Urshanabi

Summary

Urshanabi is the boatman of Utnapishtim, the man who takes a boat across the sea and the Waters of Death to the distant place where Enlil settled the survivor of the Flood and his wife. The epic calls him malāḫu, which is Arabic mallāḥ, "sailor", itself. He had "the Stone Ones" with him, by which he crossed, because he must not touch the Waters of Death.

Siduri told Gilgamesh about him. Gilgamesh took up his axe and dirk, crept up and fell among them like an arrow, his shout booming through the forest. Urshanabi saw him and took up an axe, trembling; Gilgamesh struck his head, grabbed his hair and pinned his arm to his chest, then smashed the Stone Ones and tipped them into the river. When Gilgamesh asked him the way, the boatman said: your own hands, Gilgamesh, have stopped you, you have smashed the Stone Ones. Take the axe, go down to the forest and cut me three hundred punting-poles, each five rods long; trim them and give each a boss. Gilgamesh cut them, they boarded, and in three days they covered a month and a half's journey, until they reached the Waters of Death. Urshanabi said: take the first pole, Gilgamesh, and do not let your hand touch the Waters of Death; then the second, the third, up to the twelfth. When the poles ran out Gilgamesh stripped off his garment and held it up with his arms as a sail. Utnapishtim saw them from afar and said: why are the Stone Ones smashed, and aboard the boat a man who is not its master? Tablet X, 87–200.

The boatman paid for this crossing. When sleep overcame Gilgamesh and he failed his test, Utnapishtim said: "Ur-šanabi, may the quay reject you, may the ferry scorn you! You who used to walk on its shore, suffer absence from it!" Then he told him to take the man to the washtub, wash his matted hair, throw his hides into the sea, and dress him in a royal robe that would stay new until he reached his city. They boarded, and Utnapishtim told Gilgamesh of a plant under the water whose thorn pricks; he tied stones to his feet, went down and pulled it up, and said to the boatman: this is the "plant of the heart-beat", by which a man regains his vitality; I will take it to Uruk and feed it to an old man, and if he grows young I will eat it myself. At twenty leagues they broke bread, at thirty they camped; Gilgamesh found a pool of cool water and went down to bathe, and a snake smelled the fragrance of the plant, came up silently and carried it off, shedding its skin as it turned away. Gilgamesh sat down weeping and said to Urshanabi: for whom have my arms toiled, for whom has my heart's blood run dry? I have gained no boon for myself; I have done a favour for the "lion of the earth". Then they reached Uruk, and the last words of Tablet XI are spoken to Urshanabi: go up on the wall of Uruk and walk around, survey the foundation, inspect the brickwork; is it not kiln-fired brick, did not the Seven Sages lay its foundations? One šār is city, one šār date grove, one šār clay pits, half a šār the temple of Ishtar: three šār and a half is Uruk, the šār being a measure of area.

The idea his story turns on is that crossing what cannot be crossed needs a hand other than the hero's, and that this hand pays a price. The boatman crossed with the Stone Ones; Gilgamesh smashed them in his anger and had to replace them with the work of his own hands, three hundred poles each thrown away after a single push. Having carried a living man beyond the Waters of Death, the boatman was banished from his quay and became Gilgamesh's companion on the way home, taking the place of Enkidu, who had set out with him on the first journey. What he is shown at the end of the epic is people's work, the wall, the palms, the clay pits and the temple; the plant the snake has taken.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. Ur-šanabi has two parts. Ur is a Sumerian element that begins many personal names, such as Ur-Namma, founder of the Third Dynasty of Ur, and is understood in them as the man or servant of a god; šanabi is the name of the sign that writes the number forty, and forty is two-thirds of sixty, which Akkadian word lists call šinipu, "two-thirds". Akkadian š answers Arabic th, as šalāš answers thalāth, "three", so šin- is thin-, from thanā and ithnān, "two". In Lane, thanāhu is said of one who became, with another, two, and one says: he is one, fa-athnihi, "so be thou a second to him". On this reading Urshanabi is "the dependant who became a second", which is what the epic makes him: after Enkidu's death he is the man who crossed with Gilgamesh and came back with him, the last one Gilgamesh speaks to. This is a reading proposed on the method. His title malāḫu is simply mallāḥ, the sailor, so called, Lane says, because he keeps to the salt water.

