Gilgamesh the King

By Robert Silverberg

A thrilling retelling of the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh from the Hugo and Nebula Award–Winning author of Lord Valentine’s Castle.
 Gilgamesh’s appetite for wine, women, and warfare is insatiable. As the King of Uruk, he oppresses his people and burdens his city. To temper his excesses, the gods create Enkidu, Gilgamesh’s equal, who becomes his greatest friend. Together they wander the kingdom as brothers, conquering demons until a cruel twist changes Gilgamesh’s path forever. Two parts god and one part man, Gilgamesh is mortal—a fate he now resolves to overcome, no matter what the price. And so he embarks on another journey, in pursuit of vengeance and the ultimate prize for a mortal king: eternal life. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Robert Silverberg including rare images and never-before-seen documents from the author’s personal collection.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: May 14, 2013
• ISBN: 9781480418189

Robert Silverberg

<p>Robert Silverberg has won five Nebula Awards, four Hugo Awards, and the prestigious <em>Prix Apollo.</em> He is the author of more than one hundred science fiction and fantasy novels -- including the best-selling Lord Valentine trilogy and the classics <em>Dying Inside</em> and <em>A Time of Changes</em> -- and more than sixty nonfiction works. Among the sixty-plus anthologies he has edited are <em>Legends</em> and <em>Far Horizons,</em> which contain original short stories set in the most popular universe of Robert Jordan, Stephen King, Ursula K. Le Guin, Gregory Benford, Greg Bear, Orson Scott Card, and virtually every other bestselling fantasy and SF writer today. Mr. Silverberg's Majipoor Cycle, set on perhaps the grandest and greatest world ever imagined, is considered one of the jewels in the crown of speculative fiction.</p>

Book preview

PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF ROBERT SILVERBERG

"Nightwings is Robert Silverberg at the top of his form, and when Silverberg is at the top of his form, no one is better. A haunting, evocative look at a crumbling Earth of the far future and a human race struggling to survive amidst the ruins, full of memorable characters and images that will long linger in your memory, this is one of the enduring classics of science fiction." —George R. R. Martin

No matter if Silverberg is dealing with material that is practically straight fiction, or going way into the future … his is the hand of a master of his craft and imagination. —Los Angeles Times

The John Updike of science fiction. —The New York Times Book Review

What wonders and adventures he has to tell us. —Ursula K. Le Guin

He is a master. —Robert Jordan

One of the very best. —Publishers Weekly

In the field of science fiction, Silverberg occupies a place in the highest echelon. His work is distinguished by elegance of style, intellectual precision, and far-reaching imagination. —Jack Vance

When one contemplates Robert Silverberg it can only be with awe. In terms of excellence he has few peers, if any. —Locus

Robert Silverberg is our best … Time and time again he has expanded the parameters of science fiction. —The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction

Gilgamesh the King

Robert Silverberg

This is Diana’s book

Contents

Introduction

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Afterword

A Biography of Robert Silverberg

INTRODUCTION

I’ve been a passionate armchair archaeologist since my encounter, at the age of nine, with Anne Terry Wright’s book Lost Worlds, which told tales of the wondrous lost civilizations of Troy, Crete, Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, and the Mayan lands of Mexico, and their rediscovery by such great explorers as Heinrich Schliemann, Sir Arthur Evans, and Austen Henry Layard. My first taste of romantic antiquity led me to venture deeper and deeper into archaeological investigations, through such books as C. W. Ceram’s Gods, Graves & Scholars and Sir Leonard Woolley’s Digging Up the Past, and, eventually, through the books in which archaeologists described their own investigations.

In the course of all that reading—and in the writing of my own books on archaeological subjects, which began with my Lost Cities and Vanished Civilizations (1962)—I came across the ancient Sumerian tale of Gilgamesh. Here, my interest in archaeology meshed with my even stronger interest in science fiction, for it is possible to claim that the ancient Gilgamesh legend is in fact the oldest known science-fiction story.

