Cedar Forest

Chapter 9 The Forest That Was Not Silent Here is where I have to tell you about a tablet that we have only had since 2014.

For most of the time that people have been reading this poem, the arrival at the cedar forest was short.

A few lines.

They stood and stared at the mountain of cedar.

And what is on it is about 20 lines of Tablet 5 that nobody alive had ever seen.

And what those 20 lines contain is the forest, not the height of the trees, the noise, the monkeys.

There are monkeys in the cedar forest.

They are chorusing, the tablet says.

The gods make a being called Enkidu from a lump of clay to challenge him, but they become friends.

They go rampaging through the cedar forest.

They kill the guardian of the cedar forest.

And then Ishtar, because he has rejected her hand in marriage, very... very cruelly, imposes a punishment on him that he's never had to deal with before which is one of loss and grief and bereavement for somebody that he loved.

And thereafter the poem in the last third becomes a quest poem in his search for eternal life.

the passage in which Gilgamesh talks of his grief over Enkidu's death?

Why shouldn't I roam the wilds like a lion? I mourn for Enkidu, the galloping mule, the mountain donkey, the leopard of the plains.

Shoulder to shoulder we scaled the peaks, seized and slaughtered the bull of heaven, destroyed Humbaba of the cedar forest, and slayed lions in the mountain passes.

Although neither wins, they become and remain bosom friends.

Enkidu and Gilgamesh team up, and they leave town to go on an adventure to the cedar forest, where the ogre Humbaba, there he is on the left, a representation probably of Humbaba with his wrinkly face, who guards the cedar forest over in Lebanon.

Gilgamesh and Enkidu decide to travel to the cedar forest, where the ogre Humbaba, likely a representation of Humbaba with his wrinkled face, resides, to kill him, felling his cedars and returning them to Uruk.

And so, they do.

An old Babylonian plaque depicts Gilgamesh and Enkidu slaughtering Humbaba, the tree monster, in his forest before they cut down the cedars, and that is their first glorious act of heroism.

i shall scream so loud that the dead will arise from the netherworld and eat the living this marks the first instance in human literature where the concept of zombies comes into play indeed her father is opposed to the idea of zombies roaming the earth he'd rather they stay in the netherworld and he gives to his daughter the bull of heaven the constellation taurus a fiery bull in the sky He brings it down to Uruk, where it causes much damage, but in the end, of course, Gilgamesh and Enkidu defeat it and slay it, as you can see on this rather wretched clay plaque now in Berlin.

And that is the point of this pair's greatest achievements.

They have slaughtered an ogre in the cedar forest, and they have slaughtered the bull of heaven.

and that friendship will make gilgames greater than he was it will also make him vulnerable in a way no enemy ever could friendship changes gilgames but it does not make him humble if anything it gives his ambition a new direction Gilgamesh looks at Enkidu, this man shaped from clay, raised among animals, strong enough to challenge a king, and he sees the perfect companion for an impossible deed.

Somewhere far from Uruk, beyond the settled fields and the familiar roads, lies the cedar forest.

To Mesopotamians, cedar was not just another kind of tree.

Southern Mesopotamia had mud, reeds, river clay and date palms, but it did not have vast forests of towering timber.

Cedar came from distant mountain lands, probably associated in the epic with the forests of Lebanon or the Amanus range.

It was rare, expensive, fragrant, fit for temples, palaces, ships, doors and the houses of gods.

The Cedar Forest was wealth at the edge of the known world, and it was guarded by Humbaba, or Huwawa in some older Sumerian versions of the story.

His name changes slightly across languages and tablets, but his role remains the same.