into the primeval state of formless indifferentiation, when

23 On the interplay of seeing and being seen in Gilgamesh, with special emphasis on the theme of alienation, see Dickson (2007).

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on high heaven was not named, | and the earth beneath did not yet bear a name (Enuma Elish 1-2).

On the other hand, the urge this sight inspires drives the hero away from the river and into the mountain in order to engrave his name there. Reference to the setting up of names clearly alludes to the royal practise of inscribed monuments (Walker 1981, Ellis 1986)at the same time as it presumably also (and with a neat circularity) underwrites that practise by supplying a mythic exemplar. Kings subsequent to Gilgamesh will do just as he did, namely leave their marks on hewn stone that metonymically enjoys the perma-nence of the mountains from which it is taken. If the corpse afloat is a thing adrift, uprooted and nameless, the mountain is a thing that does not move, its solidity and perdurance offering a figure of the rootedness to which all heroic endeavor aspires. It seeks to achieve precisely the permanence and density of mountains. Moreover, it is quite certain that in Mesopotamian cultural imagination the distance between these opposed termsriver and mountainonce again harks back, within the broader, mythic framework that so often supports implicit ways of articulating experience, to the primal opposition between the watery aps and the E2-engur-ra or House of the Lord of Deep Waters that Ea aboriginally built to check their flowand that the trope therefore draws much of its power from that primordial reference.24 Heroic effort is a reprise of cosmogonic work, such that the concrete product in which the former issues mirrors the works of immortal hands. This returns us once more to the issue of Uruks wall, built upon foundations laid by the apkallu themselves, insofar as human dwellings in the world all strive to replicate Eas cosmic ediface.

If it returns us to the wall, the same trope also brings us back to the lapis lazuli tablet. For while the inherent solidity and dura-bility of stone may well be valued qualities in and of themselves, what chiefly recommends it in this context is its use as a signifying medium. Here too the issue of product and agency returns, namely in the form of the capacity of thingslike the stone from which mountains, walls, and tablets are madeto serve as indices and also as agents, signs and also signals of transformation. Thanks to texts such as that of Gilgamesh, the trope of inscription is so familiar as a literary topos, its sense so patently obvious, that it is hard now fully to recover its implicit logic. Well enough that the narrative becomes

24 See Edzard (1987); Hurowitz (1992); and van Leeuwen (2007).

38 keith dickson

permanent through inscription, the stone lending its substance to the tale it carries well beyond the temporal life of its agent; this much may not strike us as especially odd. But that the longer life the narrative thereby gains should somehow be a life transferred to the hero whose story it tells is in some sense nothing short of magical. How is it exactly that heroes live on in the narrative and the narration of their deeds?

An understanding of how concrete things facilitate the aim of heroic endeavor to live beyond the heros natural life can be approached by examining the representation of three other artifacts in the poem: (1) the body of the wildman Enkidu, (2) his funerary statue, and (3) the strange fruit in the garden into which Gilgamesh stumbles at the end of Tablet IX. All three are offered by the text as in some sense iconic, namely as planned resemblances. They serve thereby as heuristic objects, since all implicitly address the question of the relation between resemblance or iconicity and loss, on which much of the epic turns; in so doing, they make that ques-tion available for exploration.

Gilgamesh presents two quite distinct configurations of the wild-mans body, mediated through the figure of Enkidu as agent and also through the figure of Enkidu as object. For it should be recalled that he a twice-made thingonce by gods and once by human craftsmenand that in each case his status is expressly that of an artifact. It is of course not uncommon to see things made in the poem. Throughout the story we observe the manufacture of other artifacts, though often in passages sadly lacunose: the weaponry forged for the heroes in Tablet II, the dream house Enkidu con-structs for his friend each night of their journey into the Cedar Forest (e.g. IV: 10-13), the raft on which to transport the felled trees (V: 300), the punting-poles Gilgamesh cuts to move himself across the Waters of Death (X: 159-168), and Uta-napishtims own craft, on which he rides out the Flood (XI: 50-67). What makes the case of Enkidu unique is that we see his manufacture first at the beginning, then also after the end of his biological life, and by two different types of artisans. In the opening of the tale, we witness his creation by Aruru (I: 101-104) as a divinely-wrought object, an artifact made so as to let Uruk be rested (95-98), a pinch of clay cast down into the wilderness and infused there somehow with raw, divine, bestial, androgynous life. Between his entry into the world at that point in the text and his departure from it in Tablet VIII,

the wall of uruk: iconicities in GILGAMESH 39

Enkidu famously undergoes transformation from savage into human being, thanks to the intercession of Shamhat, thereby traversing the distance between nature and culture, and then from human being into hero richly endowed with fame and also with mortality.

