Religion, Nature and Ambiguous Space in Ancient Mesopotamia - The Mountain Wilderness in Old-Babylonian Religious Narratives\" in Numen - International Review of the History of Religions,

Numen 63 (2015) 1–36

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Religion, Nature, and Ambiguous Space in Ancient Mesopotamia: The Mountain Wilderness in Old Babylonian Religious Narratives

Laura FeldtUniversity of Southern Denmark, Department of History, Section of the Study of Religions, Campusvej 55, 5230 Odense M., Denmark

[email protected]

Abstract

This article discusses the nexus of religion and nature by means of an investigation of the mountain wilderness space in ancient Mesopotamia. Drawing inspiration from theories of social space and the field of religion and nature, it pays special attention to the mediality of the sources embedding the wilderness space by analyzing the literary-narrative form of a set of Old Babylonian, Sumerian religious narratives related to the deities Inana and Ninurta and the heroes Lugalbanda and Gilgamesh. Contrary to previ-ous research, which has seen the mountain wilderness as a dangerous and inimical chaos region, this article argues that the mountain wilderness is also ascribed benign connotations and functions. It is a wild and dangerous region, but it is also naturally abundant, primeval, and harbors forms of agency and force. It is an arena for magical transformation, heroic acts, and for direct communication with the deities. It is thus a more ambiguous space than has previously been recognized, and it should be under-stood in the context of the social space of the scribal milieu. Finally, the article suggests that cosmology studies and the relationships between natural domains and deities, in the general history of religions, are reconsidered in light of theories of social space and in light of the mediality of the sources.

* Warm thanks are due to professors Lisbeth Mikaelsson and Ingvild S. Gilhus, and to the par-ticipants in the Antikkseminar at the Department of the Study of Religion at the University of Bergen, for fruitful feedback; as well as to Jerry Cooper, Paul Delnero, and Ulla Koch for helpful conversations on this subject. I also wish to thank the anonymous peer reviewers at Numen for valuable feedback. I gratefully acknowledge a generous grant from the Danish Research Council for Independent Research in the Humanities, which enabled me to carry out this research project.

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Keywords

religion and nature – wilderness – social space – narratology – Old Babylonian narra-tives of Ninurta – Inana – Lugalbanda and Gilgamesh

Wilderness mythology is probably one of the most abiding creations in the his-tory of religions. Ideas of natural wildernesses from deep forests, arid deserts, vast steppes, and uninhabitable mountains, to the depths of the ocean have played important roles in various religions and still do so contemporarily — in religious narratives, rituals, cosmologies, and in common practices. What are the relations between the world’s religions and its imagined and real wilder-ness areas? As a space of natural, cultural, and social significance, the interest-ing multiplicity of “wilderness” ideas and practices calls for new approaches in the study of religion. Wilderness has not previously been subject to exten-sive study or theorizing within the humanistic study of religion.1 Wilderness has, rather, been investigated as parts of eco-theology (e.g., Deane-Drummond 2008; Eaton 2005; Jasper 2004), by literary critics (e.g., Garrard 2004; Heise 2009), or by philosophers and historians (Cronon 1995; Oelschlaeger 1991). Wilderness is thus, in the study of religion, an under-theorized concept and an under-investigated theme. It brings to mind related history of religions con-cepts such as “chaos” or “nature,” to which it is, however, not identical. These concepts can be criticized for their inability to capture the diversity of human engagements with wild nature (Feldt 2012b:1–23). This article discusses the religion and wilderness nexus by means of an investigation of a case study from ancient Mesopotamia. The investigation concerns the construction/ production and function of the mountain “wilderness” in “Mesopotamian religion” in the Old Babylonian period,2 and my material is a set of Old Babylonian Sumerian religious narratives related to the deities Inana and

1  But see the articles in Feldt 2012b.2  I use inverted commas to show the problems involved in the idea of “Mesopotamian reli-

gion,” because there was no single shared “religion-institution” across two or more millen-nia, and the complexity involved is greater than what such a term would suggest. Yet, to be sure, we can indeed identify traits that characterize religion in Mesopotamia in general terms. Michael Stausberg’s useful distinction between “the religious” and “religion” would be interesting to pursue in further reflections, as there is much evidence of “the religious” and of attributive and structural differentiation in Mesopotamia (Stausberg 2010). “The Old Babylonian period” designates south Mesopotamia in the period from ca. 2000–1600 BCE. The political history of this period was characterized by a series of states dominating the region, with Babylonia under the Amorite dynasty as the more prominent one. All dates in this article are BCE unless explicitly noted.

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Ninurta and the heroes Lugalbanda and Gilgamesh.3 What is so interesting about the narratives of the Mesopotamian mountain wilderness is precisely its multiplicity: it oscillates between cosmology, literary motif, spatial practice, and geography. The narratives retain references to and elements of realistic geographical material space and practice while also being a site of magical exchanges and transformations and encounters with monsters.

The wilderness in Old Babylonian Sumerian narratives has not previously been subject to investigation on its own. The narratives chosen for study here encompass some of the most detailed Mesopotamian sources on the theme of wilderness, they stem from the same time period and reference each other intertextually,4 and they all belong to the genre of narrative, heroic literature. It thus makes sense to study these texts together.5 Some have touched upon the ideological idea of “foreign and enemy lands” and “the mountains” (kur) in religion in Mesopotamia, and found it to be a dangerous, negative, inimi-cal chaos region (Maul 2003; Wiggermann 1996; Bruschweiler 1987).6 In this article, I hope to nuance traditional approaches to spatial domains such as

3  As the texts that I treat here are written in Sumerian. I focus on the Sumerian terms kur and to some extent also ḫur-sağ; these terms are discussed below. The texts may have been written in the period previous to the Old Babylonian period, namely in the Ur III period (ca. 2100–2000), but the manuscripts used here date to the Old Babylonian period.

4  This has not been subject to investigation here, though.5  To get a fuller view of ancient Mesopotamian wilderness ideas, one would also have to

include Akkadian sources. To include Akkadian sources would exceed the limits of one arti-cle and will be the subject of future work.

6  F. A. M. Wiggermann posits a general dichotomous theological framework in Mesopotamia from the third millennium to the first (Wiggermann 1996:218–219) which pits life, order, culture, normality, domestication, gods, cult, present time, and anthropomorphism in kalam/the cities up against death, disorder, primordiality, barbarianism, enemies, ungodly rule, the wild and abnormal, demonic, monstrous, and dangerous in the kur (Wiggermann 1996:210–215); it also sees the gods’ defeat of opponents as serving a reassuring interpretation of reality, when the foreign gods or enemies are defeated. Unfortunately, this interpretation obscures important elements of the construction of the wilderness space in this material — the ambiguity of the wilderness, its benign sides, and the fascination it exerts, as well as its concrete natural/material aspects. Françoise Bruschweiler, importantly, sees kur as an ambivalent space, with forces both creative and destructive (1987:75), and yet in her judg-ment the negative side, the destructive aspect, is most often used in Sumerian literary texts. It is important to note that my analysis here concerns not the semantics of the term kur, but the narrative spatial domains described in the texts that I treat, which is often referred to by the term kur in this material. In other words, the semantic range of kur is much broader than “mountains” or “mountain wilderness” (for kur in the meaning of “realm of the dead,” see Katz 2003). Philological details are discussed further below.

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“wilderness” in the study of religion in favor of a more detailed focus on the mediality — here, the literary-narrative form — of the religious sources that may embed, produce, sanction, and/or negotiate specific spaces and spatial practices, as well as to nuance the interpretations of the mountains as a nega-tive chaos-region in ancient Mesopotamia. I employ a narratological strategy of analysis and I argue, based on the analyses, that the mountain wilderness in this material is ascribed benign connotations and functions and that it is asso-ciated with the wild abundance of “nature,” in addition to the negative, inimi-cal associations and functions. The wilderness in this Old Babylonian material is thus more of an ambiguous space than has previously been recognized. My aim is to discuss, on the basis of the analyses, social space in relation to the religion and wilderness nexus in these texts.

Perspective and Strategy of Analysis

This article draws theoretical inspiration from the field of “the spatial turn in the social sciences” and the application of this theoretical perspective by scholars of religion and anthropologists. In the last decade, critical spatial-ity theory has become an important influence in many fields of the study of religion (see e.g., Knott 2005), including biblical studies (Camp 2002; Berquist and Camp 2008; George 2009).7 The major point of critical spatiality theory is that space, like history and society, is always constructed and produced in social practice and that it must therefore be theorized.8 The work of philoso-pher Henri Lefebvre and geographer Edward W. Soja demonstrates that space is not a mental construct alone; it is also always material, and representations of space in social thought and practice cannot be understood as projections of modes of thinking independent of socio-material conditions (Soja 1989:124–126; Lefebvre 1991). In this article, I use critical spatiality theory as an incentive to discuss social space in relation to these ancient texts. Further theoretical inspiration is drawn from the field of “religion and nature,” where the current eschewal of previous dichotomizing ideas of “culture” versus “nature” provides

7  In conjunction with the great surge in interest in landscape and space in anthropology (Feld and Basso 1997; Hirsch and O’Hanlon 1995), the emergence of these related fields under-scores how necessary renewed reflections on religions, cosmology, and natural space in the history of religions are.

