Gilgamesh and Enkidu

Funny, with all this talk for and against gay marriage at the moment, and the frequent allusion to Adam and Eve, which often prompts the corollary observation “It’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve,” few seem to know of western civilization’s first couple, Enkidu and Gilgamesh. There seems to have been a historical king named Gilgamesh who lived around 2800 BC around whose name stories collected, and these were gathered together later on, and still later in the seventeenth century BCE they were made into a continuous narrative. [Naturally, I can’t stress strongly enough reading the final chapter of C.R.Beye Ancient Epic Poetry with a chapter on the Gilgamesh Poems  available from Amazon)  The Book of Genesis must be dated later, so, let’s say Adam and Eve are the second couple; who would have thought that the first affective twosome would be male?  I am not saying, however, that we have definitive proof that they enjoyed each other carnally.  We know this about the Genesis duo, because they went on to have Cain and Abel, at least you have to imagine that the First Children or First Siblings were spawned by maybe the Second (okay, maybe First) Couple.  Yet the story of Enkidu and Gilgamesh is worth knowing whatever your take on same-sex relationships, just because it is so unusual, and thus important in the constellation of archtypal depictions of humans together.
This King Gilgamesh rules Uruk brutishly, it seems, since the narrator declares no woman was safe from him. The goddess Aruru fashions a mannikin out of clay, calls it Enkidu who is sent to be the people’s liberator, he meets Gilgamesh, they wrestle, become inseparable friends. They go on a buddy traveling trip where their adventures include killing a giant,  Enkidu puts himself at risk when the goddess Ishtar’s sexual invitation to Gilgamesh is spurned and in her angry attack Enkidu mocks her and hurls a thigh bone at her head. That puts paid to his chances of survival, and the rest of the narrative deals with his death and Gilgamesh’s grief and desolation.  Never mind, there are other details but these are the basics. The interesting thing is the transformation of Enkidu.  Early on he is described as the animals’ friend, a hairy brute, a child of nature. Because he protects them, the hunters hate him.  Out of the blue the narrator says a father appears to a hunter to advise him to get Enkidu to the animals’ watering hole and set him up with a prostitute. Who knows where she comes from?  But we have to understand that she was probably a temple prostitute and not the equivalent of some addict in hot pants waving at johns on the Interstate; sex with her seems to produce a major spiritual and psychic change in Enkidu. The narrator insists upon the details, that Enkidu has incredible energy, he keeps an erection for seven days of serious fornication.  And then he abandons the animals to the hunters, goes to the city, takes up eating bread and wine, gets a hair cut, wears perfume--all this the narrator insists upon telling--sets out to do combat with the sexual bully of a king, then there is the wrestling, the friendship, spurning the goddess.  As Enkidu lies dying he curses the prostitute for taking away his life, as though spelling out the biological truth that once a male achieves orgasm he no longer has a function.  The two men are described as relentless cocksmen, but once they wrestle there is only that friendship, the sex goddess’s invitation, that is, sex with a woman, is spurned.  The two men become inseparables, leading a life of adventure. It’s sort of a Sumerian version of “Brokeback Mountain.”