The clay tablets containing the legend of Gilgamesh turned up in the middle of the nineteenth century, during the excavation by the British archaeologist Austen Henry Layard of the palace of the ancient Assyrian king Sennacherib at Mosul, in what is now Iraq. It was years before the cuneiform script of Assyria could be deciphered and translated; but in 1872, George Smith, a British Museum philologist who was sorting through the vast hoard of tablets from the library of Sennacherib’s palace, came upon part of an inscription that told the legend of a great flood, very much like the biblical deluge of Noah. Quickly rummaging through the great mass of tablets, he found other pieces of the tale. Perhaps, he thought, the rest of the story lay buried somewhere in the great Assyrian mound at Mosul. Aware of the importance of uncovering the text of an Assyrian myth that paralleled the biblical account, Smith persuaded a British newspaper to underwrite the cost of an expedition to Mesopotamia so that he could look for it.

He arrived in Mosul in May, hired some workmen, and began digging in the part of Sennacherib’s palace that Layard had referred to as the chambers of record. At once he began to uncover inscribed tablets, thousands of them, and—implausibly, miraculously—on the fifth day of work found what he had come to find: a tablet that contained the greater portion of the seventeen lines of inscription belonging to the first column of the Chaldean [Mesopotamian] account of the Deluge, and fitting into the only place where there was a serious blank in the story.

When he returned to England, Smith produced a translation—a preliminary one, full of errors, for the decipherment of cuneiform tablets was still only an approximate science then—of this tale of an Assyrian Noah, Utnapishtim by name: All that I possessed of the seed of life I gathered together, the whole I made to enter into the ship, all my servants, male and female, the tame animals of the fields, and the wild animals of the plains. … And Shamash [the god of the sun] caused a great flood, and he spake, speaking in the darkness of the night: ‘I will cause it to rain from the heavens abundantly; enter within the ship and close the door.’ … The waters destroyed all life from the face of the earth. … I was borne over the sea. Those who had done wickedness, all the human race who had turned to sin—the bodies of these floated like reeds. … All the rest is there, too, the landing of the Ark atop a great mountain, the sending to bring back information about the state of things in the world, the eventual emergence from the ship, and the resettlement of the Earth by the survivors of the great flood.

Smith’s book stirred up a great furor—were the tales the Bible told nothing more than rewrites of Assyrian myths?—and soon archaeologists working in the Mesopotamian mounds unearthed other copies of the Deluge text. It became clear that the version in Sennacherib’s library, which dated from about 700 B.C., was an Assyrian translation of a much older text—perhaps two thousand years older—in the language of the Sumerians, the founders of the first Mesopotamian civilization. Since the Bible text we have could not be any older than about 1300 B.C., this Sumerian myth must have been in circulation in the Mesopotamian region for at least a thousand years when the earliest text of Genesis was written.

It also turned out that the flood myth contained in those Assyrian and Sumerian tablets was part of a larger epic involving the adventures of an ancient hero named Gilgamesh, who was king of the Mesopotamian city of Uruk, and something like Hercules and Odysseus rolled into one. This titanic figure, who claimed to be two parts god and only one part mortal, couples with goddesses, slays monsters and demons, and, after trying and failing to prevent the death of his beloved friend Enkidu, feels a great anger at the thought that he too must ultimately die, and sets out across the world on a quest for the secret of eternal life. That secret, he learns in a divinely induced vision, can be obtained from the hero of the Deluge story, Ziusudra (as the Noah-figure is known in the Sumerian version of the text), who lives on the blessed isle of Dilmun somewhere far to the south. It is at this point that the Gilgamesh epic pauses to retell the tale of Ziusudra, whom the gods chose to spare when they grew weary of sinful mankind and sent a great flood to drown the world.

Gilgamesh’s quest for immortality takes him, after many an adventure, to Dilmun, and then to the nameless island nearby that is Ziusudra’s actual home. There, the ancient patriarch heads a community of holy men and women who live in monastic simplicity; and after several interviews in which Gilgamesh speaks of his fear of death, Ziusudra tells him where to find the plant known as Grow-Young-Again, from the pearl-like fruit of which he can make a drug that will reverse the ravages of age.