Upon his death, by a curious symmetry, Enkidu reverts explicitly to artifact once again, in the form of the statue Gilgamesh orders his craftsmen to make, both in keeping with traditional funerary customs and also in an attempt to rescue something of his friend from total annihilation.25 In the most extended litany of things and materials preserved in the poem, a passage densely cluttered with objects and stuff, all measured out by their respective weights and values, Gilgamesh has the artisans of Uruk construct a likeness of his friend, an image with eyebrows of lapis lazuli, . . . chest of gold | . . . body of [. . .] (VIII: 71-72); as well as splendid grave-gifts, offerings to the deities of the Netherworld, no doubt to pur-chase surety that his friend will not be ill-treated there. Within the cultural context that frames the narrative, the making of the statue (or perhaps figurine) is motivated by reference to specific rites of mourning, burial, and the extended cult of the dead.26 Intriguing in this context is Scurlocks suggestion that the statue in such ritu-als was intended as a soul emplacement, namely as a temporary residence for the agency (etemmu) of the deceased between the moment of death and the burial of the body (2002: 1).27 In this

25 With specific reference to the practise of constructing funerary statues, Katz (1999: 109) remarks: The knowledge that the body is doomed to perish, con-trasted with the abstract sense of the spirit [that somehow continues its life after the bodys death], and the concrete form of its care creates tension between the concrete and abstract realities. It seems that the obvious solution was to employ an icon of the dead for this purpose. By introducing a concrete element to represent the deceased, the abstract spirit received a concrete form and thereby the breach between the belief in its survival and the perceptible reality can be bridged and the tension mitigated. See also Scurlock (2002) on the notion of soul emplacements.

26 George (2003: 486) distinguishes the rites of mourning in the Gilgamesh pas-sage as follows: (1) the lament on the deathbed . . . (1-64); (2) the fashioning of the funerary statue and other preparations for the funeral (65-91); (3) the public display of the grave-goods, the prayers to the gods of the netherworld and further ritual (92-212); (4) more rites (213-end). On funerary rituals in general, see George (2003: 486-90), along with Scurlock (2002), Katz (1999), and the articles in Alster (1980).

27 On the nature and status of the etemmu, see Bottro (1980: 28-29), who remarks: . . . il est constant que dans la pens des anciens Msopotamiens, il ne subsistait de lHomme, aprs sa mort, que deux choses: lune franchement mat-rielle, engourdie et paralyse: son squelette; lautre formelle, arienne, dcalque

40 keith dickson

it not only preemptively forestalls the practical problems otherwise caused by disembodied ghosts, but also provides a tangible recipient for the funerary offerings.

In its narrative context, on the other hand, the statue additionally serves as a concrete means to explore how objects mediate loss, or rather, how most fail to. In this respect, the statue emphasizes the failure of attempts to cheat the passage of time along its inevitable course into death and decay. Its lavishness paradoxically confirms its futility. As a man-made artifact, Enkidu is hardly more than a broken icon, a flawed simulacrum of his friend. This becomes clearer by examining both icon and corpse within a wider network of images in the poem, all of which relate to the theme of planned resemblance or iconicity. In place of the flesh of Enkiduonce erotically beautiful but now already in the throes of decomposition (X: 59-60 = 136-137 = 236-237)the statue is a thing of hard mineral stuff, bright metal inlaid with gemstones. The transforma-tion of his body into something rich and strange of course means that Enkidu as statue ideally remains free from corruption and thereby gains a longevity far greater than that of the body for which it substitutes. In so doing, it preserves Enkidu himself as in some sense still present and still tangible.28 Yet by this very fact of substitutionbecause it is not his true body, after all, because his body has now become something else (pearls for eyes)the elegant simulacrum also permanently confirms the loss of what it signifies. Its presence verifies his absence. This is why it cannot satisfy the grief of Gilgamesh, but instead only prolongs and exacerbates it, since the artificial body makes the deceased manifest only by simul-taneously establishing the fact that he is no longer there.

These two configurations of Enkidu therefore stand in polar opposition to each other, at least in terms of how each artifact embodies the relation between agency and product, etemmu and its emplacement:

ombreux et vanescent de ce quil avait reprsent sa vie durant: son spectre, son fantme, son esprit, son etemmu. See also Scurlock (2002: 1-2).

