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Notes -
Not familiar with the original post, but this is one of the earlier scenes of the Epic of Gilgamesh. Essentially, King Gilgamesh is ruling over Uruk as a tyrant, subjecting his people to cruel forced labor and exercising droit du seigneur whenever a couple is married. So the gods create a wild man named Enkidu to stop him.
Enkidu initially lives his life among the animals in the wilderness, almost more beast than man, cooperating with animals on the hunt, etc. But the gods decide that Enkidu needs to go forth into Uruk to stop King Gilgamesh and join civilization. Thus, they send a priestess/temple prostitute to Enkidu, and they lie together for seven days and seven nights. But on the eighth day, when Enkidu goes to rejoin his animal companions, they all shun him and flee from him, now that he’s been changed by the civilizing influence of sex. He thus has no choice but to go down into the city, where it is inevitable that he’ll fight with King Gilgamesh (and afterwards, become his closest friend).
The Epic of Gilgamesh is a very interesting poem, because in addition to all the timeless meditations on the mortality of man and whatnot, you also get an extremely rare and valuable look at how those who lived in history’s first civilized state understood and related to the development of the state—which, it must be emphasized, is a wholly novel, awesome, terrifying technology. Cities had existed for millennia before Homer’s Greeks, for centuries before even the Vedic Aryans. But the milleu in which the Epic of Gilgamesh was written witnessed the development of the very first cities; the world of Enkidu was all that was known prior. It’s thus no surprise that the poem both begins and ends with a meditation on the glory of the walls of the cities of Uruk, so many meters high, baked of clay….
I honor your generosity in sharing this.
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