Mother, Goddess, Seductress, Harlot: Women in "The Epic of Gilgamesh"

At the time it was written down, the Epic of Gilgamesh was the definitive national epic of Babylonia. Babylon was the capital and largest city in Babylonia, which lay within the region of Mesopotamia. Today it is among the earliest known works of literary narrative, first written in a series of Sumerian cities in southern Mesopotamia about 2100 BCE. The Epic clearly had an important place in the story and religious life of both the individual and society, as is evident by the fact that a significant number of elements in the narrative parallel concepts and practices almost universally found cross-culturally. It is an exploration of Uruk and surrounding rural life between 2500 and 4500 BCE. The highly literal nature of the language and the unique blend of narrative and religious elements of the epic may provide a more sympathetic and culturally specific insight into both the social and psychological need for religious language and symbols and the specific details of the feminine divine in all cultures and the prevailing cultural attitude towards women. Moreover, both the relative lack of a predatory and competitive attitude towards women apparent in the characters and the apparent elevation of females as mothers, both biologically and metaphorically, are very much contra cultural to the patriarchal structure that is evident in the masculine language. The ethos of the diverse population of Sumer was nearly universally tethered to maintaining the system, since life collapsed without a mother's nurturing touch to restore balance. In fact, all the priorities and behaviors of the protagonists are directly derivative from the powerful influence the culture affected upon almost every facet of religious life. This directly parallels attempts to preserve and return balance of both a fundamental policy and the divine feminine. These elements profoundly were instantiated in the mythology of the deities eldest Judge Seated of the Fifty Destinies in the Sumerian tablets.

The Archetypes of Women in the Epic: Mother, Goddess, Seductress, and Harlot

The epic of Gilgamesh is so interesting and intriguing to those who want insight into what ancient Mesopotamian society might have been like. Gilgamesh is continually inspired and challenged by his encounters with the gods, and his quest is in part created by the physical manifestation of Mother Earth at the behest of the gods. Both Gilgamesh and Enkidu have encounters with various female archetypes, some encouraging and some discouraging. The portrayal of these women gives us a key to the society. Women have some power and freedom, are shown as naturally more loyal, wise, and temperate than men, are allowed to join in important religious and life-related events, and may also be desired sexually.

One of the most intriguing aspects of Gilgamesh is the possible role of women in the society in which they lived. This story suggests that women had an unusually open and central role in the society and may have been afforded more rights and more power than their comparative modern counterparts. The archetypes of mother, seductress, and, in the guise of Ishtar, goddess, are vital to the tale. Ishtar and Shamhat show the flirting sexual predator who plays with men’s emotions like a cat plays, and more obviously, Enkidu, who is destroyed but rescued by family and mother. This narrative provides wisdom, reason, and loss. The most intriguing area of research for students working at this level would be to uncover how these tales might reflect real societal roles and relationships.

Women as Agents of Change and Catalysts for Transformation

The portrayal of women in the ancient Mesopotamian epic has recently attracted renewed scholarly attention, primarily in light of the challenges issued by contemporary feminist theories. The reception of this epic often discounts the substantial and important roles played by women. This review seeks to recalibrate the discourse concerning gender roles in the epic, in part by reviewing some of the foundational works that established the patterning of gender via constructivist and structuralist prolegomena and in part by looking afresh at the evidence of women's roles in the epic. This review identifies three thematic roles played by women in the epic: women as agents of change and catalysts for transformation, women as intermediaries (or as constraint and liberation), and the symbolic encoding of women as controllers over life and death. It also discusses the sometimes demonized aspect of women which is conveyed in the epic.

Throughout the epic, women play the role of change agents, which affects social change within the epic, reflecting upon the social changes happening in the ancient world of Mesopotamia. This is particularly pertinent in the third role, which deals with the social and symbolic encoding of the women who appear in the epic. While these roles may seem to show a progression of women within the epic from agents of change participating in the socio-ecological, political, and religious developments depicted within the narrative, even including those aspects which are recalcitrant to such change, the final two roles of intermediaries and/or possibly malign women culminate in death being a feminine attribute. This is surprising since these are negative aspects associated with women and the opposite of what is seen as human progress. These insights drawn from within the epic are relevant, both as themes by themselves for the epic, albeit in a compressed representation, and they reflect the integral role women played in and around the epic as conduits for different worldviews to the society in which the epic was written and the time it represents, the Meso-Epoch of literature.

Gender Roles and Power Dynamics in Ancient Mesopotamia

“I will show the land her power! I will reveal to the land her portents! Shall a mother forsake her children whom she has brought forth? For seven years, a mother has not left her child. To Nintu, the great mistress, the good, the perfect, the queen of women equal to An, the major goddess, who created perfection made perfect, to the mistress of the Arash temple, the midwife of the land, may she go forth, out into the wild.” The ancient text is more than a millennium older than the Book of Genesis and has consequently been subject to more interpretations. In the weeks since striking the earth, half of ‘Gilgamesh’ has been published already. While the male-dominated scenes here render any illusions we may have had about ancient society statistically irrelevant, we continue to dig—and, hopefully, to begin interpreting the hit in a context more fitting to the period and the place.

There is a parallel in the Akkadian of Nintu’s response, but it is less telling. The peril faced by mankind and the gods’ sorrow at their loss seems to account for the more human response of the Sumerian deity. It seems paradoxical that these males, together with the divinities themselves, admit to the potential superiority of females. This is just the more revealing, though, in the boys’ epochal appreciation that women, rather than males, are the nurturing agents according to faithful reproduction. Society at the time of Gilgamesh was patriarchal, and inheritance passed through the father’s line, with fathers, as heads of the family unit, having absolute authority over the lives of their children, wives, and slaves.