8  That space is culturally constructed is a commonplace insight. Many anthropologists (and narratologists; cf. Bal 1997) use the helpful distinction between place and space (e.g., Kirby 2009), which I do not engage here.

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inspiration and motivation for this article and the interest in religious interac-tion with the non-human world (Taylor 2005; Jenkins 2009).9 Characteristic of the field of religion and nature is a view of humanity and culture as insepa-rable from the non-human world, as not distinct from “nature,” but as impli-cated and involved in, always interacting with, its environment (Taylor 2005).10 Wilderness is an interesting concept in relation to both theoretical fields because it is both an imagined cultural space as well as a set of concrete “natu-ral” territories; it is embedded in social practice at the same time that it has a specific material foundation. In this article, I understand “wilderness” to be such “natural” spatial domains of the world that are culturally understood to be largely free of human influence (Oelschlaeger 2005; Feldt 2012b).11 Beyond this minimal definition signaling what to look for in the material, the analy-ses attempt to remain as open as possible for how wilderness is constructed and functions in the narratives.12 The Mesopotamian wilderness is, as it were, transmitted in literary narratives, which are the media through which they are encountered and used. It is therefore crucial to consider how the wilderness is constructed narratively. For my strategy of analysis, I draw on the narratol-ogy of Mieke Bal.13 In her book Narratology (1997), Bal offers a series of nar-ratological concepts as an “instrument”14 with which narrative texts may be analyzed. Bal proposes a theory of narrative that enables one to identify the role of narrative in any cultural expression, positing that narratology is of rel-evance for cultural analysis (1997:220–224). Bal’s theory of narrativity offers a basic distinction that forms the point of departure for the interpretation of narrative texts or segments (1997:5–7): in all narratives, three layers can be

9   I use the term “non-human world” in line with the insight that humans are always involved and engaged in relations with the non-human world; in other words, that humans do not belong to a realm of “culture” that is separable from “nature.” The concept of “nature” has played a tremendous role in research history, and for that reason I sometimes also use the term “nature” to communicate that my results may have implications for previous research.

10  This is how it is in other current investigations of climate and environment (Jasanoff 2010; Ingold 2000).

11  For an introduction to the criticisms of the wilderness idea and associated values, see Oelschlaeger 2005.

12  I understand my object of study not as given, but as socially, culturally, textually, and materially constructed. For that reason, it is better to make one’s preliminary assump-tions, definitions, and strategy of analysis explicit because they are then available for intersubjective discussion (for more on “tempered constructionism,” see Jensen 2003:108–112, 130–132).

13  For a discussion of the use of narratology for analyses of myths, see Feldt 2013.14  Bal (1997:222) cautions that the term “instrument” should not be taken too literally.

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distinguished,15 namely, “fabula,” “story,” and “text.” A “fabula” is a series of logi-cally related events in chronological sequence, which is caused or experienced by the actors of the narrative. “Story” is a fabula presented in a certain way; that is, the “story” may present the fabula in a variety of ways, not necessarily chronologically or in full, while “text” is the concrete sequence of linguistic signs (e.g., oral words, written sentences, film images, statues, reliefs, etc.) that articulate the “story.”16 The narrative presentation of space may be analyzed in terms of all three levels.

Thus, I approach the texts with a narratology-based assumption that the events happening in a particular place, and how the characters react to them, are just as important in a spatial analysis of narrative as are straightforward descriptions of space (cf. Bal 1997:134–137), an assumption which is in accord with critical spatiality theory (Soja 1996:65–70; Camp 2002).17 I analyze the events of the wilderness as relayed in the fabula layer, the treatment of the wil-derness space, the wilderness events, and the characters and their experiences, utterances, and emotions in the story layer, and the narratorial, argumentative, and descriptive comments about the wilderness in the text layer, in addition to what the narrative presentation overall communicates about the wilder-ness space. The story composition and the utterances and characters of narra-tor and the protagonists may be important indicators about the texts’ spatial

15  Most narratologies distinguish between a story’s “how” (the way it is told — its “story,” plot, récit, suizhet) and its “what” (the events in the sequence in which they occurred — the story’s fabula, l’histoire).

16  In other words, we may say that the “fabula” is the “what” of the narrative, the “story” is the “how,” while “text” refers to the concrete and material manifestation of “signs” used. The division into layers is grounded in the insight that the “texts” of narratives may differ, even if their “stories” are the same. Therefore, it is useful to examine the “text” layer separately from the “story.” The basic sequence of events, the fabula, and the way in which events are presented (“story”) may also differ. The underlying assumption behind the division into layers is that it is possible to analyze the three layers separately in order to account for the special effects that narratives may have on their recipients (Bal 1997:5–10). One of the advantages of Bal’s theory is that narrative analysis does not stop with an analysis of narrative structure (“fabula”) or with the distinction between fabula and plot (“story”), but it also takes into consideration the material form or medium of expression (“text”). One could question the use of “text” for this layer as it suggests, on the one hand, a text-dominance also for non-textual, non-linguistic media; on the other hand, it is very clear that the “text” term is to be understood in a broad sense.

17  See introductions to Bal’s narratology in Feldt 2006, 2013. Both the fabula’s construction of location/place and the “story”-layer’s construction of “space” are relevant in analysis (Bal 1997:132–141, 214–216).

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ideology and relevant spatial practice.18 On the basis of the analyses, I discuss the social space of the producers and recipients — the spaces in and from which these wilderness texts were produced and used.19

Analyses

The Old Babylonian Sumerian narrative compositions treated here were cul-turally authoritative and seminal in Mesopotamian culture (Vanstiphout 2003:1–22; Michalowski 2003).20 These narratives are the composite result of multiple writings, rewritings, and redactions in a highly literary culture.21 Literature in Sumerian bears witness to a high written culture; it was written by experts, academics, and religious specialists at a time when, in all likelihood, Sumerian was already dead or dying as a spoken language (Woods 2006).22 This means that these texts were put into writing by people whose primary lan-guage was most likely Akkadian. In the Old Babylonian period, Sumerian was regarded as the quintessence of culture and learning (Veldhuis 2003),23 and in this religious-literary environment these stories were selected for cultural

18  It is important to note that the second space aspects may be qualified, contested, ques-tioned, or backed up in other discourse; cf. in a narratological perspective in Bal 1997:25, 34, 43–50, 52–61.

19  My background assumption is that what matters with regard to religious narratives is not only their content, but also their affective or performative qualities, their media-quality. Here I am inspired by Birgit Meyer’s work on other types of religious mediation (Meyer 2006, 2011).

20  Some texts were more than others; here Inana and Ebih may be regarded as less semi-nal and authoritative than the other texts, which were highly significant culturally and which have a long history of transmission. For Lugale, we are speaking of a period of time stretching from the beginning of the second millennium BCE to late in the first millen-nium (Van Dijk 1983; Seminara 2001).

21  Several of them are assemblages of text types — mythology/ritual, text/wisdom, song, poetry, lists, etc. — and in all likelihood put together from a diversity of sources. Furthermore, as for manuscripts, there is no such thing as “the text,” only copies of copies of copies.

22  Many but not all Assyriologists agree on the time of death of Sumerian as a spoken lan-guage. We do not have strong and unequivocal evidence for all of these texts in the Ur III period, so the fact that Sumerian was dead or dying in the Old Babylonian period is not evidence per se that the texts are earlier.

23  So the literature does not present a unified view extending across centuries. “Sumerian” refers here to the language in which these compositions were written, not to an ethnic group.

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transmission and memory. I use the composite editions for this study,24 and I take them to speak of the Old Babylonian authors/redactors and recipients, not of any assumed Neo-Sumerian origin.25 I assume that the composition as a “collectivity . . . invites interpretation” for the study of religion (as cited in Leach 1987:581; Hendel 2005:96–98; Gilhus 2006). My theoretical object is the construction/production and function of a “mountain wilderness” in religion in Mesopotamia. I have selected the mountain wilderness stories related to the deities Ninurta and Inana and the human heroes Lugalbanda and Gilgamesh and their encounters with wilderness monsters for analysis because they con-stitute a comparatively unified corpus in terms of genre, language, compo-sition, and dating, as detailed above.26 While wilderness texts and ideas are found elsewhere in the vast Mesopotamian textual record,27 the texts analyzed here represent some of the richest and most complete developments of narra-tive wilderness traditions from Mesopotamia between which the intertextual connections are numerous.28

In Assyriological research history, the mountain wilderness has often been understood to signify a negative domain of chaos, as an inimical and danger-ous place — “the shadow side” (Wiggermann 1996) — and the people who

24  I use the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature versions (ETCSL; see Black et al. 1998–2006). The absence of “original” texts (the composite text as the condition for the process of reception) is a feature that the study of the Hebrew Bible shares with the study of cuneiform literature (Feldt 2012a:87; Carr 2010). For historians of religion, the com-posite, redacted version is also worth investigating in terms of its effects on the process of reception. Of course, special problems apply to the combination of manuscripts in Assyriology; for discussion, see Black 1998.