Linguistic Root

The title: mallāḥ

Malāḫu in the Akkadian dictionary is a sailor or shipwright, written with the Sumerian signs MA₂.LAH₄, the first of which is the sign for a boat. It is Arabic mallāḥ letter for letter, m, l and ḥ, and Lane says the sailor is so called because he is constantly upon the salt water. But Akkadian ḫ against Arabic ḥ does not follow the usual law, since old ḥ drops in Akkadian and ḫ stays ḫ, so the word travelled between the branches rather than descending in both by one path.

The name: the servant and "the second"

One Nineveh copy separates the two parts of the name by putting the divine sign before šanabi, making it a god's name. Forty is the number of Ea, whose name can be written in Akkadian with the divine sign and the numeral forty, so that for the scribes Urshanabi was "servant of Forty", the servant of Ea, who warned Utnapishtim of the Flood. Forty is two-thirds of sixty in the base-sixty count, and Sebastian Fink, in a study titled "How Gilgameš Became a Two-thirds God: It Was the Ferryman", connects this two-thirds with Tablet I's statement that Gilgamesh is two-thirds god and one-third human.

The word lists set ša-na-bi beside šinipu, "two-thirds"; the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary gives its feminine forms such as šinipât and suggests it may be a Sumerian loanword. Akkadian for "two" is šina, whose š and n are the th and n of Arabic ithnān under the th/š law (Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, Š part 3, p. 32). In Lane, thanā is to fold a thing so that one part lies on another, thanāhu is to become two with someone, and fa-athnihi is "be a second to him". The reading makes the name "the dependant of the second" or "the one who became a second".

The limit of the reading is that it leaves ur in Sumerian, and that the Old Babylonian Sursunabu and the Kalhu spelling Ur-šunabe do not divide like Ur-šanabi, so the scribes may have explained an older name by the number.

Historical Context

In the Old Babylonian version the boatman is called Sursunabu and tells Gilgamesh, "I am Sursunabu, of Ūta-naʾištim the Distant", and asks him for three hundred punting-poles, each sixty cubits long. Tablets X and XI of the Standard version then tell his story in full and make him Gilgamesh's companion to Uruk.

Key Mythic Narratives

The Stone Ones

The text does not say exactly what the Stone Ones are. They are with the boatman in the forest, they "had sealed the boat", and in the old version he says: "The Stone Ones were what enabled me to cross, because I must not touch the Waters of Death." They are something of stone that protects or drives the boat so that the boatman's hand never touches the water. When Gilgamesh smashed them, the long pole took their place: a man pushes with it once and lets it go before the water reaches his hand.

The washing and the robe

Before the return Utnapishtim tells the boatman to wash Gilgamesh, take him out of the animal skins he has worn since Enkidu's death, and dress him in a royal robe. The man who went into the wild in a lion's skin, as Shamash foretold to Enkidu, goes back to his city as a king in his robe.

Symbolic Reading

The Babylonian rereading essay reads the journey to Utnapishtim as a sea expedition across the Gulf, and the plant of youth as a medicinal plant or a pearl of the Gulf, so that on this reading Urshanabi is the pilot of a sea route known to the people of the coast. The Sumerian rereading essay reads the snake's theft of the plant as nature taking back what man took: the snake renews itself by shedding its skin, and lasting life belongs to nature, not to the individual; it reads Gilgamesh's return to Uruk as the discovery that his lasting life lies in building his city. The boatman witnesses both: he saw the snake take the plant, and he is the one told to walk on the wall.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

Greek and Roman myth know a ferryman of the dead. In the story of Psyche's descent told under Cupid, an old man named Charon waits at the dead river, demands his fare and takes travellers across to the far bank in a stitched boat, so she carries a coin for him in her mouth. Urshanabi takes no fare; he is the one who pays. Apuleius, Metamorphoses 6.18; see Descent to the Underworld.

In the North Thor comes to a sound with a ferryman on the far side who calls himself Hárbarðr and is Odin in disguise; they trade words, he will not ferry Thor across, and he sends him the long way round the sound. In both stories the ferryman of the dividing water decides who crosses, but Urshanabi takes Gilgamesh across after a fight, and Hárbarðr turns Thor back after a flyting.

He took Gilgamesh to the survivor of the Flood, and was boatman to the man who had built the ark.

Among the Etruscans Charon's name passed to a demon who stands at the gate of the dead with a hammer to open and shut its bar, and only rarely appears with a boat: Charun.