Gilgamesh was supposedly a king of Uruk (located in present-day Iraq) who lived c.2100 BCE. As the central character in the Gilgamesh Epic he became a big noise in the ancient world. Given the detail of his extraordinary feats and fantastic content of his epic journey, however, some have been left wondering how Gilgamesh could correspond to a real person above pure legend. The rate at which the Gilgamesh account spread and was copied over the Near East is also alarming and suggests it had more meaning than just a story.
Gilgamesh is paired in the epic by a wild man named Enkidu who, depending on one’s perspective, is more interesting than Gilgamesh. Enkidu is another reason casting doubt on the epic having basis in reality. For about a century scholars have in various ways doubted that Gilgamesh and Enkidu were creations of the epic and the period its composition is thought to reflect (Frankfort 1939, 65–67; Sandars 1960, 21; Rice 1998, 20, 95 –97, 251–252; Dalley 2008, 41; Lewis-Williams and Pearce, 2009, 149–168). Some of this view comes down to the alleged Gilgamesh figure, and a bull-man resembling Enkidu, being portrayed on seals and sculpture that predate the epic.
The so-called Gilgamesh character is sometimes shown amid two flanking beasts which connects closely with a wider iconography figure that portrays what is identified as an ‘Animal Master’ or ‘Wild Beast Lord’; examples of this range from the Near East, Indus Valley culture to Celtic Europe. The animal master iconography is so diffuse it might indicate a trend favoured in artistic arrangement more than anything else although cultural contact shouldn’t be ruled out. Animal master examples are too numerous to reproduce here but here’s a link to a broad collection:
Animal masters are types of supernatural ancestors postulated to have emerged in Palaeolithic hunting societies (Clottes 2016, 10, 94); the so-called sorcerers, bird & bull men of cave art being forms of them without the encasing iconography which developed later. Perhaps originally they identified powerful, revered (perhaps feared) game-lord/carnival kings. Modern connotations of ‘master’ as overlord are misleading as their rapport with beasts is thought to imply more of a shamanic, power-animal relation. In a 1909 article, Le Bison et Le Taureau Céleste Chaldéen, Henri Breuil explored the human propensity latent in cave images of bison and aurochs which foregrounded, he believed, more explicit bull-man combinations of the ancient Near East which count Enkidu and Gilgamesh in some respects.
Pondering the Gilgamesh and Enkidu figures, Breuil compared the latter’s animal likeness/disguise to a Bochiman hunter and indigenous American. I discuss possible cultural sources of the Enkidu figure, a little bit, in my forthcoming JSA paper. Moreover, the wrangling expertise of Gilgamesh and Enkidu in addition to other features compare them with Castor and Pollux of Greek myth and their celestial bearing with the Gemini stars.
An exceptional animal master depiction came to light only 2 years ago and at present is the earliest known. It is currently undated but its artistic style aligns with upper levels of Göbekli Tepe, from the ‘Lion Pillars Building’ particularly. The depiction, which demonstrates Stone-to-Bronze Age continuity, comes from a tiny settlement named Sayburç which is just west of Şanliurfa in Turkey and very close to Göbekli Tepe. The relief skirts a stone bench in a circular building and shows a disinhibited man holding his phallus. To the left of him is another figure coaxing a wild aurochs. The combined scene might depict an initiation or mythic episodes in the lives of both figures which in turn could relate events in the lives of the twin pillars at GT and elsewhere.
We should naturally be cautious about explaining Gilgamesh as folklore memory or cultural zeitgeist only as more details about the alleged king of 2100 BCE may show up including a tomb with him in it. However, the details discussed above stand beyond normal human biography and provide an interesting background to one of several animal master iconographies.