Alas, there is to be no immortality for Gilgamesh. He obtains the fruit of Grow-Young-Again, but loses it before he can prepare his immortality serum, thus fulfilling a prophecy he had heard on his journey: Gilgamesh, you never will find this eternal life that you seek. Returning to Uruk, he takes up the responsibilities of kingship again, reconciled at last to the knowledge that, one day, death will come to him as it does for all other men.

It seemed to me, after reading the complete text of the Gilgamesh epic—nearly all of it has been recovered by now, and many translations are available—that this must be the earliest science-fiction story still in existence, for surely the tale of a quest for an immortality serum qualifies as science fiction. Just about every science-fiction writer has tackled the theme in one fashion or another, among them Robert A. Heinlein in Methuselah’s Children (1941), A. E. van Vogt in The Weapon Makers (1943), Jack Vance in To Live Forever (1956), and Wilson Tucker in The Time Masters (1953), which brought the actual immortal Gilgamesh into the twentieth century. And, of course, many writers from the world of mainstream literature have dealt with the theme: George Bernard Shaw in Back to Methuselah (1921), Karel Čapek in The Makropolous Secret (1922), Aldous Huxley in After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (1939), and a multitude of others.

In 1972, I had written an immortality novel of my own, The Book of Skulls. By then, I had had for many years, tucked away in the back of my mind, the notion of doing a book that retold the Gilgamesh legend, not as melodramatic science fiction of the sort Tucker had written, nor as a fantasy full of evil priests and magic spells, but simply as a historical novel with no fantastic or supernatural elements: the story of Gilgamesh, the king of Uruk, in the land of Sumer nearly five thousand years ago, telling—in his own words—how he came into his kingship and how he struggled against the knowledge that one day he would have to die.

It was not until 1983 that I actually did anything about it. My publisher then was Arbor House, a mid-sized company run by the dynamic, aggressive, irascible Donald I. Fine. How Arbor House had come to be my publisher then is almost a book-length saga in itself; suffice it to say that in 1980, Fine had executed an intricate publishing maneuver that to my great surprise, and that of my agent, had swept me away from my publisher at the time and turned me into an Arbor House writer. But I had quickly discovered that, although he had a well-deserved reputation for being a difficult character, he would treat me with much tenderness and respect, and right from the outset we developed a warm and mutually rewarding relationship.

We did four books together over the next three years. Then, in a letter to Fine dated July 14, 1983, I proposed Gilgamesh the King as my next Arbor House book, explaining that

"the Sumerian legend of Gilgamesh is the world’s oldest surviving work of great literature, dating back more than five thousand years—which makes it nearly twice as old as The Iliad and The Odyssey. Gilgamesh is the first tragic hero of whom we know anything, and the myths that grew up about him have spread so widely through the folklore of later peoples that they may be ancestral to much of the heroic romance and mythology of other cultures, from the Homeric Greeks down to the medieval fantastists."

The historical Gilgamesh, I explained, was the fifth king of the Sumerian city of Uruk, living somewhere about 3000 B.C. After his death, a cluster of hero-legends sprang up about him, which became the subject of the epic tale that remained current and popular throughout thousands of years of Sumerian, Assyrian, and Babylonian life. I summarized the episodes of the epic scene by scene, concluding with his failed quest for the potion of immortality and his reconciliation with the inevitability of his own death. What I want to do, I said, "is use this myth as the skeleton for a first-person novel of some 400 manuscript pages that would be, essentially, the memoirs of Gilgamesh: a book in which he tells of his life in straightforward, matter-of-fact prose, describing his rise to power, his adventures, his obsession with immortality, and his ultimate realization that it cannot be obtained. … This narrative will play out against a detailed background of life in Sumer, the world’s first civilized nation. That is, instead of being a romantic tale of demons and monsters and magic, it will be a human story—the best model for which, I think, is Mary Renault’s The King Must Die, in which she turns the legends of Theseus into a plausible and convincing account of one man’s life in pre-Homeric Greece."

