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 would undoubtedly consider a medical emergency! After their marathon love-making session, the woman introduces Enkidu to the delights of civilization. Since Enkidu had never worn clothes, she takes off her own clothes, divides them into two parts, puts one part on herself and dresses Enkidu in the other part. She then offers to take Enkidu into the great city of Uruk, and this is where he will later meet Gilgamesh, the King of Uruk. Traditional translations of the Babylonian cuneiform tablets refer to the woman as a “harlot”. This is a rather outdated and quaint word for a “fallen woman”, which does not at all describe the individual I call “Shamkat”. The English language does not have a word to describe this woman that does not carry all sorts of negative and highly judgmental connotations. The fact is, she must have been quite an amazing creature! Had it not been for her, Enkidu would never have become the hero, adventurer, and companion of Gilgamesh that he eventually became. It is worth noting, for those who are unfamiliar with the Epic, that when Gilgamesh and Enkidu finally meet, they get into a massive fight that busts up half the city of Uruk. That is another chapter of the story I would love to do sometime. I used two musical instruments in this video, both of them Anatolian. The main instrument is the Turkish long-neck lute known as the saz (or baglama), and the other is the double reed wind instrument known as the “zurna”. Both the saz and the zurna are similar to the ancient instruments of Anatolia and Mesopotamia, and they have changed very little in 5000 years. Unfortunately, although I do play the zurna, it’s not possible to play any wind instrument and sing at the same time. What I have done is to sample the instrument, and use it as a drone which I can control, in performance, with a foot pedal keyboard. There are no overdubs, pre-records, or add-ons in this video. It was all performed live, just as you see it. I would like to thank Andrew George, Professor Emeritus of Babylonian at the University of London. His extraordinary work on the Babylonian Epic Of Gilgamesh is, for me, an endless source of inspiration.