alled
attention to by Fr. Delitzsch, and published by Haupt,
contains the remains of a hymn addressed to Gilgames, "the
powerful king, the king of the Spirits of the Earth."

[Illustration: 057.jpg GILGAMES STRANGLES A LION.]

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from an Assyrian bas-relief from
Khorsabad, in the Museum of the Louvre

The whole story is essentially an account of his struggles with Ishtar,
and the first pages reveal him as already at issue with the goddess. His
portrait, such as the monuments have preserved it for us, is singularly
unlike the ordinary type: one would be inclined to regard it as
representing an individual of a different race, a survival of some very
ancient nation which had held rule on the plains of the Euphrates before
the arrival of the Sumerian or Semitic* tribes.

* Smith (The Chaldaean Account of Genesis, p. 194) remarked
the difference between the representations of Gilgames and
the typical Babylonian: he concluded from this that the hero
was of Ethiopian origin. Hommel declares that his features
have neither a Sumerian nor Semitic aspect, and that they
raise an insoluble question in ethnology.

His figure is tall, broad, muscular to an astonishing degree, and
expresses at once vigour and activity; his head is massive, bony, almost
square, with a somewhat flattened face, a large nose, and prominent
cheek-bones, the whole framed by an abundance of hair, and a thick beard
symmetrically curled. All the young men of Uruk, the well-protected,
were captivated by the prodigious strength and beauty of the hero; the
elders of the city betook themselves to Ishtar to complain of the state
of neglect to which the young generation had relegated them. "He has no
longer a rival in their hearts, but thy subjects are led to battle, and
Gilgames does not send one child back to his father. Night and day they
cry after him: 'It is he the shepherd of Uruk, the well-protected, he
is its shepherd and master, he the powerful, the perfect and the wise.'"
Even the women did not escape the general enthusiasm: "he leaves not a
single virgin to her mother, a single daughter to a warrior, a single
wife to her master. Ishtar heard their complaint, the gods heard it, and
cried with a loud voice to Aruru: 'It is thou, Aruru, who hast given him
birth; create for him now his fellow, that he may be able to meet him on
a day when it pleaseth him, in order that they may fi