The book, I thought, would have a crossover audience, attracting the readers of serious historical novels, while the aspect of extreme antiquity and the tinge of heroic fantasy would bring in the fantasy/science-fiction audience where my name was already well known. Don Fine agreed, and, after some months of research, I began writing the book late in 1983, delivering it in the spring of 1984. Arbor House published it that fall.

Finding readers for it, though, proved more complicated than I had anticipated. The way books were sold in those days—only through bookstores; the Internet did not yet exist—resulted in rigid compartmentalization of categories. Science-fiction books were displayed in one section of a bookstore, fantasy novels in another, and historical novels somewhere else entirely. Any book bearing the byline of Robert Silverberg, who had been publishing mostly science fiction under that name since 1955, would automatically wind up in the s-f section, among the Foundation novels of Isaac Asimov, and the Dune novels of Frank Herbert, and 2001 and its various sequels by Arthur C. Clarke. But Gilgamesh the King didn’t have much in common with those works.

Of course, I was hoping for a crossover audience. But not only was that a problem for someone as firmly rooted in science fiction as I was, but the readership I wanted to cross over into turned out to be a vanishing one. I think we should make every effort to go after the Mary Renault audience (i.e., the audience for intelligent non-bodice-ripper historical novels) in marketing the book, I told the Arbor House marketing chief. But what I didn’t know was that the audience for intelligent, non-bodice-ripper historical novels had virtually collapsed by the early 1980s, and that the books of Mary Renault herself, bestsellers in their day, were no longer doing very well. It might not have been easy for a writer like me, with a long-established name in an entirely different field of fiction, to break into that market at all; but the market itself, I discovered, had greatly dwindled by the time I was attempting to enter it.

My reputation as a science-fiction writer assured that the book would be displayed in the s-f section, anyway. Since the book, lacking as it was in spaceships, robots, time machines, alien beings, and the rest of the conventional furniture of science fiction, didn’t look or feel like science fiction, s-f readers who picked it up and skimmed through it in the bookstores very likely would put it down again without buying it. I could argue all I liked that a novel that dealt with a quest for immortality was examining one of the great science-fiction themes; but the readers wouldn’t agree. On the other hand, some readers of heroic fantasy might go for it, but I had no particular reputation as a writer of heroic fantasy, and, besides, I had taken some pains to rationalize away the more implausibly fantastic elements of the legend, so, in its way, the book was more a novel of anti-fantasy than anything else. That made it unlikely to build a word-of-mouth audience among fantasy readers. And so, falling between genres, Gilgamesh the King went almost unnoticed in its day.

But that day was long ago, and though bookstores and their rigid categories still exist, we now have the Internet and its new methods for distributing books; and here is my Gilgamesh novel again for modern readers. Is it a historical novel? Science fiction? Fantasy? That doesn’t really matter. What it is, is a work of fiction, a book that retells the oldest myth known to humanity in a modern tone of voice. Gilgamesh the king is five thousand years old and, just as he desired so keenly, will never die, because his story is such a powerful one; and perhaps now Gilgamesh the King, the novel and not the hero, will find its place in the world also.

—Robert Silverberg

1

THERE IS IN URUK THE city a great platform of kiln-baked brick that was the playing field of the gods, long before the Flood, in that time when mankind had not yet been created and they alone inhabited the Earth. Every seventh year for the past ten thousand years we have painted the bricks of that platform white with a plaster of fine gypsum, so that it flashes like a vast mirror under the eye of the sun.

The White Platform is the domain of the goddess Inanna, to whom our city is consecrated. Many of the kings of Uruk have erected temples upon the platform for her use; and of all these shrines of the goddess none was more grand than the one that was built by my royal grandfather the hero Enmerkar. A thousand artisans labored for twenty years to construct it, and the ceremony of its dedication lasted eleven days and eleven nights without cease, and during that time the moon was wrapped each evening in a deep mantle of blue light as a token of Inanna’s pleasure. We are Inanna’s children, the people sang, and Enmerkar is her brother, and he shall reign forever and ever.

