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Essay on Heroic Relationship between Achilles and Gilgamesh
The heroic poem with which a reciter could be most certain of commanding his audience's attention was the story of Gilgamesh. The hero was King of Uruk in remotest antiquity: he had built the city with its palaces and temples, its gates and its encircling walls, and this achievement, of which he was particularly proud, was eventually to console him for the unsuccessful end of his adventures. He was a good ruler, but his yoke lay heavy on his people, and especially on their wives and daughters: and prayers were universally offered to Aruru, the goddess of fertility, for the creation of a creature to whom he could devote himself and who might thus divert his attention from his subjects. Aruru meditated the creature to which she was going to give life, and then, casting a lump of clay upon the ground, she shaped and animated it.
This was the origin of Enkidu the savage, wholly ignorant of civilization, whose body was shaggy, and whose head was covered with hair like a woman's. He ate grass like a deer and slaked his thirst at water holes. He was in many respects an animal and Gilgamesh needed the full strength of the divine element in his being (he was two-thirds divine, being the son of the goddess Nin-Sun, and one-third human) to control him.
But there was in Enkidu an element of something beyond the merely animal, for he delivered captured beasts from the snares of the hunters, who, to rid themselves of him, brought him a harlot from the temple of Ishtar, who in her turn introduced him to civilization in the obvious manner for no less than six days and seven nights. His hair was cut, his body shaved, and he was anointed with oil: but he still knew nothing of bread, nor of human food and drink.....