25  Assyriological analyses often focus on the hypothesized origins of the stories in the Neo-Sumerian period, and I agree that this is a necessary discussion. Yet studying the texts from the perspective of their preservation across the centuries and their participation in the selected “canon” of Mesopotamian cultural memory is also a legitimate object of inquiry (Thomsen 2003).

26  Since both Lugalbanda and Gilgamesh are heroes, in some ways they are or become superhuman.

27  One of the more well-known wilderness loci is that of the creation of Enkidu, his life on the steppe, and subsequent seduction by the harlot in the Akkadian Gilgamesh Epic (George 2003).

28  Some of the intertextual connections between Inana and Ebih and Lugale have been ana-lyzed by Fumi Karahashi (2004) and between the Gilgamesh stories and the Lugalbanda stories by Herman L. J. Vanstiphout (2003). My preliminary observations indicate that connections also exist between, e.g., Lugale and the Gilgamesh and Lugalbanda stories (e.g., in terms of the monstrous helpers and their warning messages, the motif of weep-ing, and possibly others), although this has not been subject to detailed inquiry here.

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inhabit the mountain wilderness, a range of monsters, have been interpreted as dangerous enemies (Wiggermann 1992, 1993; Maul 2003:54–56; see also Black 2002:56).29 This interpretation is usually aimed at first millennium mate-rials but often is inspired by the second millennium narrative material treated here (thus both Wiggermann and Maul). The mountain wilderness has thus been seen as an otherworld excluded and combatted in religious ideology. Through the analyses in this article, I will attempt to show that the dominat-ing Assyriological image of the mountains as a negative chaos-domain needs qualification and further nuances, as it obscures the positive aspects of and thus a central ambiguity in Mesopotamian notions of the mountain wilder-ness, as well as its “naturally” wild dimension, the positive portrayals of the natural abundance of the mountains in these Old Babylonian Sumerian texts, and the fascination it exerted. First, I offer a short contextualization of the mountain wilderness in ancient Mesopotamia in terms of archaeological and geographical information;30 that is, in terms of “material space” as a term for the aspect of social space that Lefebvre referred to as perceived space and Soja as Firstspace: the concrete materiality of spatial forms and geophysical reali-ties (Lefebvre 1991; Soja 1989). Then I will turn to the narratives.

Material Space ContextualizationAs detailed in the strategy of analysis, a basic presupposition here is that any understanding of space is also dependent on a material foundation. One of the most basic features of the Mesopotamian landscape is that agriculture and urban areas are located in the river plain area, and to the east are the Zagros foothills and mountains. This basic feature of the landscape has not changed across the millennia. Historically, anyone who controlled the passes of the foothills would control access to the mountains (Michalowski 2010). Enemies and hostile attacks often came from the eastern mountains with frequent attacks on the inhabitants of the plains. On the plains, there was basically

29  As mentioned, there is a trend in the Assyriological tradition to interpret the monsters as negative enemies (“demons”). But this means that the positive functions of monsters in first-millennium ritual texts (e.g., KAR 298 [Keilschrifttexte aus Assur Religiösen Inhalts] and related texts) where the monsters are active harbingers of good, life, etc. become difficult to explain. A valuable exception is Christopher Woods’ discussion of the sun-god and understandings of the horizon in ancient Mesopotamia (Woods 2009), which is nuanced and focuses also on associations such as creation, wisdom, transformation, and the changing or decreeing of destinies.

30  Religious narratives about the mountain wilderness from the second millennium may have had material anchors in contemporary practices of monster decoration in palaces and temples; this is, however, not subject to investigation here.

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one major resource fit for building projects (mud), whereas essential building materials for larger buildings such as wood and stone would have to be pro-cured from the mountains31 (Michalowski 2010). Apart from bitumen, some limestone, reeds, and shrubs, many resources and almost all luxury goods came from outside Mesopotamia proper — metals, different types of stone, jewels, and wood (Potts 2007). From the middle of the fourth millennium BCE, the alluvial plain of Mesopotamia harbored the complex urban centers of a multicultural culture with deep roots elsewhere; the plain was the home of successive “civilizations” that were not only continuously interacting with out-siders, but also continuously included newcomers and absorbed other popu-lations (Michalowski 2010:149). Contact with the eastern mountain areas was necessary for all larger building projects, religious or royal, for elite display, gift exchange, patronage (Michalowski 2010:150), and for furnishing the large temple complexes and divine statues (Walker and Dick 2001). The complexity of the goods which needed to be procured outside the homeland — wood, precious stones, and metals — bears witness to the necessary complexities of the interaction with the surrounding areas (Michalowski 2010:158). From tribute, gift exchange over plunder, and inimical exchanges, to the extensive trade network towards the east, the rulers, soldiers, scribes, and tradesmen of the Mesopotamian plains were in continual interaction and exchange with the mountain areas. In Mesopotamian cultural memory, the mountains are there-fore tremendously significant.

The area in the religious imagination that we can reasonably designate “wilderness” is covered by the terms kur and ḫur-sağ in the Sumerian texts, for which we may reasonably — although they each carry distinct meanings (Steinkeller 2004) — assume some overlap in the religious imagination. The philology of the relevant Sumerian terms kur and ḫur-sağ also reflects this situ-ation. According to Piotr Steinkeller’s convincing arguments (2004), and con-tra the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary (s.v.; cf. Reiner and Roth 1973–2011:49–59) kur signifies “a single mountain” vis-à-vis ḫur-sağ, which means “mountain range.” In relation to the term kalam, “homeland,” however, kur means simply “mountain land” or “foreign land.” The terms kur and ḫur-sağ are also used for temple topography, and kur also for the netherworld (Steinkeller 2004; cf. Katz 2003). The use of kur and ḫur-sağ in praises of temple topography and archi-tecture offers circumstantial support for the benign, fertility, and abundance

31  The more specific differences between the mountains of the east and the west would be an interesting subject for further analyses of special relevance for the Gilgamesh and Huwawa stories (cf. Bruschweiler 1987:75), although in the present context it seems fair not to pursue it further. See also Woods 2009:191.

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connotations of both kur and ḫur-sağ, whereas kur used for the netherworld (as in the phrase kur-nu-gi4, “land of no return”) connects to the connotations of distance, danger, and foreignness. The texts analyzed seem to use ḫur-sağ for “mountain ranges” and kur for “single mountain,” but they also use kur for “mountain area” in general as opposed to kalam, “homeland.”32 For the pur-poses of this investigation it seems fair to proceed on the assumption that these two terms together, sometimes in overlapping meanings, sometimes in clear distinction, are the Sumerian words that most closely designate wil-derness, which is understood as the distant and inaccessible mountainous regions. Closely related wilderness terminology is the term ğištir, “forest”; as we shall see, these texts often place forests in the inaccessible mountain regions or otherwise connect forests and mountains.33 Now, to the question of how the wild and distant mountains are presented, narrativized, and used in Old Babylonian cultural memory.

Narrating the Mountain Wilderness

The selected material consists of the texts known as Ninurta’s Exploits (Lugale), Inana and Ebih, Lugalbanda in the Mountain Wilderness (LW) and Lugalbanda and Anzud (LA), and Gilgamesh and Huwawa A.34 Ninurta’s Exploits or Lugale, a 728 lines long text,35 relates the story of how the god Ninurta battles a fear-some monster, Asag, and his stone warriors in the mountains; after his victory, Ninurta determines the destinies of his opponents and reorders the mountain

32  I have not carried out a quantitative analysis of the distribution of these terms in the texts.

33  In Lugale, ki-bal-a, “rebel lands,” is sometimes used instead of or with kur, e.g. Lugale ll. 96–97. Lugale is the only one of these texts in which a forest does not play a large role; as we see in the passage about Ninurta’s attack, trees are involved (Lugale l. 87), but they are not at the center of attention.

34  The text here referred to as Lugalbanda in the Mountain Wilderness is often referred to as either Lugalbanda in the Mountain Cave, or Lugalbanda in the Wilderness. Gilgamesh and Huwawa A will be used here as the key narrative in fabula analysis, etc., but I will draw on version B when it differs in story and text in ways important to the argument. The texts are available in Sumerian transliteration and English translation at The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature website; see Black et al. 1998–2006. I read “Gilgamesh” and not Bilgamesh on the basis of Rubio 2012.