28 This is the argument of Katz (1999), who examines the use of a figurine [in funerary rituals] as a proxy for the dead man, and remarks (117) that rather than dealing with an abstract spiritual being, a physical, figurative representation of the dead was used for the cult of the ancestors, signifying his actual presence in the house. See also the passage quoted above, note 25.

the wall of uruk: iconicities in GILGAMESH 41

ENKIDU HUMAN ENKIDU STATUE

agency (etemmu) +

product (body) +

The artifact whose manufacture we witness in Tablet I conjoins living agency with an impermanent and corruptible body, whereas the artifact wrought in Tablet VIII is the reverse: an incorruptible body from which the living agency is gone. An everlasting thing in place of a putrescent corpse, an ideal form instead of rotting flesh, the statue thus generates the irony to which Walls (2001: 66) calls attention, namely that Enkidus ideal form is rendered immortal in gold, precious gems, and lapis lazuli even as his fleshly body descends into putrefaction. This is an irony sharpened by the stark juxtaposition of Enkidus elegant statue with his rotting corpseon the one hand, gold and lapis lazuli; on the other, rancid flesh on which a maggot feeds. From a different perspective, however, and still as artifact, there is a sense in which the statue actually lies much closer to what Enkidu has now become after his deathmere clay (X: 68-69 = 145-146 = 245-246), that isthan to the body of Enkidu while he was still alive. For though now splen-didly imperishable, the simulacrum is also undeniably quite dead, just as dead as the beloved corpse that Gilgamesh can no longer rouse (VIII: 55-58). If Enkidu alive revelled in his human agency thanks to Shamhats precious gift of culture and the friendship of the king, the statue is no more than a manufactured object, a mere product, a lifeless work of mortal hands. No more than the corpse can it hear what is spoken (VIII: 56) or respond to those around it. These further contrasts and similarities can also be represented in schematic form:

ENKIDU ALIVE ENKIDU SIMULACRUM ENKIDU CORPSE

flesh refined mineral clay

corruptible incorruptible corrupted

agency product raw matter

responsive unresponsive unresponsive

sentient inert dead

42 keith dickson

Slung midway between flesh and clay, living body and dead matter, the statue is a decidedly splendid, painful failure; it succeeds only in preserving the fact that Enkidu has become little more than a lump of senseless dirt, no longer a consumer of food that civilizes but now instead just raw food for worms. This represents a funda-mentally iconic failure, in the sense of a planned resemblance that does not succeed in embodying what is indeed the most essential feature of its original. Even if intended as a soul emplacement (Scurlock 2002), a surrogate body to house (albeit temporarily) the etemmu that survives the passing of the flesh, it is no less a house of death than the corpse itself. A mere product, it evinces no living agency, and thereby even carries with it something of the obscenity of the corpse.

The full weight of this failure becomes measureable, however, only when the statue is compared with another, far more successful iconicity in Gilgamesh. I have argued elsewhere (Dickson 2007) that the garden of jewelled trees into which the hero emerges at the end of Tablet IX, after his long passage through darkness, amounts to an attempt at iconic representation of something that in fact transgresses conventional categories of thought: namely, the nature of divinity, vital yet somehow also self-renewing and imperishable. Even in its fragmentary condition, this episodeitself now hardly more than a sheer cascade of brilliant shardsnonetheless succeeds in conveying what was certainly its intended affect. The trees in the garden at the end of the earthroot-stock of the Greek Hesperid grove and of Iduns orchard in the Germanic tradition29bear weird, even scandalous fruit: carnelian and alabaster, agate and lapis lazuli somehow grow there on the branches, pendulously single or in clusters. Although the scene as preserved for us unfolds almost entirely in the detached mode of visual awe, the presence of these gem-fruits as objects of the heros (and our own) rapt gaze cannot conceal the fact that they are actually there to be tasted. These trees bear fruit not for contemplation but for food. Moreover, in the savage logic (Lvi-Strauss 1968) that asserts equivalence between what we eat and what we are, the floral growth of pre-cious stones promotes a sequence of analogies whose aim is to

29 On the motif of the garden of the gods, linking its fruit to their longevity, see see Widengrens study (1951) of the Tree of Life in the ancient Near East, as well as Parpolas ambitious (and highly speculative) 1993 essay. For traces of the jewelled tree theme in other cultures, see Grelot (1958: 59-60), Horowitz (1998), and George (2003: 497), with references.

the wall of uruk: iconicities in GILGAMESH 43

represent both what the gods are made of and what we ourselves can never digest and can therefore never be. For if beasts eat raw (e.g. grass) and humans cook the stuff (e.g. bread) they eatand if both consequently suffer death and decay, having consumed the corruptiblewhat is it exactly that accounts for the perfect, ever-lasting bodies of the gods? Could it be that they pluck and chew aba$m-stone, agate, carnelian, and similar things from these trees, then swallow and weirdly incorporate them, by some miraculous alchemy, into the stuff of their crystalline flesh?

