The Funeral of Enkidu

Gilgamesh will not let Enkidu go. The whole of tablet eight is the long lament. He sits beside the body and speaks to it. He calls on every animal of the wilderness Enkidu used to run with — the gazelles his foster mothers, the donkeys his foster fathers, the bears, the leopards, the panthers, the lions, the great deer — to mourn with him. He calls on the cedar of the forest, the cypress, the rivers, the elders of Uruk, the temple women. He calls on Shamhat, who first brought Enkidu out of the wild. He covers Enkidu's face like a bride's, weeping over him like a widow.

For six days and seven nights he sits there. He will not allow the body to be carried out. He cradles the head. He sets a banquet of gold and lapis at his friend's side, treasure for the journey to the underworld — a flask of ointment, a great drinking horn of carnelian, a cup of pure lapis lazuli, an axe whose handle he loved, the bow of Anshan. The whole city mourns with him. The poem catalogues the offerings carefully; this is Mesopotamian funeral practice in the lines of an epic.

On the seventh day a worm crawls out of Enkidu's nostril. Gilgamesh sees it. The realization is exact and physical and final: this is what my brother is now. This is what I will be. The poem does not soften the moment. He throws off his royal robes. He cuts his hair. He puts on the skin of a lion. He runs out of Uruk into the wilderness, alone, no provisions, no destination. He is going to find out, one way or another, whether death has to be true. The funeral is over. The quest is beginning.