* Genesis x. 9, 10. Among the Jews and Mussulmans a complete
cycle of legends have developed around Nimrod. He built the
Tower of Babel; he threw Abraham into a fiery furnace, and
he tried to mount to heaven on the back of an eagle. Sayce
and Grivel saw in Nimrod an heroic form of Merodach, the god
of Babylonia: the majority of living Assyriologists prefer
to follow Smith’s example, and identify him with the hero
Gilgames.
** The name of this hero is composed of three signs, which
Smith provisionally rendered Isdubar—a reading which,
modified into Gishdhubar, Gistubar, is still retained by
many Assyriologists. There have been proposed one after
another the renderings Dhubar, Namrûdu, Anamarutu, Numarad,
Namrasit, all of which exhibit in the name of the hero that
of Nimrod. Pinches discovered, in 1890, what appears to be
the true signification of the three signs,Gilgamesh,
Gilgames; Sayce and Oppert have compared this name with that
of Gilgamos, a Babylonian hero, of whom. Ælian has preserved
the memory. A. Jeremias continued to reject both the reading
and the identification.
Several copies of a poem, in which an unknown scribe had celebrated his exploits, existed about the middle of the VIIth century before our era in the Royal Library at Nineveh; they had been transcribed by order of Assur-banipal from a more ancient copy, and the fragments of them which have come down to us, in spite of their lacunae, enable us to restore the original text, if not in its entirety, at least in regard to the succession of events. They were divided into twelve episodes corresponding with the twelve divisions of the year, and the ancient Babylonian author was guided in his choice of these divisions by something more than mere chance. Gilgames, at first an ordinary mortal under the patronage of the gods, had himself become a god and son of the goddess Aruru: “he had seen the abyss, he had learned everything that is kept secret and hidden, he had even made known to men what had taken place before the deluge.” The sun, who had protected him in his human condition, had placed him beside himself on the judgment-seat, and delegated to him authority to pronounce decisions from which there was no appeal: he was, as it were, a sun on a small scale, before whom the kings, princes, and great ones of the earth humbly bowed their heads.* The scribes had, therefore, some authority for treating the events of his life after the model of the year, and for expressing them in twelve chants, which answered to the annual course of the sun through the twelve months.
* The identity of Gilgames with the Accadian fire-god, or
rather with the sun, was recognized from the first by H.
Rawlinson, and has been accepted since by almost all
Assyriologists. A tablet brought back by G. Smith, called
attention to by Fr. Delitzsch, and published by Haupt,
contains the remains of a hymn addressed to Gilgames, “the
powerful king, the king of the Spirits of the Earth.”
The whole story is essentially an account of his struggles with Ishtar, and the first pages reveal him as already at issue with the goddess. His portrait, such as the monuments have preserved it for us, is singularly unlike the ordinary type: one would be inclined to regard it as representing an individual of a different race, a survival of some very ancient nation which had held rule on the plains of the Euphrates before the arrival of the Sumerian or Semitic* tribes.
* Smith (The Chaldæan Account of Genesis, p. 194) remarked
the difference between the representations of Gilgames and
the typical Babylonian: he concluded from this that the hero
was of Ethiopian origin. Hommel declares that his features
have neither a Sumerian nor Semitic aspect, and that they
raise an insoluble question in ethnology.
Drawn by Faucher-Gudin,
from an Assyrian bas-relief
from Khorsabad, in the
Museum of the Louvre
His figure is tall, broad, muscular to an astonishing degree, and expresses at once vigour and activity; his head is massive, bony, almost square, with a somewhat flattened face, a large nose, and prominent cheek-bones, the whole framed by an abundance of hair, and a thick beard symmetrically curled. All the young men of Uruk, the well-protected, were captivated by the prodigious strength and beauty of the hero; the elders of the city betook themselves to Ishtar to complain of the state of neglect to which the young generation had relegated them. “He has no longer a rival in their hearts, but thy subjects are led to battle, and Gilgames does not send one child back to his father. Night and day they cry after him: ‘It is he the shepherd of Uruk, the well-protected, he is its shepherd and master, he the powerful, the perfect and the wise.’” Even the women did not escape the general enthusiasm: “he leaves not a single virgin to her mother, a single daughter to a warrior, a single wife to her master. Ishtar heard their complaint, the gods heard it, and cried with a loud voice to Aruru: ‘It is thou, Aruru, who hast given him birth; create for him now his fellow, that he may be able to meet him on a day when it pleaseth him, in order that they may fight with each other and Uruk may be delivered.‘When Aruru heard them, she created in her heart a man of Anu. Aruru washed her hands, took a bit of clay, cast it upon the earth, kneaded it and created Babani, the warrior, the exalted scion, the man of Ninib, whose whole body is covered with hair, whose tresses are as long as those of a woman; the locks of his hair bristle on his head like those on the corn-god; he is clad in a vestment like that of the god of the fields; he browses with the gazelles, he quenches his thirst with the beasts of the field, he sports with the beasts of the waters.” Frequent representations of Eabani are found upon the monuments; he has the horns of a goat, the legs and tail of a bull.* He possessed not only the strength of a brute, but his intelligence also embraced all things, the past and the future: he would probably have triumphed over Gilgames if Shamash had not succeeded in attaching them to one another by an indissoluble tie of friendship. The difficulty was to draw these two future friends together, and to bring them face to face without their coming to blows; the god sent his courier Saîdu, the hunter, to study the habits of the monster, and to find out the necessary means to persuade him to come down peaceably to Uruk. “Saîdu, the hunter, proceeded to meet Eabani near the entrance of the watering-place. One day, two days, three days, Eabani met him at the entrance of the watering-place. He perceived Saîdu, and his countenance darkened: he entered the enclosure, he became sad, he groaned, he cried with a loud voice, his heart was heavy, his features were distorted, sobs burst from his breast. The hunter saw from a distance that his face was inflamed with anger,” and judging it more prudent not to persevere farther in his enterprise, returned to impart to the god what he had observed.
* Smith was the first, I believe, to compare his form to
that of a satyr or faun; this comparison is rendered more
probable by the fact that the modern inhabitants of Chaldæa
believe in the existence of similar monsters. A. Jeremias
places Eabani alongside Priapus, who is generally a god of
the fields, and a clever soothsayer. Following out these
ideas, we might compare our Eabani with the Graico-Roman
Proteus, who pastures the flocks of the sea, and whom it was
necessary to pursue and seize by force or cunning words to
compel him to give oracular predictions.