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The creation of Eabani recalls the Biblical tradition of the formation of the first man, and Ukhat appears to be the Babylonian equivalent to the Biblical Eve, who through her charms entices Eabani away from the gazelles and cattle, and brings him to Uruk, the symbol of civilized existence.
The old sacred centers like Ur, Nippur, Uruk, Sippar, with their great temples, their elaborate cults, their great storehouses of religious literature, and their great body of influential priests and theologians and astrologers were as dear to the people of the north as to those of the south; and in proportion as these old cities lost their political importance, their rank as sacred centers to which pilgrimages were made on the occasion of the festivals of the gods was correspondingly raised.
They constitute the regular means of communication between man and the gods, so regular that at times the compilers of the epic do not find it necessary to specify the fact, but take it for granted. To Gilgamesh, Eabani's coming is revealed and he asks his mother Aruru to interpret the dream. The third and fourth tablets take us back to the history of Uruk.
An independent state with its seat at Uruk follows upon the culminating period of the glory of Ur, and may be regarded, indeed, as an indication that the rulers of Ur had lost their control over the whole of Southern Babylonia. Isin, whose site has not yet been determined, but which lay probably to the north of Uruk, was another political center.
She is dark and moody, sudden and ill-fated, and rends her young like a cannibal lioness; and she is old and wise, and remembers Hur of the Chaldees which Uruk built, and that Temple of Bel which rose in seven pyramids to symbolise the planets, and Birs-i-Nimrud, and Haran, and she bears still, as a thing of yesterday, old Persepolis and the tomb of Cyrus, and those cloister-like vihârah-temples of the ancient Buddhists, cut from the Himalayan rock; and returning from the Far East, I stopped at Ismailia, and so to Cairo, and saw where Memphis was, and stood one bright midnight before that great pyramid of Shafra, and that dumb Sphynx, and, seated at the well of one of the rock-tombs, looked till tears of pity streamed down my cheeks: for great is the earth, and her Ages, but man 'passeth away. These tombs have pillars extremely like the two palace-pillars, only that these are round, and mine are square: for I chose it so: but the same band near the top, then over this the closed lotus-flower, then the small square plinth, which separates them from the architrave, only mine have no architrave; the tombs consist of a little outer temple or court, then comes a well, and inside another chamber, where, I suppose, the dead were, a ribbon-like astragal surrounding the walls, which are crowned with boldly-projecting cornices, surmounted by an abacus.
In the light of the Babylonian story of Eabani living with animals, Stade's suggestion receives a striking illustration. See Trumbull, The Threshold Covenant, p. 239. Kharimtu. In Arabic the word is likewise used for 'woman' in general. The temple at Uruk is meant.
It is Sin-gashid again who associates Ningul with Lugal-banda, and emphasizes his affection for the goddess by calling her his mother. In one inscription, moreover, Sin-gashid addresses himself exclusively to the goddess, who had an equal share in the temple at Uruk. Dumuzi-zu-aba.
The center of action in the first tablets of the series and in the oldest portions of the epic is the ancient city Uruk, or Erech, in southern Babylonia, invariably spoken of as Uruk supûri, that is, the 'walled' or fortified Uruk. A special significance attaches to this epithet. It was the characteristic of every ancient town, for reasons which Ihering has brilliantly set forth, to be walled.
In fact, the Babylonian principalities arise from the extension of the city's jurisdiction, just as the later Babylonian empire is naught but the enlargement, on a greater scale, of the city of Babylon. Of these old Babylonian cities the most noteworthy, in the south, are Eridu, Lagash, Ur, Larsa, Uruk, Isin; and in the north, Agade, Sippar, Nippur, Kutha, and Babylon.
The designation of Uruk as 'walled, therefore, stamps it as a city, but that the term was added, also points to the great antiquity of the place, to a period when towns as distinguished from mere agricultural villages were sufficiently rare to warrant some special nomenclature.
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