Was Sumerian King Gilgamesh Real? - ROBERT SEPEHR

🎶 I was out paddling in the lake on a nice sunny day, and it got me thinking about poetry. But being an anthropologist, that often means something ancient. And in this case, the Epic of Gilgamesh came to mind. Thousands of years before Homer, the ancient Aryan nobility living between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers embedded esoteric knowledge and history onto stone tablets in the form of epic poetry, which combined real-life people and events with occult symbology and astrotheology, meaning they intertwined historic facts with symbolism and the movement of the stars. Over 4,000 years old, it's an epic poem from ancient Mesopotamia regarded as the earliest surviving great work of literature and the second oldest religious text in the world, the oldest being an ancient Egyptian funerary text dating from the late Old Kingdom carved onto the subterranean walls and sarcophagi of pyramids at Saqqara. The Epic of Gilgamesh consists of 12 tablets and starts with five Sumerian poems about a powerful king of Uruk, which is in modern-day Iraq, and once was an important Sumerian and Babylonian city, which had between 50,000 and 100,000 residents, making it the largest city-urban area in the world about 4,000 to 5,000 years ago. The Babylonian version of the poem was titled He Who Saw the Abyss, or another way of translating it, He Who Sees the Unknown, and the first half discusses King Gilgamesh and another character called Enkidu, which is described as a primitive wild man, which as an anthropologist I take to mean something along the lines of Homo erectus. The gods created this archaic hominid to stop King Gilgamesh from oppressing the people of Uruk, so Enkidu acted as a servant and slave in what was one of the earliest agricultural civilizations and farming was very labor-intensive. At first, this was a slave and master relationship, but Enkidu is then civilized through sex rituals with a prostitute, and for the rest of the epic Enkidu is then a friend to Gilgamesh, although not an equal. While this sex ritual was always very graphic in nature, a new cuneiform tablet has been discovered recently, and although it's just 16 lines of text, the sex scene is described in even more detail, yielding an entirely new sequence of events. The epic already told of how Enkidu, the primitive hunter-gatherer, became human by having sex with a woman named Shamhat for an entire week straight, making love for six days and seven nights, non-stop, but now it turns out that it took not one, but two full weeks of lovemaking to make Enkidu truly human. Enkidu originally grew up among the animals and is described as a savage or wild man, until Gilgamesh orders the prostitute Shamhat to seduce him and separate him from his animal companions. There are two ways that most people interpret this ritual event, which leads to Enkidu becoming civilized. The first is that the context of prostitute in ancient Mesopotamia was not derogatory, it's not the same thing as in modern times, and implies a sacred act where through the ritual one would commune with the gods and goddesses, and if carried out in a specific way, using tantra and prolonged orgasm, it results in an activation of the chakras, including what some call the third eye, and leads to enlightenment. Others see this marathon sex as having to do with literal procreation, where the civilizing of Enkidu is about the creation of a new race, a genetic hybridization. This argument is made with references to other supporting material regarding the Anunnaki, which means princely seed or princely blood, and alludes to a divine god-like race in Sumerian mythology that creates a servant race, and according to some interpretations, upgrades Homo erectus in order to create a slave species of gold miners and workers. This concept is not isolated to Mesopotamia, as even in the ancient texts of the Indian subcontinent, we have tales of the Vanara, a simian race that lives in the forest, featured in the Hindu epic the Ramayana. The word Vanara comes from vana meaning forest, and nara meaning man, and although the word Vanara has come to mean monkey over the years, and the Vanaras are depicted as monkeys in popular art, their exact identity is not clear. The Ramayana presents them as human-like, with reference to their speech and clothing, but also describes them as having monkey-like characteristics. This Vanara race also appears in other ancient texts, including the Mahabharata, and while some Hindu scholars think of them as strictly mythical, a substantial number of them take the stories to reflect literal history, pointing to examples such as Rama's Bridge, a 30-mile-long bridge described in the Ramayana as being built by the god Rama with the help of an army of ape-men. Geological evidence suggests that what appears to be a man-made bridge was once a former land connection between India and Sri Lanka, and that it was passable on foot until the 15th century when storms deepened the channel. A local Hindu temple claims that Rama's Bridge was entirely above sea level until it broke in a cyclone in 1480. While this bridge is controversial, and there are plenty of skeptics discounting the stories as myth, I bring it up just to demonstrate that the idea of a different hominid species being hybridized and used as a worker or slave race is not exclusive to the Sumerians, and there are scholars that not only point to archaeological evidence to support the ancient myths, many are now turning to genetics to back up the ancient literature, since modern DNA sequencing has unlocked the genomes of not only modern humans, but several archaic species such as Neanderthal, Denisovans, and others that have yet to be identified in the fossil record, which are likely Homo erectus specimens that can be found in the DNA of various races of modern living human populations today. Dr. Rangan Ramakrishnan, an Indian scholar, said that, quote, If one reads the original Ramayana without the influence of succeeding vernacular