The Clay Man: How Enkidu Was Made and Unmade by Civilization

Gilgamesh is two-thirds divine and one-third human, the strongest man alive, king of the walled city of Uruk — and a terror to his own people. He drives young men to exhaustion in endless competitions. He claims the right to sleep with every bride before her husband. The people of Uruk cry out to the gods: who will equal this man?

The goddess Aruru kneads clay in her hands and casts it onto the open steppe. From it rises Enkidu — covered in shaggy hair like an animal, eating grass with the gazelles, drinking at the watering holes beside the wild beasts, pulling up the traps that hunters set. He knows nothing of the human world. He is pure body, pure nature, pure freedom from civilization's weight.

A hunter sees him and is terrified. Word reaches Gilgamesh. He sends a woman — a temple priestess, a harlot — back with the hunter to the watering hole. She waits. Enkidu comes. For six days and seven nights she teaches him what the text delicately calls the work of a woman. When it is over, the gazelles flee from him. He tries to run with them and cannot. His legs, which once outpaced animals, now feel like lead.

He has been civilized. The priestess tells him: you are beautiful, Enkidu, you are like a god — why do you run with animals? She feeds him bread. He does not know what bread is. He drinks seven jugs of beer. His heart grows merry. He bathes. He anoints himself with oil. He puts on clothing. He looks, for the first time, like a man.

Then she tells him about Gilgamesh. Enkidu's face changes. He wants to meet this king. He travels to Uruk. He blocks the doorway where Gilgamesh is about to exercise his rights over a bride. They fight — a contest so equal that the walls shake. Neither wins. They stop. They embrace. They become the most famous friendship in the ancient world.

The story is simultaneously a myth about the origins of civilization — bread, beer, clothing, the city as the taming of the animal — and a tragedy about what is lost when the wild becomes human. Enkidu gains a friend and loses the only world he ever knew.