Nothing remains of that temple now, for I tore it down after I came to the throne, and put up a far more splendid one on its site. But in its time it was a wonder of the world. It is a place that will always hold special meaning for me: within its precincts, one day in my childhood, the beginnings of wisdom descended on me, and the shape of my life was shaped, and I was set upon a course from which there has been no turning.

That was the day on which the palace servants fetched me from my games to watch my father the king, divine Lugalbanda, embark upon the last of his journeys. Lugalbanda goes forth now to the bosom of the gods, they told me, and he shall live for all time among them in joy, and drink their wine and eat their bread. I think and hope that they were right; but it may very well be the case that my father’s final journey has brought him instead to the Land of No Returning, to the House of Dust and Darkness, where his ghost shuffles about sadly like a bird with crippled wings, feeding on dry clay. I do not know.

I am he whom you call Gilgamesh. I am the pilgrim who has seen everything within the confines of the Land, and far beyond it; I am the man to whom all things were made known, the secret things, the truths of life and death, most especially those of death. I have coupled with Inanna in the bed of the Sacred Marriage; I have slain demons and spoken with gods; I am two parts god myself, and only one part mortal. Here in Uruk I am king, and when I walk through the streets I walk alone, for there is no one who dares approach me too closely. I would not have it that way, but it is too late to alter matters now: I am a man apart, a man alone, and so will I be to the end of my days. Once I had a friend who was the heart of my heart, the self of my self, but the gods took him from me and he will not come again.

My father Lugalbanda must have known a loneliness much like mine, for he was a king and a god also, and a great hero in his day. Surely those things set him apart from ordinary men, as I have been set apart.

The imprint of my father is still clear in my mind after all these years: a great-shouldered deep-chested man, who went bare above the waist in all seasons, wearing only his long flounced woolen robe from hips to ankles. His skin was smooth and dark from the sun, like polished leather, and he had a thick curling black beard, in the manner of the desert people, though unlike them he shaved his scalp. I remember his eyes best of all, dark and bright and enormous, seeming to fill his whole forehead: when he scooped me up and held me before his face, I sometimes thought I would float forward into the vast pool of those eyes and be lost within my father’s soul forever.

I saw him rarely. There were too many wars to fight. Year after year he led the chariots forth to quell some uprising in our unruly vassal state of Aratta, far to the east, or to drive away the wild marauding tribes of the wastelands that crept up on Uruk to steal our grain and cattle, or to display our might before one of our great rival cities, Kish or Ur. When he was not away at the wars, there were the pilgrimages he must make to the holy shrines, in spring to Nippur, in the autumn to Eridu. Even when he was home he had little time for me, preoccupied as he was by the necessary festivals and rituals of the year, or the meetings of the city assembly, or the proceedings of the court of justice, or the supervision of the unending work that must be done to maintain our canals and dikes. But he promised me that a time would come when he would teach me the things of manhood and we would hunt lions together in the marshlands.

That time never arrived. The malevolent demons that hover always above our lives, awaiting some moment of weakness in us, are unwearying; and when I was six years old one of those creatures succeeded in penetrating the high walls of the palace, and seized upon the soul of Lugalbanda the king, and swept him from the world.

I had no idea that any of that was happening. In those days life was only play for me. The palace, that formidable place of fortified towered entrances and intricately niched facades and lofty columns, was my gaming-house. All day long I ran about with an energy that never failed, shouting and laughing and tumbling on my hands. Even then I was half again as tall as any boy of my own age, and strong accordingly; and so I chose older boys as my playfellows, always the rough ones, the sons of grooms and cupbearers, for of brothers I had none.