As simulacra, iconic representations of divinity, the jewelled trees achieve what cannot be achieved by the funerary statue of Enkidu, even despite (and possibly because of ) the fact that both are made from the same material. For however much Enkidu might seem through his icon to have finally been removed from the world of bodily decay, rescued from corruption, the statue has no genuine life at all and lacks the power to grow, simply but marvelously, like fruit on a branch. Aruru may well have the means to emplace agency within a pinch of clay, but the artisans of Uruk do not. It is this failure, the statues flawed iconicity, that sends Gilgamesh on a quest that finally confirms the futility of ever hardening and healing the mortal body against death. By contrast, the dazzling food of the gods confounds thought by conjoining mineral with vegetable kingdoms, making them pervious to each other,30 and thereby bearing fruit that ripens without ever suffering the decomposition that attends all earthly life. It flourishes but never wanes or dies, and thus remains exempt from corruption, just as do the beings that manage to ingest it. The fumerary statue, on the other hand, achieves at best a kind of syzygy between these two worlds, that is, between Enkidus new mineral body and the etemmu that has left it forever. While it answers the impulse to concretize and objectively preserve the heros lost friend, the statue succeeds in doing so only by turning him into a lifeless product; the precious object holds his form, but cannot hold and thus fails to perpetuate his agency.

30 The term is borrowed from Lowe-Porters 1948 translation of Thomas Mann, Dr. Faustus, in a passage describing the young Adrian Leverkhns fascination with the growth of ice crystals, which seems to parallel growth in the vegetable kingdom. The narrator remarks (18): If I understood my host aright, then what occupied him was the essential unity of animate and so-called inanimate nature, it was the thought that we sin against the latter when we draw too hard and fast a line between the two fields, since in reality it is pervious and there is no elementary capacity which is reserved entirely to the living creature and which the biologist could not also study on an inanimate subject.

44 keith dickson

As a result, Enkidu lives on in his soul-emplacement only as a potential fetish-object, an exquisite thing that inspires quasi-erotic devotion to itself instead of to what it signifies, and that does so precisely because that signified is permanently absent.31 The funer-ary icon is no less a house of death than the corpse itself.

The marvellous nature of the fruit lies in the fact that it success-fully instantiates a coincidentia oppositorum, perfectly melding mineral with vegetable, crystalline permanence with biological flow. In this respect, it conjoins what for human culture always remain the polar opposites under whose sway heroic endeavor proceeds: mountain and river, ediface and aps, substance and mere wind. We recall that the sight of what will be his own corpse adrift on the waters impels the Sumerian Gilgamesh to the opposite extreme, up into the mountain to inscribe his name there. The relation between time and immutability is expressed in terms of distance, measured by how far a trek it is (and how much bodily effort) to journey from river to summit. The fruit in the garden at the ends of the earth, on the other hand, objectively collapses that distance by embodying the coincidence of permanence and flow. Its iconicity is in that sense perfect, and for that reason the gem-fruit is hardly a simulacrum at all, no mere resemblance. It is instead more like the living conjunction of inert clay and etemmu that under Arurus hands brings Enkidu into the worldwere it not that this latter union is impermanent.

Through the failure of Enkidus funerary statue, the story acknowl-edges that no human artifact achieves coincidentia. The beloved dies, and not long afterwards also the lover, and no house built of good stone or even lapis lazuli can ever stay their departure. There is a chance, however, that what cannot be accomplished everlastingly once and for all may still be achieved in serial fashion, thanks to the power of some artifacts both to signify and also to affect real change, to work as indices and also as signals. As we saw, wall and tablet in the SV proem to Gilgamesh facilitate an invitation to the

31 Gilgamesh implicitly acknowledges the fetish, first in his refusal to give up Enkidus body for longer than the number of days prescribed for mourning, and second in his horrified, obsessive attachment to the image of the maggot that finally drops from the nose of the corpse (X: 59-60 = 136-137 = 236-237). His first response to Enkidus death fixates on the corpse despite the fact that its true object is its departed agency. He recoils from the beloved body when the worm instead claims it for its own, and then substitutes for it the artificial body of gold and gemseverlasting and uncorruptible, but now a virtually empty sign.