versions, which emerged at least several centuries later, Vanaras, like Hunaman, are referred to as distinct species altogether. Like other human species, they speak fluently and they inhabit a distinctive culture. Ramayana is perhaps the only literature to speak about a variety of human species offering to fill an important gap in human ancestry and evolution through literary support. Interestingly, the protagonist, Lord Rama, corresponds to the Sapiens, and other Vanaras loosely match Homo erectus. Are these striking similarities mere coincidence, or shouldn't we take it more seriously? In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the prostitute Shamat journeys out into the wild where she finds Enkitu by a watering hole. Shamat strips off her clothes and lures Enkitu into having sex with her for six days and seven nights, which leads to Enkitu losing some of his raw animal strength, but gaining higher intelligence, intellect, and consciousness of a human being. In the New Tablet, Shamat invites Enkitu to Uruk, and they have sex for a second week, and then Shamat invites Enkitu to Uruk again. Most scholars conclude that the differences between the two episodes reflect different stages of Enkitu's transition from an archaic primitive animal to a modern human being. The first time Shamat invites Enkitu to come to Uruk, Enkitu readily accepts her invitation, saying that he will come to Uruk, but only to challenge Gilgamesh and usurp his power. I shall change the order of things, he declares. Quote, The one born in the wild is mighty, he has strength. Though Enkitu has learned to plan and speak like a human being, his way of thinking is still very much that of a wild animal. But the second time Shamat invites him to Uruk, after they have sex for yet another week, he sees things differently. Shamat says that she will lead him to the temple, home of Anu, the god of heaven. Rather than change the order of things, Enkitu is to find a place for himself in society, where men are engaged in labors of skill. You too, like a true man, will make a place for yourself. Enkitu, now wiser after a second bout of civilizing sex, is ready to accept this invitation. Quote, He heard her words, he consented to what she said. A woman's counsel struck home in his heart. He accepts the fact that human society is not all about domination and strength, but also about cooperation and skill. Each human being is part of a larger social fabric, where everyone must find their own place, and Enkitu's role is that of a servant. After the first week of sex, or in some interpretations, genetic hybridization, Enkitu, or the new race he represents, may have acquired human language, a higher IQ than before, and a capacity for reflection, but he's still stuck in the world of animals. He thinks only in terms of challenging rivals. To become fully human, he learns to see himself not as an individual who has to assert strength through acting out in physical violence, but as a social being who must participate in the life of the city, and with a lower intellect, this involves physical labor. In the second half of the epic, distress over Enkitu's death causes Gilgamesh to undertake a long and perilous journey to discover the secret of eternal life. He doesn't quite find it, but he's immortalized in the stars, as the constellation Orion has its origins in Sumerian mythology, as it's associated with the story of their hero fighting the bull of heaven, represented by Taurus. That said, in 2003, a German-led expedition reported that it had discovered what was thought to be the entire city of Uruk, including the lost tomb of Gilgamesh. Georg Fassbinder of the Bavarian Department of Historical Monuments in Munich said, quote, I don't want to say definitely that it was the grave of Gilgamesh, but it looks very similar to that described in the epic. In the story, Gilgamesh is described as having been buried under the Euphrates, and the tomb was discovered where it would have been surrounded by waters of the Euphrates before the river changed its course. We found, just outside the city, an area in the middle of the former Euphrates River, the remains of such a building which could be interpreted as a burial. By reading differences in the magnetism in the soil, you can look into the ground. The difference between mud bricks and sediments in the Euphrates provides a very detailed structure. The most surprising thing was that we found structures that had already described in the Gilgamesh epic. We covered more than 100 hectares. We found garden structures and field structures, as described in the epic, and we found Babylonian houses. Very clearly we can see the canals, some structures showing that flooding destroyed some houses, which means it was a highly developed system, like Venice in the desert. So while much of the epic of Gilgamesh was a mythology that contained astro-theology, describing cyclical patterns of celestial bodies in the heavens, it could also be interpreted as having symbolic esoteric knowledge, found in other mystery teachings, pertaining to the immortality of the soul. That said, Gilgamesh was also likely a flesh and blood ruler, a historical king of Uruk during the Holocene, during the dynasty of Iana, around 4,600 years ago, following the first dynasty of Kish, as described by the Sumerian kings list. After the flood had swept over, and kingship had descended from heaven, the kingship was in Kish. Then Kish was defeated, and the kingship was taken to Iana. My name is Robert Sepper. I'm an anthropologist. My published work is available on Amazon, as well as through various other major book outlets. They make a great gift. If you'd like to support my work, you can do that through Patreon.com. There should be a link in the description section for those who are interested. I appreciate it. Thank you. Please hit the like button, subscribe for future updates. As always, I look forward to reading your comments, so please leave me your thoughts below. Please have a wonderful weekend, and I hope to see you again soon.