So I played at chariots and warriors, or wrestled, or fought with cudgels. And meanwhile one day a sudden horde of priests and exorcists and sorcerers began to come and go within the palace, and a clay image of the demon Namtaru was fashioned and placed close by the stricken king’s head, and a brazier was filled with ashes and a dagger put within it, and on the third day at nightfall the dagger was brought forth and thrust into the image of Namtaru and the image was buried in the corner of the wall, and libations of beer were poured and a young pig was slaughtered and its heart was set forth to appease the demon, and water was sprinkled, and constant prayers were chanted; and each day Lugalbanda struggled for his life and lost some further small part of the struggle. Not a word of this was said to me. My playfellows grew somber and seemed abashed to be running about and shouting and whacking at cudgels with me. I did not know why. They did not tell me that my father was dying, though I think they certainly knew it and knew also what the consequences of his death would be.

Then one morning a steward of the palace came to me and called out, Put up your cudgel, boy! No more games! There is man’s business to do today! He bade me bathe and dress myself in my finest brocaded robe, and place about my forehead my headband of golden foil and lapis lazuli, and go to the apartment of my mother the queen Ninsun. For I must accompany her shortly to the temple of Enmerkar, he said.

I went to her, not understanding why, since it was no holy day known to me. I found my mother clad most magnificently in a coat of bright crimson wool, a headdress gleaming with carnelian and topaz and chalcedony, and golden breastplates from which hung ivory amulets in the form of fish and gazelles. Her eyes were darkened with kohl and her cheeks were painted deep green, so that she looked like a creature that had risen from the sea. She said nothing to me, but fastened about my neck a figurine in red stone of the wind-demon Pazuzu, as if she feared for me. She touched her hand lightly to my cheek. Her touch was cool.

Then we went out into the long hall of the fountains, where many people were waiting for us. And from there we went in procession, the grandest procession I had ever seen, to the Enmerkar temple.

A dozen priests led the way, naked as priests must be when they come before a god, and a dozen priestesses as well, naked also. After them strode two dozen tall warriors who had fought in the campaigns of Lugalbanda. These were encumbered by their full armor, copper helmets and all, and carried their axes and shields. I was sorry for them, inasmuch as this was in the month Abu, when the scourge of summer lies heaviest on the Land, and no rain falls and the heat is a burden beyond bearing.

Following the warriors came the people of the household of Lugalbanda: butlers, maids, cupbearers, jesters and acrobats, grooms, charioteers, gardeners, musicians, dancing-girls, barbers, drawers of the bath, and all the rest. Every one of them was dressed in a fine robe, finer than anything I had ever seen them wear before, and they carried the implements of their professions as though they were on their way to wait on Lugalbanda. I knew most of these people. They had served in the palace since before I was born. Their sons were my playmates and sometimes I had taken meals in their dwellings. But when I smiled and waved to them they looked away, keeping their faces solemn.

The last person in this group was one who was particularly dear to me. I went skipping up from my place in the rear of the procession to walk beside him. This was old Ur-kununna, the court harper: a long-shanked white-bearded man, very grave of bearing but with gentle twinkling eyes, who had lived in every city of the Land and knew every hymn and every legend. Each afternoon he sang in the Ninhursag courtyard of the palace, and I would sit at his feet for hour upon hour while he touched his harp and chanted the tale of the marriage of Inanna and Dumuzi, or the descent of Inanna to the nether world, or the tale of Enlil and Ninlil, or of the journey of the moon-god Nanna to the city of Nippur, or of the hero Ziusudra, who built the great vessel by which mankind survived the Flood, and who was rewarded by the gods with eternal life in the paradise on Earth that is known as Dilmun. He sang us also ballads of my grandfather Enmerkar’s wars with Aratta, and the famous one of the adventures of Lugalbanda before he was king, when in his wanderings he entered a place where the air was poisonous, and nearly lost his life, but was saved by the goddess. Ur-kununna had taught some of these songs to me, and he had showed me how to play his harp. His manner was always warm and tender toward me, with never any show of impatience. But now, when I ran up alongside him, he was strangely remote and aloof: like everyone else, he said nothing, and when I indicated that I would like to carry his harp he shook his head almost brusquely. Then my mother hissed at me and called me back to the place that she and five of her serving-maids occupied at the end of the procession.