35  For elaborate discussions of text history, dating, provenance, etc., see Feldt 2011.

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regions.36 Then, he returns to the land to receive blessings and rewards. The myth Inana and Ebih (184 lines) concerns the deity Inana’s successful battle against the hostile and wild mountain range of Ebih. The Lugalbanda stories (LW and LA) tell of the human hero Lugalbanda and his experiences on the campaign of King Enmerkar of Uruk against the city of Aratta in the moun-tains, where he is helped by the giant monster-bird Anzud, who gives him the fantastic ability to run faster than a normal human being, enabling him to help the king’s forces overcome Aratta by running back and forth to Eana for the goddess Inana’s advice. In Gilgamesh and Huwawa (202 lines), Gilgamesh, the king of Uruk, is dismayed by death and sets out towards the cedar forest in the mountains to cut down cedars and thereby attain (metaphorical) immortality (A: 1–7; B: 1–21); he and his servant Enkidu cunningly trick and kill the guardian of the cedar forest, Huwawa, and they return to Uruk with the cedars and offer Huwawa’s head to the deity Enlil, who finds their act abomi-nable and assigns Huwawa’s “auras” to various natural domains.

All of these narratives share a basic structure, a common fabula.37 I posit that the common fabula forms a basic structure of expectation for the narra-tives, and that the combat fabula that these stories share may play a role when scholars overlook the benign sides of the wilderness, because the wilderness is the scene of the encounters with the monsters/opponents. However, as a more detailed narrative analysis will show, the narrative treatment of the wilderness is much more complex than the focus on narrative structure brings out. The table below presents a schematic comparison of the fabulae of the selected stories. The sections singled out for further analyses have been italicized in the table below.

36  To “determine the destiny” of all things and beings was, in ancient Mesopotamia, the prerogative of the gods. It was an act of great significance, related to the creation and maintenance of order. Accordingly, here it means more than just assigning a punishment to defeated opponents: Ninurta’s determination of the destinies of Asag and the stone warriors entails establishing their (future) nature, function, and use. See Rochberg 1982.

37  As Bal states, one confronts a concrete fabula with a general model in order to bring out a structure.

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TABLE 1  Fabula/Story Analysis38

Model Structure40 Ninurta’s Exploits (Lugale) (726 lines)

Inana and Ebih (184 lines)

Lugalbanda in the Wilderness and Lugalbanda and Anzud (total of 916 lines)

Gilgamesh and Huwawa A (202 lines)

α: hymnic introduction

ll. 1–23 ll. 1–24 ll. 1–19LW

a: lack/villainy ll. 24–69 ll. 25–32 ll. 20–34LW ll. 4–7b: hero emerges ll. 33–58 ll. 20–34LW ll. 4–7c: donor or

consultationll. 59–130 ll. 8–47

d: journey ll. 70–118, 151–167 (with consultation ll. 119–150)

ll. 131–137 ll. 35–499LW and ll. 1–250LA

ll. 48–61

e: battle 168 ll. 144–151 ll. 251–261LA ll. 62–67f: initial defeat 168–186 ll. 261–267LA ll. 68–75g: donor or

consultation187–243 ll. 268–412LA ll. 76–88

h: hero recovers ll. 89–95i: battle

resumed244–288 ll. 97–148

j: victory 289–299 ll. 152–165 ll. 149–151k: enemy

punished, world reordered

300–644 ll. 166–175 ll. 152–180

l: journey home/ return

645–680 ll. 181–186

38  The line numbers of this table follow the ETCSL edition (see Black et al. 1998–2006).39  This model is inspired by Neil Forsyth (1987) and constructed on the basis of a compari-

son of the narratives with other Mesopotamian stories. Forsyth used Akkadian, Greek, biblical, and Gnostic sources, as well as some Gilgamesh and Huwawa narratives (1987:54; see also fig. 1 on p. 448).

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Model Structure Ninurta’s Exploits (Lugale) (726 lines)

Inana and Ebih (184 lines)

Lugalbanda in the Wilderness and Lugalbanda and Anzud (total of 916 lines)

Gilgamesh and Huwawa A (202 lines)

m: triumph, praise, reward

681–711 ll. 176–184 ll. 187–200

ω: final exaltation

712–726 ll. 413–416LA and l. 417LA

ll. 201–202

As we can see, all of the texts’ fabulae concern a hero’s adventures in the wilder-ness, most commonly in the form of a struggle against a monstrous opponent, thus seemingly affirming and maintaining the existing order and providing support for the idea of the wilderness as an inimical dangerous place. Yet, as the analyses below show, the narrative presentation of the “fabulae” in the “story” and “text” layers of the narratives offer very different views that com-plicate this image.

Ninurta’s Exploits/Lugale40As mentioned, the religious narrative of Lugale concerns the deity Ninurta’s battle against the fearsome monster Asag from the mountains. Asag’s spatial connection to kur, the mountain regions, is spelled out clearly (ll. 29, 34, 39, 47, 58), and it seems fair to say that he epitomizes the mountain wilderness, even if he certainly cannot be equated with a mountain or the mountains.41 What is special in Lugale in terms of narratological analysis is the way in which the basic combat “fabula” is played out in Lugale’s “story.” In terms of the “fabula,” the monster Asag occupies the role of opponent, enemy, and the battle takes place in the mountains; after the battle, Asag and kur (the mountain regions) are transformed from their primeval state to their current appearance. But in the “story” layer, considerable attention is spent on descriptions of Asag as a

40  Details of text history, dating, provenance, and previous interpretations may be found in Feldt 2011, of the manuscripts in Van Dijk 1983.

41  It is important to note that the text first and foremost labors to bring across an image of Asag as monstrous (Feldt 2011).

TABLE 1 (cont.)

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character in functions a: lack/villainy and d: journey. The analysis shows that Asag is much more complex than that of the mere actant of “opponent.” Asag is described in a great variety of images; he rules the mountains and is leader of the stone warriors and king of the plants. Several traits suggest that the mountain wilderness as epitomized by Asag here has “nature” connotations: The metaphors and epithets used to describe Asag oscillate between various images, but many are drawn from non-human “nature” — animal, meteoro-logical, physical, and plant images (Feldt 2011:135–136) — just as his domains of action predominantly fall in the “natural” category:

TABLE 2  Asag’s Domains of Action

“Nature” Controls large area of plants and stones (35, 37–38, 46); strips or destroys trees (39); causes darkness (45); dries up the water of the mountains and destroys trees (176); sets fire to reed thickets (178); fields become full of vermin (180); splits the body of Ki (“earth”) and gives it painful wounds (177); bathes An (“sky”) in blood (178); the horizon changes color to red/purple-dye (181); chases donkeys (273); gathers dust (274); spirits/demons close the sheepfolds (277); dries up water (277).

Culture/the Social Domain Murders (29, 275); destroys cities (38); controls people (38, 46); kills (171); screeches at ‘ “the land” (175); disperses people (179).

Divine Domain Controls gods (35–38?, 46?); causes fear (45); poses a threat to Ninurta’s divine kingship (53); desires Ninurta’s divine powers (54); scares the deities An, Enlil and the Anuna, the temple’s proper functioning is disturbed (182–185).

Blending Nature and Culture Causes a rain of potsherds (274); his storm results in the killing of people and the removal of their strength (278).

While Asag is, more than anything, a category-transgressive, monstrous per-son, dangerous, wild, and uncontrollable, his rule interestingly resembles that of Ninurta. The mountains have “social” organization, and the kur is quite simi-lar in organization to kalam, the land, in the text’s descriptions (Feldt 2011).

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Here, Ninurta’s monstrous weapon-aide, Šarur, describes Asag to Ninurta (ll. 26–47):

26. My ruler! An has copulated with green Ki,27. Ninurta! A warrior who does not know fear, Asag, she has born him,28. A child, who has not stayed with a wet-nurse, but yet drunk the power of milk,29. My ruler! A foster-child, who knows no father, a murderer from the mountains [kur],30. A young man who has come out from [?], who knows no shame,31. Ninurta, he is a fear-inspiring man, rejoicing over [his] appearance,32. My warrior, he is a bull that I would evade,33. My ruler, he is a man, who returns to his city, and who acts for the sake of his mother(?). 34. In the mountains [kur], it is breeding, and its offspring is spreading wide.35. Unanimously, the (stone-)plants have named him their ruler,36. In their midst, like a great wild bull, it raises [its] horns,37. The šu-, the sağ-kal-, the esi [diorite]-, and the kagina [haematite] – stones38. and the heroes the nu-stones, its warriors, are raiding the cities.39. In the mountains [kur], he has made kušû2(shark’s?)-teeth appear, and he is harrowing (with them).40. Before its strength, the gods of those cities bow down (to[wards] it).41. My ruler, in this way he has erected a throne, he is not lying idle.42. Ninurta, lord, just like you he judges the lawsuits of the land.43. Asag’s splendor [me-lám] — who can interfere with it?44. The enormousness of its forehead — who can stop it?45. It [the melam] makes bodies tremble, fear [of it] makes the flesh creep,46. People’s eyes are fixed upon it.47. My ruler, the mountains have given their offerings to it.42

Indeed, Asag, with his plant and stone soldiers, is presented as a mirror image of Ninurta and his helpers. By emphasizing the similar organization of the wild mountain domain and the similarity between the monster Asag and the hero Ninurta, between Asag’s rule of the plants and stone warriors and the

42  My own translation. It differs from Van Dijk’s and that of the ETCSL in some places. For arguments in favor of my translation, see Feldt 2011.