the wall of uruk: iconicities in GILGAMESH 45

reader to engage in certain stylized activities. I am called not just to look, but also to mount the rampart and walk on it back and forth. I am called to see and touch, unlock a box, lift up its lid and lift from it the precious autograph inscription. It is not hard to see in these injunctions the script of a kind of imitatio involving two distinct acts of substitution. In accepting the invitation, I offer myself first as a surrogate body for the body of Gilgamesh that has long ago decayed and is now absent. I do as the hero himself did, since these acts iconically re-enact his heroic career. To measurekinetically and with the substance of my bodythe density and extent of the wall Gilgamesh wrought confirms not just its objective reality but also, through its status as an artifact, the reality of its maker. I walk upon what he built. In this confirmation, something of the heros own agency becomes re-embodied, as it were, since my own body now lends his a temporary emplacement.

I have suggested that this confirmation in turn has mythic reso-nance. As one particular artifact, the product of his hands, the wall of Uruk marks his act of construction as a reprise of the divine act that first established Eas dwelling on the shifting waters of the aps. By insisting on the originality of the construction and its resistance to being copied,32 the introit implies that what Gilgamesh has built is as unique as that primal ediface. Its foundation was laid by the apkallu themselves (I: 20-21), after all, beings who bridge the gap between the primeval and the postdiluvian worlds. As a result, the wall of Uruk cannot be replicated by later kings and men (I: 14-17), but only reinstantiated, created each time anew, in the form of each new royal foundationor so each new royal foundation will claim (Hurowitz 1992, Appendix 7; van Leeuwen 2007:67). There is a sense, then, given the terms in which the SV prologue deploys its imagery, in which this wall is itself the E2-engur-ra, just as the weird fruit in the orchard in Tablet IX is the real flesh of the gods. In both cases, the artifact surpasses its iconicity and verges on identity with what it represents.

Something analogous is meant for the reader, too. The imitatio in the prologue proceeds through increasingly more tactile experience (see, climb, open, take) and increasingly more involved embodiment

32 Note the claimconventional, no doubt, but no less significantthat what Gilgamesh has built cannot be matched (I: 14, 16-17): view its parapet which none can replicate! . . . the seat of Ishtar, | that no later king can replicate, nor any man.

46 keith dickson

to culminate in an act of speech. From what we have seen of iconicities in Gilgamesh, this shift no longer comes as a surprise. Svenbros anthropology of Greek inscriptions points to the centrality of voicing in the dynamic relationship between the funerary text and its reader. That relationship is one of needful appropriation. Since the text is by definition incompleteas the silent word of an absent speakerit anticipates the reader, counts on the reader and the reading aloud that the reader will accomplish, and therefore deliberately conscripts the readers voice to give it its sonorous realization (Svenbro 1993: 45). This is the same device the SV prologue directs at its intended audience. Summoned to commit myself bodily to a set of mimetic acts, I am led to mount the wall, take up the tablet, and read aloud all the misfortunes, all that the hero went through (I: 28). As an artifact, the wall of Uruk mediates a series of emplacements that position my body in relation to that of Gilgamesh himself. These script my body into a choreography that moves me through stations through which his own body once passed: the Journey Outward, the Vision of the Deep, the Return, the Works of Memorialization.33 As an artifact, the tablet in turn appropriates my voice for use in the equally stylized and iconic act of reading; in so doing, it grants the life of Gilgamesh a kind of serial renewal.

While it cannot reach the culmination of the sequence of iconici-tiescorpse, statue, fruitthat shape the terms in which Gilgamesh understands artifacts in their relation to permanence and loss, the tablet nonetheless might well embody the next best thing. At one extreme in that sequence lies the beloved corpse, eaten by worms; at the other is a distant garden where divine fruit grows, gemlike and miraculously vital, but impossible to eat. Between them stand three works of human hands: funerary statue, lapis lazuli tablet, and brickwork wall, each meant in its way to serve as the emplacement of a life. Relatively permanent, all three are also lamentably empty and muteexcept insofar as the inscribed tablet always remains open to speak once again if filled by living voices. I say out loud the words he wrote. My voice each time breathes agency into a body made of stone.

33 See above, note 8, on the heroic narrative pattern.

the wall of uruk: iconicities in GILGAMESH 47

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