“Gilgames for his friend Ea-bani
weeps bitterly and lies outstretched upon the ground.
“'Shall I not die like Ea-bani?
Grief has entered my body;
I fear death, and lie outstretched upon the ground.’ ”
Accordingly he determines to visit Xisuthros,[331] the hero of the Deluge, who dwelt beyond the river of death, whither he had been translated without dying, and learn from him the secret of immortality.
The road was long and difficult; mortal man had never trodden it before. But there was divine blood in Gilgames; and as the Greek Hêraklês forced his way to Hades, so he too forced his way beyond the limits of our human world. First he had to pass the twin mountains of Mas, in the northern desert of Arabia, which guard the daily rising and setting of the sun, whose summit touches the “zenith of heaven,” while “their breast reaches downwards to Hades.” Men with the bodies of scorpions guarded the gateway of the sun, the horror of whose aspect was “awesome,” and whose look “was death.” But “the scorpion-man” and his “wife” recognised that the stranger was partly divine, and he was allowed to pass in safety through the open doors. Once beyond them he entered a region of thick darkness. For the space of twelve double hours he groped [pg 437] his way through this land without light, when suddenly he emerged from it into the bright light of day. Here grew a marvellous tree, whose fruit was the precious turquoise[332] and lapis-lazuli, which hung from it like clusters of grapes.
At last Gilgames reached the shore of the ocean, which, like a serpent, encircles the earth. Here Ṡiduri, or Ṡabitum “the lady of Saba,”[333] sat upon “the throne of the sea.” But she locked the gate of her palace, and forbade him to cross the ocean; none had ever passed over it except the sun-god in his nightly voyage from west to east. Once more, however, the element of divinity that was in Gilgames prevailed; Ṡabitum acknowledged that he was more than a mere man, and allowed his right to seek his ancestor beyond the river of death. Arad-Ea, the pilot of Xisuthros, was summoned; trees were cut and fashioned into a boat, and for a month and fifteen days Gilgames and his pilot pursued their voyage over the sea. Then “on the third day” they entered “the waters of death.” The hero was bidden to cling to the rudder and to see that the deadly water did not touch his hand. Twelve strokes of the oar were needed before the rapids were safely passed, and the boat reached the shore that lay beyond the realm of death. Here Gilgames beheld Xisuthros “afar off” “at the mouth of the rivers.” At once he communicated to him the object of his journey: how and why had Xisuthros escaped the universal law of death? The answer is contained in the eleventh book of the Epic, which recounts the story of the great Deluge.
Ever since its discovery by George Smith in 1872, the Babylonian story of the Deluge, which has thus been [pg 438] introduced into the Epic of Gilgames, has attracted the special attention of both scholars and the public. On the one side it agrees with the story of the Deluge handed down to us by the copyists of the Chaldæan historian Berossos, and so is a witness to his trustworthiness; on the other side, its parallelism with the account of the Deluge in the Book of Genesis is at once striking and startling. But the version of the story embodied by Sin-liqi-unnini in his Epic was but one out of many that were current in Babylonia. We have a fragment of another which so closely resembles that of the Epic, as to have been long believed to form part of it; indeed, it is possible that it comes from a variant copy of the Epic itself. Fragments of another version have lately been found by Dr. Scheil in a Babylonian tablet which goes back to the reign of Ammi-zadok, the fourth successor of Khammurabi.[334] Even the version contained in the Epic seems to be a combination of two earlier ones, or rather to be based upon at least two different versions of the legend. The story, in fact, must have been of immemorial antiquity in Babylonia; Xisuthros and his ship are depicted upon some of the earliest seals, and Babylonian chronology drew a sharp line of division between the kings who had reigned before and after the Flood. In the Epic Xisuthros is a native of Surippak on the Euphrates, but the story must originally have grown up at Eridu on the shores of the Persian Gulf. Like the story of the struggle with Tiamât, it typifies the contest between the anarchic elements of storm and flood and that peaceful expanse of water in which the fishermen of [pg 439] Eridu plied their trade, and out of which the culture-god had ascended. It is significant that up to the last it was En-lil of Nippur who was represented as sending the Flood that destroyed mankind, while Xisuthros was saved by Ea.
The Babylonian story of the Deluge has been so often translated and is so well known, that there is no need for me to repeat it here. It is sufficient to note that Xisuthros, like Noah, owed his preservation to his piety. In the final scene, when Bel (En-lil) is enraged that any one should have escaped from the destruction he had brought upon mankind, Ea pacifies him with the words: “Punish the sinner for his sins, punish the transgressor for his transgressions; be merciful that he be not [utterly] cut off, be long-suffering that he be not [rooted out].” The Deluge was a punishment for sin, and it was only just, therefore, that the righteous man should be saved.