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organization of the domain of the land where humans live, the story empha-sizes the fundamental similarities of the mountain wilderness and human life in the land, of heroes and monsters, of self and other. We may say that it sug-gests a certain “insideness” of the outside, some contingency in the hero/mon-ster or self/other constructions, or, at the very least, a certain ambiguity (Feldt 2011). The text gives further indications of connections between the mountain wilderness and life in the land: Asag is, after Ninurta’s victory, turned into stone and his entrails are made into the underworld — a metamorphosis from ani-mate being to landscape — so when humans die, they travel into the entrails of Asag. Their battle changes the domain of kur, as Ninurta transforms it into its current shape, renames it ḫur-sağ (mountain ranges), and organizes the water courses so that they supply the river that enables agriculture in the land by irrigation (ll. 347–367). This reorganization is the source and foundation of fertility in the land:

Now, today, throughout the whole world, kings of the Land far and wide rejoice at Lord Ninurta. He provided water for the speckled barley in the cultivated fields, he {raised up} {(2 mss. have instead:) piled up} the harvest of fruits in garden and orchard. He heaped up the grain piles like mounds. The lord caused trading colonies to go up from the Land of Sumer. He contented the desires of the gods. (ll. 360–366; Black et al. 1998–2006)43

The other major “fabula” slot which receives great attention, namely, k: enemy punished, world reordered further documents the value of the mountain area for life in the land. This slot is taken up, almost entirely, by a meticulous list of different types of stone and their usage in everyday life: 230 lines (ll. 414–644) out of an overall total of 726 lines in the composition. It is fair to say that this slot receives an unusual and significant amount of textual attention. The usage of every stone is verbalized as related to the battle between Ninurta and Asag, all of the different types of stones are addressed as people, with personhood,

43  Quoted from the ETCSL (ll. 360–366): 360. ì-ne-éš ud-da níğ ki-šár-ra-ke4, 361. lugal kalam-ma en dnin-urta-ra sù-ud-bi-šè mu-un-húl-e-eš, 362. gán-né še gu-nu a mi-ni-in-túm, 363. buru14 pú-kiri6-ke4 {šu}(2 mss. have instead:) gurun} im-mi-in-íl, 364. {guru7-du6-dè} (1 ms. has instead:) guru7-du6-re} gú im-mi-in-gur-gur, 365. en-e kalam-ta kar im-ta-an-èd, 366. diğir-re-e-ne ur5-bi mu-un-sag9.

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and each type is either praised or condemned, according to its role in the battle. The wilderness events are thus related to everyday lived space in an explicit way that serves as an evocation of the “personhood” of natural ele-ments and its religious significance, just as the extensive knowledge fixed in the list format demonstrates scribal skill and expert knowledge. The list of stones, with its many puns and allusions, points to the social space of the keep-ers and author-redactors of academic lists — the scribes — who were the pri-mary people to whom this knowledge was indeed accessible. The cosmological transformation of the mountain domain by Ninurta, along with this list relat-ing the victory of Ninurta, in the mountain wilderness, to agriculture, death, as well as to expert knowledge of and practices with all kinds of stones, effectively link life in the land to life in the wilderness and frame the mountain wilderness as the space of origin of, and necessary condition for, agriculture, stone pro-duction, and technology. Importantly, this knowledge is served by and is only accessible through the scribes. The text ends, appropriately, with an exalta-tion of the deity of scribal culture, Nisaba (ll. 712–723). While the wilderness is here clearly a heroic space of battle between hero-god and opponent-monster, and while Asag is explicitly framed as evil and dangerous, it is also clear that the post-battle mountain domain is not an evil chaos region, but a valuable space of plenty, of tremendous significance for life in the land. We may con-clude that the representation of the mountain wilderness in Lugale harbors more ambiguity and more benign connotations than scholars have previously allowed for, even if the transfer of the mountain domain to the rule of Ninurta and his naming and re-organizing activities do soften the “wild” connotation somewhat.

Inana and EbihIn Inana and Ebih,44 the text layer is particularly interesting for an analysis of the construction and function of the mountain wilderness.45 Most of Inana and Ebih consists of dialogue (cf. Bal 1997:16–77): ll. 25–52; 65–111; 113–130; 153–181 out of a total of 184 lines. The narrative sections are unusually and noticeably brief. The narrator plays a very small role in this text, as does the basic combat fabula, because the utterances of the divine protagonists are emphasized in the “text” to a great extent. The mountain is described in the dialogue of the

44  For details of text history, source criticism, and previous interpretations, see Delnero 2011.45  Analysis from the perspective of the text layer means attentiveness to issues related to

the narrator, the non-narrative comments (descriptive and argumentative sections) or alternations between narrative text and non-narrative text, the levels of narration, etc. (Bal 1997:16–75).

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deities Inana and An.46 While Mount Ebih is clearly the opponent according to fabula analysis, it is interesting to see that, in the text layer, the mountain’s pri-mary characteristics are inaccessibility, rebelliousness, and insubordination, on the one hand, and, on the other, beauty and natural abundance. In Inana’s utterances, the mountain is insubordinate and rebellious (ll. 33–36), inacces-sible and with thick forests (ll. 45–48; 104–107), it is like a snake (ll. 83–84), it does not fear Inana or bow to her (ll. 89–95), and it is magnificent (ll. 96–99), beautiful, elevated, attractive, and holy (ll. 152–159):

She went to the mountain range of Ebiḫ and addressed it: “Mountain range, because of your elevation, because of your height, because of your attractiveness, because of your beauty, because of your wearing a holy garment, because of your reaching up to heaven, because you did not put your nose to the ground, because you did not rub your lips in the dust, I have killed you and brought you low.” (ll. 152–159, ETCSL translation; see Black et al. 1998–2006)

Twice Inana refers to its doing evil, referring to its insubordination (ll. 46, 105) for which reason she is intent on destroying it. She likens her conquest of the mountain to the capture of an elephant and a wild bull, stressing the mountain’s sadness because of what she has done (ll. 160–165). Finally, she praises herself for building a palace and establishing a cult on the mountain subsequent to her victory. She also stresses its beauty, natural abundance, and attractiveness.

In the deity An’s utterances, the mountain wilderness is presented with sim-ilar ambiguity: it is full of fearsome terror that overflows into the abodes of the deities; it is greatly arrogant (ll. 116–120; 127–130); it is full of abundant fruit gar-dens, luxuriance, magnificent trees, and bright branches; and, it is a wonder to behold, full of many lions, wild rams and stags, wild bulls, and deer that mate under the cypress trees (ll. 121–126):

Fruit hangs in its flourishing gardens and luxuriance spreads forth. Its magnificent trees, a crown in the heavens, . . . stand as a wonder to behold. In Ebiḫ . . . lions are abundant under the canopy of trees and bright branches. It makes wild rams and stags freely abundant. It stands wild bulls in flourishing grass. Deer couple among the cypress trees of the mountain range. (ll. 116–126, ETCSL translation; Black et al., 1998–2006)

46  Of course these descriptions participate in the construction of Mount Ebih as a character in the story layer.

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The narrator offers images of Mount Ebih as a person or being with a neck and a stomach into which a dagger can be thrust (ll. 138–143), with a body consist-ing of rocks, as an abode for serpents, with many trees and thick, impenetrable forests (ll. 45–48), including oaks (ll. 144–151). Here, too, we see the duality or ambiguity of the mountain wilderness image between its riches and natural abundance and its wildness and strength, which is experienced as rebellious-ness and fearful, even for the gods.

The mountain wilderness occupies the narratological slot of opponent, and it is overcome by Inana in the end; in terms of “fabula” the mountain is indeed an opponent. Yet, as we have seen, in the “text” layer the image is more com-plex. The mountain wilderness is represented as an agent, but also as a “natural space.” The descriptions of water courses, its thick and impenetrable forests, its many animals, and its natural abundance (fruits, plants, animals) offer both aesthetic appreciation and positive valuation of “nature” and demonstrate that the wilderness also connotes natural abundance and luxuriance. Inana’s final establishment of kingship and cult in the mountains means that the wilderness is transferred to the domain of divine rule. Previously, the moun-tain wilderness as domain of abundant nature was represented as outside the rule of the deity. While Inana’s destruction of it is framed as legitimate, the vivid, appreciative descriptions of the natural abundance of the mountains, the description of the destruction of Mount Ebih with a tone of sadness, as well as the deity An’s speech to Inana with its appreciation of the wilderness, are aspects that communicate a sense of positive valuation, fascination, and loss. Natural alterity, abundance, and wildness are clearly also valued, and the combination with Inana’s brutal victory and subordination of the mountains makes for a somewhat jarring impression.

