Let’s Start From the Very Beginning
[Editor’s Note: Longtime readers will recognize that this is part of a series. We mention this with the hopeful expectation that someone will read an entry from the backlist. So far that hasn’t happened. I understand why. If you eat a cup of yogurt and it tastes bad, you’re not going to look for a container of older yogurt, are you?]
Gutbloom: Today we have as our guest the wingman of the Gilgamesh Epic, Enkidu.
Enkidu: That is the world’s worst introduction.
Gutbloom: This is going to be the world’s worst interview. Didn’t your PR people tell you that?
Enkidu: No, they just said that it was going to be an unfunny version of Between Two Ferns, but unlike Between Two Ferns it would be in writing and on a platform that nobody reads.
Gutbloom: I was doing this before Between Two Ferns.
Enkidu: But not as well.
Gutbloom: OK, I agree. What do you want from me? I should probably tell our readers a little bit about who you are, in case their knowledge of Sumerian mythology is a little rusty.
Enkidu: Do you want me to help?
Gutbloom: No, I’ve got this.
Enkidu: I doubt that, but go ahead.
Gutbloom: In the Gilgamesh Epic, Gilgamesh needs a playmate and so the gods find you, a wildman who lives with the animals and “eats grass and drinks the milk of wild cows.”
Enkidu: OK, if you say so.
Gutbloom: That’s not right?
Enkidu: Really, Gilgamesh and I are the same hero. I’m an earlier version, the real deal… the original hero character of Western Civilization. He is a later adoption and overlay, but the Sumerians and Assyrians maintained me as a separate character to preserve some of the stories that didn’t fit with the more complicated religious system of later societies. But go ahead, I’m sure your readers don’t care.
Gutbloom: [Flips through he notes for a while. Adjusts his tie. Clears his throat.] The way you are brought to the city of Uruk is that the temple priestess, Shamhat, calls to you and exposes her nakedness. You respond. She takes you to a cabin where she feeds you…
