Gilgamesh, Sumerian Cycle: Gilgamesh and the Bull of Heaven

The Sumerian poem "Gilgamesh and the Bull of Heaven" is still unpublished (1961!). Its contents, poorly preserved as they are, may be sketched as follows: After a lacuna of some twenty lines, the poem continues with an address to Gilgamesh by the goddess Inanna (the Sumerian counterpart of the Babylonian Ishtar), in which she describes the gifts and favours she is prepared to shower upon him. It is reasonable to assume that the preceding missing portion of the text contained Inanna's love proposals. Another break in the text follows, which must have contained Gilgamesh's rejection of Inanna's offers. When the text becomes intelligible once again, we find Inanna before An, the heaven-god, asking to be presented with the Bull of Heaven. An at first refuses, but Inanna threatens to take up the matter with all the great gods of the universe. Terrified, An grants her request. Inanna then sends the Bull of Heaven down against Erech, and it ravages the city. From here on, the available text, which concludes with an address by Enkidu to Gilgamesh, becomes unintelligible. The end of the poem, which probably described Gilgamesh's victorious struggle with the Bull of the Heaven, is missing altogether.

A blue and yellow glazed bull
from Babylon (18th c BCE).

When the contents of this Sumerian poem are compared with those of its Babylonian counterpart in the "Epic of Gilgamesh", they show a close and unmistakable resemblance in the broad outlines of the plot. In both poems Inanna (Ishtar) offers her love and tempting gifts to Gilgamesh; the offer is rejected; with the unwilling consent of An (Anu), the Bull of Heaven is sent to attack Erech; the beast ravages the city, but is finally killed. As for the details, the two versions vary almost beyond the point of recognition. The gifts offered by Inanna (Ishtar) to tempt Gilgamesh are quite different in the two versions. Gilgamesh's rejection speech, which, in the Babylonian epic, consists of 56 lines and is filled with learned allusions to Babylonian mythology and proverbs, is much briefer in the Sumerian version. The conversations between Inanna (Ishtar) and An (Anu) bear little similarity in the two versions. Nor is there any reason to doubt that the concluding details of the Sumerian poem, when these are recovered, will have but little in common with those of the Babylonian epic.