It seems fair to conclude that the presentation of the mountain wilderness in Inana and Ebih is presented ambiguously between wildness-danger and natural abundance-luxuriance. It oscillates between the desired domination of an abundant and dangerous nature that threatens the stability of kalam, the cultured world, and a fascination of the fertile, abundant natural alterity of this space as a legitimate space of its own. It does not speak of “worship of nature,” but of a religion, the material basis and dominant focus of which were access to natural goods, food, and fertility.

Lugalbanda in the Wilderness47In the Lugalbanda narratives, the “story” — “fabula” interaction presents an interesting object of research. The narrative analysis shows that the Lugalbanda

47  For these analyses, I have also drawn on Vanstiphout’s recent translation. See Vanstiphout 2003 and Alster 1990 for details of text history, provenance, and previous interpretations.

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texts emphasize very particular fabula slots and actors to a remarkable extent — one that almost drowns out the basic narrative structure. The special focus of the “story” on particular “fabula” slots, the journey and the consultation slots (cf. Table 1 above), is remarkable, as well as the emphasis on particular “fabula” actors, namely, the donor and the helper. The helper, Lugalbanda, is the real hero of the composition. The divergences from the traditional combat fabula are thus quite great. An analysis of how attention is distributed in the “story” vis-à-vis the “fabula” slots reveals also a very particular spatial focus: out of a total 916 lines in the combined stories of LW and LA, 714 lines are set in the mountain wilderness. The fabula-versus-story analysis reveals just how much of the narrative is set in the wilderness and how great the emphasis is on the wilderness and the events that take place there. Therefore, we need to detail and discuss the wilderness events (a more detailed “fabula”-analysis), as well as how the wilderness space and the characters acting there are described in order to get a hold of the presentation of the wilderness space in these stories (the aspects of the “story”).

A more detailed analysis of slot d: journey,48 which takes place in the moun-tain wilderness, reveals it as a space in which human, natural, animal, and divine beings/persons communicate and interact. In Bal’s narratological per-spective, places are linked to certain points of perception in narratives. Places seen in relation to their perception are called “space” (Bal 1997:133), and this aspect of the “story” layer is where we can get information about how space is felt, experienced, and perceived by the characters. In LW, the point of percep-tion is an ordinary human person49 placed in a position to marvel at the great size and luxuriousness of plants and trees and the abundant wildlife of the wilderness domain, in which he finds himself all alone. It is a space void of humans, where direct communication with the deities is possible and identity transformation takes place. The wilderness is experienced as remote, desolate, and dangerous (LW ll. 151–170; LA ll. 1–5). Yet it is also full of marvelous food and drink, the luxuriousness and abundance of plants, fruits, animals, and trees are also in central focus (e.g., plants “of life” and water “of life” are found there)50 (LW ll. 265–325), as seen, for instance, in this description of a wild bull,

48  I leave out of consideration here slot g:consultation as it does not bear directly on the idea of wilderness.

49  Thus also Black (2002:53).50  ll. 266–267:266. íd hal-hal-la ama ḫur-sağ-ğá-ke4 a-nam-tìl-la im-tùm, 267. ú nam-tìl-la-

ka zú nam-mi-in-gub; (The rolling rivers, mothers of the mountains, brought life-saving water. He bit on the life-saving plants, he sipped from the life-saving water) (ETCSL trans-lation; see Black 2006, but following Steinkeller 2007 on the translation of ḫur-sağ).

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an image of natural abundance and power in Old Babylonian literature (Feldt 2007):

A brown wild bull, a fine-looking wild bull, a wild bull tossing its horns, a wild bull in hunger (?), resting, seeking with its voice the brown wild bulls of the hills, the pure place — in this way it was chewing aromatic šimgig as if it were barley, it was grinding up the wood of the cypress as if it were esparto grass, it was sniffing with its nose at the foliage of the šenu shrub as if it were grass. It was drinking the water of the rolling rivers, it was belching from ilinnuš, the pure plant of the mountains. (ll. 300–308, ETCSL translation; see Black et al. 1998–2006)

In LA, the perception of space also centers on remoteness and lack of human company, the height of the mountains, and the size of the trees (ll. 1–49). Importantly, the descriptions of trees, plants, stones and other objects, and wildlife in the wilderness use their “real” and quite specific names, so we are not in an “otherworld”; instead, we are in the normal world of humans, which is, however, removed in time and with added marvelous features such as, e.g., gigantism or hyperbole.51 Much “story” attention is focused on the gigantic monster-bird Anzud, who has shark’s teeth and an eagle’s claws, who is wild and ferocious, but intelligent, who speaks the human tongue, and who may bestow magical gifts (LA ll. 28–110). Here, too, it seems fair to say that the mon-ster-bird Anzud is bound to and epitomizes the wilderness space. Therefore, we may reasonably assume that the gifts that this character is able to give also speak of the qualities imagined to belong to the wilderness: precious met-als, grain, apples, cucumbers, hunting skill, battle strength, butter, and milk (LA ll. 132–166), as here, when Anzud addresses Lugalbanda:

Come now, my Lugalbanda. Go like a boat full of precious metals, like a grain barge, like a boat going to deliver apples, like a boat piled up high with a cargo of cucumbers, casting a shade, like a boat loaded lavishly at the place of harvest, go back to brick-built Kulaba with head held high! — Lugalbanda who loves the seed will not accept this. (ll. 132–140, ETCSL translation; see Black et al. 1998–2006)

These are gifts that reflect a duality of strength and skill and abundance and luxuriousness; it is a catalogue of desirable goods stemming from the moun-tain wilderness. Lugalbanda rejects these offers of abundance from Anzud in

51  For a discussion of marvelous elements in religious narratives, see Feldt 2012a.

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favor of speed in running. Anzud grants his wish, and Lugalbanda emerges from his wilderness experience with a transformed identity.

While the wilderness is, in these stories, presented as a positive space of mar-velous transformation, it is also a heroic space: Lugalbanda enters as a weakling and exits a hero. But, importantly, in this text, heroism is not about violence and strength, but about creativity, wit, and communication with the gods. Lugalbanda survives in the wilderness because of his cunning intelligence,52 skill, and wit. He communicates aptly and directly with the deities, offering appropriate prayers and rituals, and he creatively reinvents the skills of “civi-lization” (LW ll. 287–293)53 and deals with the mountain monster-bird as its equal in cunning intelligence. This is a hero-image that does not praise the soldier’s strength and endurance, but the clever mediator’s cunning wit and intelligence. Again, the duality in the associations of the mountain wilderness is clear: the danger of abandonment and death, the fascination and positive valuation of its natural abundance, luxuriousness, gigantism, the nearness to the astral deities who are accessible there, and the possibility of marvelous transformation characteristic of this space.

Gilgamesh and HuwawaThe Sumerian story of Gilgamesh and Huwawa differs from the well-known and longer Akkadian Epic of Gilgamesh, which is from the first millennium (George 2003). A set of Sumerian tales about Gilgamesh predate the well-known Gilgamesh epic — and of those I have here selected the composi-tions known as Gilgamesh and Huwawa A and B for analysis.54 In this story, Gilgamesh ventures into the mountain wilderness to cut down cedars, because he wishes to attain metaphorical immortality, to surpass death through fame (A: ll. 1–7;B: ll. 5–21). He brings along his servant Enkidu and some workers. As we see in Table 1 above, the fabula is similar to the other combat fabulae, with the bulk of the composition set in the mountain wilderness (ll. 48–180). Special attention is devoted to slots c: donor or consultation, i: battle resumed, and k: enemy punished.

52  For discussion of the idea of cunning intelligence in Greek society, see Detienne and Vernant 1991.

53  In his retelling of what happened in the wilderness, Lugalbanda describes himself as having become wild in the process: ur-bar-ra-gim gúm-ga-àm mi-ni-za ú-sal ì-kú-en tu-gur4mušen -gim ki im-de 5 -de 5 -ge-en i-li-a-nu-um kur-ra ì-kú-[en] (I howled like a wolf, I grazed the meadows; I pecked the ground like a pigeon; I ate the mountain acorns) (LA ll. 242–243).

