The Rejection of Ishtar

The two heroes return to Uruk in triumph. The cedars are unloaded; Gilgamesh washes the dust off, puts on clean robes, places a crown on his head. From the temple of Eanna, Ishtar — goddess of love and war, patron of the city — sees him and is overcome. She comes down and proposes marriage on the spot. Be my husband, she says, and I will give you a chariot of gold, lapis-lazuli wheels, a team of demons for horses; the kings of the earth will kneel before you.

Gilgamesh refuses her at length, with cold catalogue precision, in one of the great speeches in any ancient literature. What husband, he asks her, did you ever stay loyal to? He counts her lovers, lover by lover. Tammuz, mourned every year. The speckled bird whose wings she broke. The lion she dug pits for. The horse to whom she gave the whip and the spur. The shepherd she turned into a wolf. The gardener she turned into a frog. He will not be the next entry in the list.

Ishtar, humiliated in front of her city, climbs in fury to heaven and demands the Bull of Heaven from her father Anu, threatening to break the gates of the underworld unless he agrees. Anu reluctantly hands it over. With the bull's first snort a hundred men fall into a pit; with the second, two hundred; with the third, three hundred. Enkidu seizes its tail; Gilgamesh stabs it between the horns; they tear out its heart and offer it to Shamash. Then Enkidu, in pure insolence, hurls the right thigh onto the wall in Ishtar's face. The city feasts. That night, in his sleep, Enkidu has a dream.