Down the endless rows of palace steps we marched, and into the Street of the Gods, and along it to the Path of the Gods that leads to the Eanna precinct where the temples are, and up the multitude of steps to the White Platform, and across it, dazzled by the reflection of the brilliant sunlight, to the Enmerkar temple. All along the path the streets were lined with silent citizens, thousands of them: the whole population of Uruk must have been there.

On the steps of the temple Inanna waited to receive us. I trembled when I saw her. The goddess has since earliest time owned Uruk and all that is within it, and I dreaded her power over me. She who stood there was of course the priestess Inanna of human flesh, and not the goddess. But at that time I did not know the difference between them, and thought I was in the presence of the Queen of Heaven herself, the Daughter of the Moon. Which in a way was so, since the goddess is incarnate in the woman, though I could not have grasped such subtleties so young.

The Inanna who admitted us to the temple that day was the old Inanna, with a face like a hawk’s and terrifying eyes, rather than the more beautiful but no less ferocious one in whom the goddess came to dwell afterward. She was clad in a bright cape of scarlet leather, arranged on a wooden framework so that it flared out mightily beyond her shoulders and rose high above her. Her breasts were bare and painted at the tips. On her arms were copper ornaments in the form of serpents, for the serpent is the sacred creature of Inanna; and about her throat was coiled not a copper serpent but a living one, of a thickness of two or three fingers, but sluggish in the terrible heat, barely troubling to let its forked black tongue flicker forth. As we went past her, Inanna sprinkled us with perfumed water from a gilded ewer, and spoke to us in low chanted murmurs. She did not use the language of the Land, but the secret mystery-language of the goddess-worshippers, those who follow the Old Way that was in the Land before my people came down into it from the mountains. All this was frightening to me, only because it was so solemn and out of the ordinary.

Within the great hall of the temple was Lugalbanda.

He lay upon a broad slab of polished alabaster, and he seemed to be asleep. Never had he looked so kingly to me: instead of his usual half-length flounced skirt he wore a mantle of white wool and a dark blue robe richly woven with threads of silver and gold, and gold-dust was sprinkled into his beard so that it sparkled like the sun’s fire. Beside his head rested, in place of the crown he had worn during his life, the horned crown of a king who is also a god. By his left hand lay his scepter, decorated with rings of lapis lazuli and mosaics of brightly colored seashells, and by his right was a wondrous dagger with a blade of gold, a hilt of lapis lazuli and gold studs, and a sheath fashioned of gold strands woven in openwork like plaited leaves of grass. Heaped up before him on the floor was an immense mound of treasure: earrings and finger-rings in gold and silver, drinking-cups of beaten silver, dice-boards, cosmetics-boxes, alabaster jars of rare scent, golden harps and bull-headed lyres, a model in silver of his chariot and one of his six-oared skiff, chalices of obsidian, cylinder-seals, vases of onyx and chalcedony, golden bowls, and so much more that I could not believe the profusion of it. Standing arrayed about my father’s bier on all four sides were the great lords of the city, perhaps twenty of them.

We took up our places before the king, my mother and I in the center of the group. The palace servants clustered about us, and the warriors in armor flanked us on both sides. From the temple courtyard came the great hollow booming of the lilissu, which is the kettledrum that otherwise is beaten only at the time of an eclipse of the moon. Then I heard the lighter sound of the little balag-drums and the shrill skirling of clay whistles as Inanna entered the temple preceded by her naked priests and priestesses. She went to the high place at the rear of the hall, where in a temple of An or Enlil there would be an effigy of the god; but in the temple of Inanna at Uruk there is no need for effigies, because the goddess herself dwells amongst us.