54  I focus primarily on A, which is the more elaborate version.

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The greater part of the story concerns the encounter and dialogue with the mountain forest monster and guardian Huwawa, who protects the cedars. The basic point communicated in the text is that the success of Gilgamesh and Enkidu in acquiring the wood, as well as fame (metaphorical immortality), is entirely contingent on their interaction with Huwawa. The slots receiving the greater textual attention (c, i, and k) support this conclusion. The story treats an issue of central concern to cultured city life in Mesopotamia, namely, that wood was essential for proper, cultured city life, especially for building palaces and temples, that it was difficult to procure, and that it was seen as an act of heroism to venture into the mountains to obtain it. The mountain cedar forest is presented as the domain of the trees, a wild area, but it is not a domain void of people or personhood and the trees are no mere resource to be picked up. The forest wilderness is sanctioned by the deities, under the special protection of the deity Utu. This is made very clear in slot c: donor or consultation (see also ll. 8–12), in which Gilgamesh is obliged to ask Utu’s permission to venture into the mountains, offering his tears as a fitting gift. Utu grants him permission and gives him a set of monstrous-marvelous helpers to assist him.55 We also see it in Huwawa’s appeal to Utu, after Gilgamesh has tricked him:

Utu, I never knew a mother who bore me, nor a father who brought me up! I was born in the mountains — you brought me up! Yet Gilgameš swore to me by heaven, by earth, and by the mountains. (ll. 155–157, ETCSL translation; Black et al. 1998–2006)

As for the wilderness as a space, the mountains are presented as distant and wild; its peaks, trees, and watercourses are great, and their inhabitants are non-human monstrous people. The mountains are clearly not the home habitat of the humans from the plains; staying there is dangerous. But the mountains are not “chaotic.” They belong to the rule of the deity Utu, humans travel there by his permission, and they should interact respectfully with its non-human inhabitants. In fact, interaction with Huwawa is decisive for obtaining the goal

55  The text is unfortunately fragmented here, and the description of Utu’s gift of help is unclear. It does, however, exhibit some similarities to the description of the seven war-riors at the beginning of Lugalbanda in the Wilderness as well as to the tradition of the Slain Heroes in Lugale ll. 128–134. Miguel Civil argues that the descriptions of these helper warriors are metaphorical, but does not elaborate this view. Interestingly, he suggests that they may be references to stars and constellations as a means of way-finding (Civil 2003:78–79). Note also that in the Lugalbanda stories Utu features as the divine protector and overseer of the wilderness regions (see also Woods 2009).

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of the journey. Respectful interaction is presented as the norm, as is revealed in both the hero-protagonist’s pity for Huwawa after he has captured him (ll. 158–162), and in Enlil’s reaction and in his speech (ll. 178–200):

Why did you act in this way? {. . . did you act . . .?} {(1 ms. has instead:) Was it commanded that his name should be wiped from the earth?} {He should have sat before you!} {(1 ms. has instead:) He should have sat . . ., . . . .} He should have eaten the bread that you eat, and should have drunk the water that you drink! {He should have been honoured . . . you!} {(1 ms. has instead:) Ḫuwawa — he . . . honoured!} (ll. 187–192, ETCSL translation; Black et al. 1998–2006)

Interaction with the wilderness is framed as interaction with Huwawa, and the killing of Huwawa is seen as a transgression. Huwawa is not evil, and Gilgamesh is not a violent brute of a hero. The narrator presents a double image of both Gilgamesh and Huwawa: on the one hand, Gilgamesh is an intruder into the wil-derness, and Huwawa is the legitimate protector of the cedar forest who should be treated as a peer, with respect, as a “forest person.” On the other hand, the implicit and explicit praise of and fascination with the heroic Gilgamesh who opens paths in the wilderness is obvious in the narrative. Similarly, Huwawa is persistently represented ambiguously: he is both a devastating monster who incapacitates Gilgamesh by making him and his company fall asleep; he is also a gullible brute who is unfamiliar with the subtleties of culture and who can be tricked by the hero’s superior wit (ll. 130–151); and he is the legitimate servant of the gods and protector of the forest wilderness who should be treated as a peer and with appropriate respect. He is also a person presented as worthy of sympathy in his weeping appeals to Gilgamesh after his capture.56

Thus, this story plays out the heroic fabula structure of victory over an inimi-cal monster in the mountain wilderness in a way that softens the hero/enemy monster and good/evil dichotomy, as well as the concomitant spatial opposi-tion between kalam and kur. In the story layer, it plays out a cultural negotia-tion between the negative spatial paradigm of the inimical space of wilderness as a site of combat against fearsome monsters to be slain and killed, and then the benign wilderness image as the legitimate domain of its wild inhabitants of non-human, “natural,” people, under the reign of Utu, with an unmistak-able appreciation of the mountain forests’ natural abundance and the “person-

56  I thus cannot agree with Robert P. Harrison’s Vico-inspired reading of the Gilgamesh and Huwawa story as a story only of “hostility, religious in origin, between the institutions of humanity and the outlying forests” (1992:13–18; quote on p. 13).

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hood” epitomizing the cedar forest. The latter view comes out especially in the dialogue between Gilgamesh and Huwawa, as well as in Enlil’s speech, which condemns the killing of Huwawa and spells out proper behavior: Huwawa should have sat before them, sharing their meal, and they should have honored him and his name (ll. 187–192).

It is also noteworthy that the hero’s victory is not framed in terms of a combat, but as a witty dialogue. Gilgamesh overcomes Huwawa not by means of brute force, but by means of his superior cunning intelligence and wit, and upon his weeping and prayers for mercy, Gilgamesh is ready to forgive him and let him run. Huwawa is, however, killed by Enkidu, who does not believe that Huwawa will let them get away alive. Framing the combat as a dialogue can be taken to speak of scribal ideals of leadership through cleverness and knowledge. The texts’ contexts of use may then have been in the scribal school milieu, in addi-tion to, perhaps more than, royal or “military” ones.57 Gilgamesh’s feelings of pity after he tricked and captured the forest monster and Huwawa’s vivid and heart-rending appeal to Utu (ll. 153–157) speak of the value attributed to the forest and its monster, of its divine protection, as well as of scribal pleasure in rhetorical mastery.58 The text ends on an almost tragic note when Huwawa’s magical luminous rays59 are distributed to the fields, the rivers, the reedbeds, the lions, the palace, the forests, and to Nungal.60 Huwawa’s rays, which, in all likelihood, represent natural strength and value, are taken from Gilgamesh and attributed to other areas. This act by Enlil can be taken as a statement that Huwawa’s powers should remain independent of the ruler, as Enlil here clearly takes them from Gilgamesh.61 The mountain wilderness is here wild, with a natural abundance and inhabited by people; it is valued and legitimate, not a negative domain.

57  We can or should, of course, not exclude the royal court Sitz im Leben from our analysis. This is also the case if the Gilgamesh texts, as some assume, stem from the Ur III dynasty. In any case, the royal ideals embedded in these texts are indeed remarkable.

58  On potential similarities to the Debate Poems, see Vanstiphout 2003:1–21.59  The concept of ni2 is complex but cannot be investigated in detail here. It is commonly

translated “auras,” which I think gives a wrong nuance (see also Civil 2003:84), or “terrors” — which is the effect of the rays.

60  The manuscript tradition for lines 193–199, and the order in which the auras are assigned is confused. See Civil 2003 for an attempt to synchronize the sources in the score; see also Delnero 2012:94 n. 13.

61  Civil suggests that the passage alludes to an imprisonment of the rays, but also that Enlil takes action to ensure that the magic rays are out of reach of heroes like Gilgamesh and that Gilgamesh does not emerge victorious in the way one would expect for the protago-nist of an epic tale (2003:85).

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Literary-Narrative Form and Social Space

On the basis of the present analyses, we thus may conclude that it is inad-equate to see the mountain wilderness in Mesopotamia as construed only as an inimical region of enemies and chaos in religious ideology, as stories of the conquest of wilderness which supply a supportive ideology for the kings and sovereigns. Rather, these narratives labor to negotiate this spatial para-digm, offering a reflective and many-sided view of the mountain wilderness. To a great extent, the mountain wilderness’ function can be characterized in terms of liminality, as a space of metamorphosis and ambiguity. And yet there is more to the construction/production of this space than that. For while the concept of liminality is certainly of value in this context, it does not help us address the concrete/material aspects of the wilderness space beyond what is general to (all) liminal spaces or the social space of the text producers and consumers.

