The Creation of Enkidu

Author: Traditional Sumerian

Time Period: 2499 BCE–1000 BCE

Country or Culture: Mesopotamia

Genre: Myth

PLOT SUMMARY

In the ancient Sumerian city of Uruk (Erech), the people are unhappy with the wild ways of their king, Gilgameš (Gilgamesh). They implore the gods to find a way to temper him. The supreme sky god, Anu, responds. He instructs Aruru, the goddess of fertility who created humanity, to create a counterpart for Gilgameš to tame him. Aruru sets to her task. She creates Enkidu by molding clay in the wilderness.

Enkidu is created with a strong, hairy body. He does not know any other people. He spends his early life among gazelles. He eats grass like them and slakes his thirst at their watering hole. There, a trapper observes Enkidu. The trapper complains to his father that Enkidu has been freeing the animals from his snares and wreaking havoc with his traps. His father instructs the trapper to go to Uruk and ask Gilgameš for a temple prostitute. The trapper should bring this woman to the watering hole. There, she will seduce Enkidu. Once Enkidu has been with her, his animals will flee from him.

The trapper does as instructed. From Uruk, he brings along a temple prostitute named Šamhat (Shamhat). They hide at the watering hole to catch Enkidu. On the third day of their vigil, Enkidu appears. The trapper tells Šamhat to disrobe and show her body to Enkidu. When Enkidu sees the naked Šamhat, he is aroused. He has sex with her for six days and seven nights. When he finally returns to his gazelles, they all flee from him, just as the trapper’s father predicted would happen.

Šamhat suggests Enkidu should travel with her to Uruk to meet Gilgameš. Enkidu agrees, ready to challenge Gilgameš. Šamhat tells Enkidu that Gilgameš dreamed of their encounter already and that she loves Gilgameš, too. She tells Enkidu of Gilgameš’s dream, then has sex with Enkidu again.

As they get ready to go to Uruk, Šamhat clothes Enkidu. She brings him to some shepherds, who are awed by Enkidu’s physical prowess and his magnificent body. The shepherds offer Enkidu bread and beer, which is new food to him. Enkidu shaves his body hair and anoints himself, becoming increasingly civilized.

A messenger arrives and tells that Gilgameš will participate in a wedding at Uruk that night. Gilgameš will deflower the bride before she is given to her husband. Enkidu and Šamhat move into the city. There, Enkidu blocks Gilgameš’s way into the bridal chamber. Enkidu and Gilgameš wrestle for a while, wreaking havoc on the place. Suddenly, they stop their fight. They kiss and become best friends.

SIGNIFICANCE

Enkidu is a mythological character originating with the ancient Sumerian people, who lived in what is present-day southern Iraq. The oldest surviving references to Enkidu, though they do not include the story of his creation, are found in Sumerian myths transcribed onto clay tablets dating from approximately 2100 BCE. The story of the creation of Enkidu is part of The Epic of Gilgameš, which was derived from these Sumerian sources and later combined into an epic poem in Akkadian. The epic has survived in two versions. The older one is from the eighteenth century BCE, and the other dates from the thirteenth to eleventh centuries BCE.

Parts of The Epic of Gilgameš were first translated into English in 1872 by the British Assyriologist George Smith. Since that time, many other English translations have been published. Maureen Kovacs’s translation, which includes the story of Enkidu’s creation, is both scholarly and accessible to contemporary readers.

The key significance of the Sumerian myth of the creation of Enkidu lies in its description of what it means to become fully human. Enkidu is purposefully created to provide a more human counterpart to Gilgameš. Part god and part human, Gilgameš is too overbearing because of his semidivine nature. It takes a fully human being like Enkidu to socialize Gilgameš to become a more suitable king of Uruk.

Enkidu’s creation significantly relates to cultural ideas about the socialization of a human being. At first, Enkidu runs wild with herbivorous animals, eating grass and drinking plain water. It is only through love, represented by sexual intercourse with Šamhat, that Enkidu awakens to his humanity. Šamhat teaches Enkidu to behave like a human instead of an animal. She clothes him and introduces him to other people, who give him manmade foods, such as bread and beer.

The myths of divine creation of humans from clay, as occurs in the creation of Enkidu, appear to reflect the significance of pottery in early human civilizations. As humans learned to shape figures from clay, they appear to have ascribed to their deities the power to create humanity from animated clay figures. A counterpart to the story of the creation of Enkidu can be found in the Chinese myth of the goddess of Nüwa. As the Mesopotamian goddess Aruru does with Enkidu, Nüwa creates humans from clay. Since the late nineteenth century, many scholars have suggested that the biblical story of God creating Adam from dust was inspired by the Sumerian-Babylonian myth of the creation of Enkidu.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gardener, John, and John Maier, trans. Gilgamesh. New York: Vintage, 1985. Print.

George, Andrew, trans. The Epic of Gilgamesh. London: Penguin, 2003. Print.

Jacobsen, Thorkild. The Treasures of Darkness: A History of Mesopotamian Religion. New Haven: Yale UP, 1976. Print.

Kovacs, Maureen Gallery, trans. The Epic of Gilgamesh. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1989. Print.

Leick, Gwendolyn. Sex and Eroticism in Mesopotamian Literature. London: Routledge, 1994. Print.

Thompson, Reginald Campbell, trans. The Epic of Gilgamish. London: Luzac, 1928. Print.