Sex was sacred in the time of Gilgamesh | Poetry

In Philip Terry’s review of Simon Armitage’s Gilgamesh (24 October)(An ancient epic is brilliantly translated for our times, 20 October), we risk reading modern categories back into a very different world.

The “sex worker” who brings Enkidu to Uruk has a name, Shamhat. She transforms the wild man into a human companion for Gilgamesh. But in Mesopotamian culture the sexual and erotic could be spiritual acts, leading to transcendence and transformation.

In the introduction to his own translation of Gilgamesh, Stephen Mitchell says: “The Akkadian words … do not mean ‘prostitute’ in our sense of the term … She is a priestess of Ishtar, the goddess of love, and, as a kind of reverse nun, has dedicated her life to what the Babylonians considered the sacred mysteries of sexual union.”

It is no surprise that this confusion is there. Christian Bibles routinely translate qedeshim – “consecrated ones” in Hebrew – as “sodomites”, or “male cult prostitutes”.

Nor does “a celebration of same-sex physical love” fully capture Gilgamesh and Enkidu. When Gilgamesh covers his dead friend’s face “like a bride” and wanders the wilderness in grief, the poem is describing something larger than sex: a profound loving companionship whose loss drives him to seek immortality.

Our Christian culture has given us certain understandings about sex and sexuality. We should not project those assumptions back into a Mesopotamian culture that had very different attitudes to these things.

Simon Dawson

Winterbourne Gunner, Wiltshire

Everything I’ve seen and heard about Simon Armitage’s Gilgamesh refers to it as a “translation”. Unless he has taught himself to read cuneiform (I tried, and it proved beyond me), this is not a translation. It should be referred to as an adaptation from a translation.

And the translator, whose skill is huge, particularly so with a language as complex – and as forgotten – as Sumerian (or Akkadian, depending on which version or versions they worked from) should have equal recognition.

Fiona Collins

Carrog, Sir Ddinbych