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The word for weapon is always written with this determinative; and since Izdubar is essentially a warrior, one should expect dubar to represent some kind of a weapon that he carries. On seal cylinders Gilgamesh appears armed with a large lance.
There is therefore a reasonable doubt whether the identification made by Babylonian scholars represents an old tradition or is merely a late conjecture arising at a time when the traditions of Izdubar were confused with those of Etana.
Before proceeding to the consideration of these less satisfactory details, it is needful to remark that Hasisadra's adventure is a mere episode in a cycle of stories of which a personage, whose name is provisionally read "Izdubar," is the centre.
Lastly, it is interesting to note that Izdubar, or Gilgamesh, the famous hero of the great Babylonian epic, occurs also in incantations a welcome indication of the antiquity of the myth, and the proof, at the same time, that the epic is built on a foundation of myth. From the mythological side, Gilgamesh appears to be a solar deity.
The equation proved that the Babylonians and Assyrians identified the hero with a legendary king, Gilgamos, who is mentioned by Aelian. To be sure, what Aelian tells of this hero is not found in the Izdubar epic, and appears to have originally been recounted of another legendary personage, Etana.
The nature of Izdubar hovers vaguely between the heroic and the divine; sometimes he seems a mere man, sometimes approaches so closely to the divinities of fire and of the sun as to be hardly distinguishable from them.
Hammurabi views the goddess in this light, and in the Izdubar or Gilgamesh epic, as already pointed out, she appears at times in the rôle of a violent destroyer.
For previous readings of the name, see Jeremias' article on 'Izdubar' in Roscher's Ausführliches Lexicon der Griechischen und Römischen Mythologie, ii. col. 773, 774. Historia Animalum, xii. 21. See p. 524. In the Oriental legends of Alexander the Great, this confusion is further illustrated. To Alexander are attached stories belonging to both Izdubar and Etana.
As I have already mentioned, the tablet which sets forth Hasisadra's perils is one of twelve; and, since each of these represents a month and bears a story appropriate to the corresponding sign of the Zodiac, great weight must be attached to Sir Henry Rawlinson's suggestion that the epos of Izdubar is a poetical embodiment of solar mythology.
See, e.g., Perrot and Chiplez, History of Art in Babylonia and Assyria, i. 84. Article 'Izdubar, col. 776; see Delitzsch, Handwörterbuch, p. 678. If the name is Elamitic, one should hardly expect a Babylonian deity entering as one of the elements. See above, p. 167. See above, p. 284. Haupt's Das Babylonische Nimrodepos, p. 93. Lit., 'he who is applied to for giving a decision. Ta-par-ra-as.
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