Now began a ceremony of singing and chanting, much of it in the language of the Old Way, which I did not then know and scarcely comprehend today, since the Old Way is woman-religion, goddess-religion, and they keep it to themselves. There were libations of wine and oil, and a bull and a ram were brought forth and sacrificed and their blood sprinkled over my father, and seven golden trays of water were emptied as gifts to the seven planets, and there were more such sacred acts. The snake of Inanna awoke and moved between her breasts, and flicked its tongue, and fixed its eyes upon me, and I was afraid. I felt goddess-presence all about me, intense, stifling.

I edged close to the kindly Ur-kununna and whispered, Is my father dead?

We must not speak, boy.

Please. Is he dead? Tell me.

Ur-kununna looked down at me from his great height and I saw the white light of his wisdom glowing in his eyes, and his tenderness, and his love for me, and I thought, how like his eyes are to Lugalbanda’s, how large and dark, how they fill his forehead! He said gently, Yes, your father is dead.

And what does that mean, being dead?

We must not speak during the ceremony.

Was Inanna dead when she descended into the nether world?

For three days, yes.

And it was like being asleep?

He smiled and said nothing:

But then she awoke and came back, and now she stands before us. Will my father awaken? Will he come back to govern Uruk again, Ur-kununna?

Ur-kununna shook his head. He will awaken, but he will not come back to govern Uruk. Then he put his finger to his lips, and would not speak again, leaving me to consider the meaning of my father’s death as the ceremony went on and on about me. Lugalbanda did not move; he did not breathe; his eyes were closed. It was like sleep. But it must have been more than sleep. It was death. When Inanna went to the nether world and was slain, it was the occasion of great dismay in heaven and Father Enki caused her to be brought forth into life. Would Father Enki cause Lugalbanda to be brought forth into life? No, I did not think so. Where then was Lugalbanda now, where would he journey next?

I listened to the chanting, and heard the answer: Lugalbanda was on his way to the palace of the gods, where he would dwell forever in the company of Sky-father An and Father Enlil and Father Enki the wise and compassionate, and all the rest. He would feast in the feasting-hall of the gods, and drink sweet wine and black beer with them. And I thought that that would not be so harsh a fate, if indeed that was where he was going. But how could we be sure that that was where he was going? How could we be sure? I turned again to Ur-kununna, but he stood with eyes closed, chanting and swaying. So I was left alone with my thoughts of death and my struggle to understand what was happening to my father.

Then the chanting ended, and Inanna made a gesture, and a dozen of the lords of the city knelt and lifted to their shoulders the massive alabaster slab on which my father lay, and carried it from the temple through the side entrance. The rest of us followed, my mother and I leading the procession,

Reviews for Gilgamesh the King

[jbarringer-2 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I don't usually associate the name Robert Silverberg with historical fiction, but this one was good. It is a story set in Mesopotamia, and tries to show how life might have been for people in the Middle East during the Biblical era.

[kaipakartik_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I got half way through. Then the book became really slow. The beginning was outstanding though.

[bookmarc-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Silverberg's "Gilgamesh The King" is a well written, entertaining story. The level of detail in description of both the common and the other worldly captivates the reader and brings the world to life. In my reading I found the characters to be the most enjoyable because of the sheer breadth of their interactions which range from love and hate and both at the same time. While some minor issues nag at me, I'd recommend the story to anyone who wants to read a more approachable epic.

[traveller1_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Silverberg is always good, often great, here he is at his greatest. An epic story retold in modern format. The great King who conquers all, but what he fears most—death. A dream-like quality, mythic, primitive, primal, intimate, compelling and surprisingly real. The sequel, where Gilgamesh continues his life and adventures in the afterlife, is equally good.
I did read the novel way before this 2005 edition, but no longer have those details.

[turtlesleap · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Interesting fictionalization of the Gilgamesh myths

[mbone07 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Silverberg's "Gilgamesh The King" is a well written, entertaining story. The level of detail in description of both the common and the other worldly captivates the reader and brings the world to life. In my reading I found the characters to be the most enjoyable because of the sheer breadth of their interactions which range from love and hate and both at the same time. While some minor issues nag at me, I'd recommend the story to anyone who wants to read a more approachable epic.