ENKIDU And The Woman SHAMKAT

This is one of my favorite episodes from the Babylonian EPIC OF GILGAMESH. I think it needs to be pointed out that the story of Gilgamesh originated in Sumer, and we do have cuneiform tablets of parts of it in Sumerian, but most of what we know comes from cuneiform tablets written much later in Akkadian and Old Babylonian. These are Semitic languages (related to modern Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic and Ethiopic, among others) and they are quite different from Sumerian which is a “language isolate” unrelated to any known tongue. In this particular video, I am singing parts of the Babylonian EPIC OF GILGAMESH in Old Babylonian, although the story itself comes to us from ancient Sumer. The hero Enkidu, who had been raised in the wild and lived his life with animals, meets a woman for the first time. What follows is not difficult to imagine. According to the cuneiform tablets, the two of them made love non-stop for one whole week, during which time Enkidu “remains erect”. Something the medical profession today w