The texts analyzed here show, on the one hand, that the authors and recipi-ents of these texts did not live in the wilderness but apart from it (Black 2002:56), and, on the other hand, that elite life in agricultural and urban areas was fundamentally dependent upon interaction with and travel into wilder-ness areas. So, to be sure, the narratives are “about” kings, heroes, and sover-eigns, whether divine or human, and their actions and exploits are in central focus. And yet let me suggest that the results brought out by the analyses indi-cate that the social space that the texts reflect is as much related to the scribes, to scribal culture, and perhaps scribal schooling, as to the kings and heroes. For instance, the length of and the tablet space accorded to the meticulous list of stones in Lugale/Ninurta’s Exploits, which severely interrupts the narrative flow, as well as the attention devoted to the demonstration of the “insideness” of the outside and the contingency of the hero-monster constructions are indications of concerns other than a support of royal ideology. In Inana and Ebih, we can point to the remarkable combination of a surface endorsement of Inana’s brutal victory over Mount Ebih, then to An’s speech with its valuation of the wilderness and its beautiful descriptions of the mountain’s lushness and abundance of fruit, plants, and animals, and the sadness in the presentation of the fall of Ebih, to which we may join the final exaltation of Nisaba, god-dess of scribes. In the Lugalbanda compositions, we see how the real hero, who is a mediator-type, not a sovereign, survives in the wilderness because of cunning intelligence, creativity, and his knowledge of the proper prayers, not because of his battle skills or heroic strength, and further, how the empha-sis is put on religious transformation in the wilderness. In the Gilgamesh and Huwawa stories we may point to the lack of divine and narratorial endorsement

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of the killing of Huwawa, to how respectful dialogue is presented as the model for interaction with this wilderness person, how sadness shrouds the killing of Huwawa, and finally how wit, cunning intelligence, and compassion are valued. These are features that suggest that we cannot take any of these com-positions as straightforward commendations of the view of wilderness as an inimical region of enemies and chaos. The spatial conception of the wilder-ness in Old Babylonian Mesopotamia was much more ambiguous and fasci-nating. We may speculate that perhaps the scribes may have found it useful to negotiate and soften the spatial paradigm of forceful victory over foreign lands and enemies into an ambiguous and complex picture, stressing the value of natural abundance, wit, knowledge, and respectful interaction and also to emphasize their specialist knowledge of the abundant valuable natural goods of the mountains.62 Many aspects of the written literary form of these texts point to rhetorical sophistication and to the value of scribal knowledge;63 in other words, they point to the social space of the scribal milieu.

Conclusion

The analyses suggest that religious wilderness ideas in Mesopotamian society in Old Babylonian times were more ambiguous than has been allowed for in previous research. In these stories about the heroic acts of divine and human protagonists in the wilderness, its main aspects stand out: the mountains are wild, void of humans and consequently often dangerous, and they are natu-rally abundant — full of desirable, luxurious, and necessary natural goods. Further, the mountain wilderness is to some extent “before” or primeval, it enables magical transformation, and it is an arena for heroic acts and direct (and “templeless”) communication with the deities.64 As we have seen, the “wild” character of the mountains was verbalized through narratives about the interaction of divine and human protagonists against monstrous people epit-omizing the mountain wilderness, presenting much of the interaction with

62  To some extent this is inspired by the recent and valuable “curricular” turn in the inter-pretation of Sumerian literary texts but without relying so much on specific reconstruc-tions of the place of individual texts in the scribal curriculum (see more information in Delnero 2011).

63  It is likely that similar stories had lives or fed off a supply of oral, popular traditions about gods and heroes of the wilderness.

64  Temples were the standard and primary religious space for mediation and communica-tion between deities and humans in ancient Mesopotamia (Walker and Dick 2001).

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the wilderness as interaction with the wild creatures of the mountains — as opposed to interaction with the landscape per se. The opponents epitomize what the mountain wilderness is about: they are uncontrollable and unpre-dictable characters, in command of natural abundance, strong, dangerous, but also capable of bestowing magical gifts. The mountain wilderness thus cannot be equated with “nature,” if “nature” is understood narrowly as a domain void of people or as an uncultured area. The mountain wilderness is presented in terms of personhood and social organization. Importantly, the mountain wil-derness cannot be seen as unequivocally dangerous and inimical. While the basic shared narrative “fabula” is that of a hero’s struggle against an opponent in foreign territory, and while this “fabula” frames the mountain wilderness either as an enemy or as the site of inimical exchange in terms of the “fabula” “slot,” the fundamental ambiguity of the wilderness is brought out clearly in each of the four narratives as they all negotiate and complicate the basic “designed space” entailed by the “fabula,” in their “stories,” and “texts.” Further, some of the narratives analyzed here emphasize the value of cunning intel-ligence over sovereignty and brute force for the (would-be) ruler/hero-protag-onist (Lugalbanda and Gilgamesh stories), and they present several modes of interaction with nature’s forces in a spectrum between forceful domination, respectful communication, and fascinated admiration of natural abundance and knowledge of its importance to human life (Inana and Ebih, Ninurta’s Exploits). As demonstrated here, it is vital to take into account the literary-narrative forms of the texts, as they significantly influence the perception of the basic fabula and how space is narrativized, as well as how we may speak of the social space of the authors-redactors and users of the texts. Religious spaces cannot be understood apart from the media — in this case narrative and literary — in which they appear, and through which they are mediated to religious audiences. Important features of the narratives analyzed here point towards the scribal milieu.

Interestingly, while the Hebrew Bible’s stories of Israel’s journey in the desert wilderness seem to offer a “wilderness perspective” on land, territo-riality, and city life — a perspective from outside in (Feldt 2012b:55–94) — the Mesopotamian wilderness stories treated here labor to bring across the “insideness” of the outside. The opponents, foreigners, and strangers are pre-sented as people worthy of dialogue, compassion, and respectful treatment (the Lugalbanda and Gilgamesh stories), and when indeed slain their names are remembered and their bodies transformed into cosmological or natural features or sites of worship of importance to current life (Gilgamesh, Lugale, Inana and Ebih). The wilderness’ value and importance for the abundance and fertility it brings to cultured life in the cities is stressed throughout. In varying

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ways, these stories labor to offer glimpses of “the insideness” of “the others,” of the foreign lands, and the fearsome wilderness.

Spatial Reflections: Nature, Chaos, and WildernessThese analyses of wilderness in ancient Mesopotamia may be relevant for broader discussions in the study of religion. Let me point to two such arenas here. With respect to the relations between deities and “nature” or domains of “nature” in ancient Mesopotamia, it is worth pointing out that these analyses have shown that even in some of the older material from ancient Mesopotamia, it is not the case that the deities represent “nature” or nature’s forces. The rela-tion between natural domains and deities is complex and certainly such that no deity can be said to embody or epitomize a natural domain or phenomenon. To be sure, the deities may be connected to domains in nature and even command or are understood to be in charge of some of them (in our case, for instance, Utu is thought to be in charge of kur), but still the deities are separate from and transcend these natural domains and forces.65 While “nature” is indeed a tremendously important term, the analyses show clearly that we cannot speak of “worship of nature” or say that the deities essentially represent the forces of “nature” on the basis of these stories. A central focus of religion in ancient Mesopotamia was indeed natural/material; humans entertained relations with transempirical beings in order to stay healthy and fertile and to make sure that the crops would not fail and the rain came at the right time. In this respect, however, religion in ancient Mesopotamia essentially does not differ from reli-gion in the Hebrew Bible (Jensen 2000; Lang 2002).66 With regard to traditional cosmology studies, another corollary of these analyses is to call for more nuances and a greater degree of contextualization with regard to large, dichotomizing spatial concepts such as “cosmos” or “chaos.” Religious cosmologies are investi-gated as those culturally specific orientations in space (and time) that may be analyzed and extracted from religious narratives, images, artefacts, and rituals (Geertz 1999:471–472; Auffarth 2001). “Cosmology” is thus understood both as the general, spatio-temporal view of the cosmos/world embedded in diverse religions and as the more or less systematized religious knowledge about it (Lincoln 1999:3–5; Raudvere 2009). In recent decades, the general study of reli-gion has moved away from such classical endeavors,67 probably partly due to how classical studies of cosmology, to some extent, came to be associated with

65  Notably, the opponents Ebih, Asag, Huwawa, and Anzud are to a much greater degree dependent on their domain — they are more tied to it, epitomizing it.

66  The “fertility perspective” on the wilderness is also shared (Feldt 2012b).67  This does not mean that it was not and is not still pursued in various area studies and

subdisciplines. Cosmology studies do thrive in some area studies that are subdisciplines

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the phenomenology of religion, which was criticized for the grand generaliz-ing and sometimes religiously grounded concepts that it utilized (Jensen 2003; Stausberg 2009), as well as with structuralist approaches, which have been seen to over-emphasize the extent of systematization in religious cosmologies. The general study of religion has moved towards a greater focus on contexts and agency (cf. Jensen 2003; Raudvere 2009; Stausberg 2009). Along similar lines, the present analyses of ancient Mesopotamian wilderness ideas suggest that further cosmological studies may benefit from a more detailed investigation of the concrete construction/productions of space, including the mediality (here, the literary-narrative contexts) of religious spatial ideas. Large, general-izing, and dichotomizing concepts such as nature, cosmos, or chaos do seem to need qualification, theoretical development, and further nuances. The con-cept of wilderness may be one such qualification which may be apt to grasp a greater extent of diversity in religious interactions with natural environments. It may also be of help in questioning traditional dualisms, which often obscure important ambiguities and complexities, as well as point to the necessity of more specific investigations of the material-natural environment involved in the religious construction/production of space.

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