Over the course of the years, many people have studied the Epic of Gilgamesh trying to decipher it's significant meanings and references. It is one of the most important documents to survive the ravages of Nature and the history of Man. The EoG is an ancient text that portrays the life of earlier times in language that is sometimes plain and sometimes seemingly symbolic. In many places, the story works on both of these levels - where what appears to be a description of something mundane is undoubtedly referring to something of a more esoteric nature.

On one level, the EoG can be read as a pure fable, like the Twelve Labors of Hercules. They are very much the same, with a hero who is part divine and part human, who performs magnificent feats of strength and cleverness. These sorts of stories not only served as entertainment in ancient times, when there were no televisions or malls - they served as inspiration to people who were very much at the mercy of the elements and Nature. Floods, typhoons, hurricanes and tsunamis are creatures of water and air or wind. Volcanic eruptions and their attendant earthquakes, lightning strikes, fire fountains, pyroclastic flows, mud slides, and sun-blotting ash clouds are mostly creatures of fire and earth. These were the 'monsters and demons' that prehistoric peoples and their later descendants had to face; the 'gods of the earth' they sought to propititate through ritual and sacrifice. Hearing stories such as these gave them hope that man could somehow tame and perhaps conquer Nature and the elements. Herman Melville said it best: "To produce a mighty book, you must chose a mighty theme."

In stories of this type, the hero is often a mythic figure like Batman or Wolverine. Batman and Wolverine are not and never were real people. They are characters that their creators manufactured from their own minds to represent what Joseph Campbell has called 'the hero of a thousand faces'. They are the 'everyman' who rises up from the frail mortality of the human condition to find the strength of his own divinity and best the gods or defeat evil for the betterment of mankind. According to the Epic, Gilgamesh is the warrior-king of Uruk. In her introduction to the epic, Stephanie Dalley writes:

"We now know for certain that Gilgamesh was considered in antiquity to be a historical character. For a long time it was not clear whether the earlier parts of the Sumerian king list, in which superhuman lengths of reign were attributed to all rulers, were entirely fictional or mythical. Historical inscriptions of a king of Kish, Enmenbaragesi, who belongs to the same era, have now come to light.

"There are two different traditions concerning the parentage of Gilgamesh. The epic itself says that one Lugalbanda was his father, a man who is known from the Sumerian king list to have occupied the throne of Uruk two kings before Gilgamesh and to have been a shepherd; Sumerian epic stories about Lugalbanda are extant. In spite of extensive and thorough excavations at Uruk, no contemporary inscriptions are yet known for Gilgamesh or Lugalbanda. Precise dates cannot be given for the lifetime of Gilgamesh, but they are generally agreed to be between 2800 and 2500 BC."

THE CATACLYSM AND THE HERO

5-21 "In Uruk people are dying, and souls are full of distress. People are lost -- that fills me with dismay. I lean out over the city wall: bodies in the water make the river almost overflow. That is what I see: that people die thus, which fills me with despair; that the end of life is unavoidable; that the grave, the all-powerful underworld, will spare no one; that no one is tall enough to block off the underworld; that no one is broad enough to cover over the underworld -- the boundary that a man cannot cross at the final end of life. "

On a surficial level, the EoG seems to be a story that involves a great cataclysm happening in a land called Uruk or Unug, where Gilgamesh is the king. Being concerned for the lives of his subjects, as any good king should be, he wishes to put an end to the destruction and chaos. He goes and asks the advice of the Council of Uruk, of Ea/Enki, of his mother (the goddess Ninsun) and of his human companion Enkidu. That is - he goes to his governmental advisors, his chosen god, his wise goddess-mother and his friend who has first-hand knowledge of the forests and mountains, trying to come up with a complete set of parameters as to a course of action. This part of the story would seem to be an exposition on the proper actions of a kingly figure - to attend to all concerned and obtain more than one opinion. On another level, it is the story of a man looking at his own mortality and the mortality of his subjects, friends and family. Gilgamesh's ultimate quest is to become immortal.

The story of this cataclysm is one of the most intriguing sub-stories in this epic. It is the story of Gilgamesh and Enkidu going to do battle with Huwawa or Humbaba, the god of the forest that lives on the mountain. This part of the story is filled with strange references and doings that leave one with many questions. It did me...mostly....

WHO? or WHAT? IS HUWAWA?

In the book "The Stairway to Heaven", pages 123-128, Zecharia Sitchin paints Huwawa as some kind of high-tech robot with laser-beams for eyes, which I find to be entertaining, but completely absurd. One must ask, if the Anunnaki were capable of building such things and flying through space, why were ziggurats being built of mud bricks, instead of steel girders and glass? Well, that's just as silly.

Another man, named Robert Temple has stated that the convolutions shown on the masks of Huwawa that have been found are representations of the eratic orbit of Mercury. In the context of Sumerian mythology - according to some, Mercury equates to Mummu, the vizier of Apsu. However, Apsu is not the Sun. Apsu is the underworld ocean, or the primordial ocean, from whence all else was seeded. Mr. Temple also suggests that these convolutions are representations of entrails used in divinatory augury. While the symbologies of myth often incorporate many references, the answer to the puzzle of Huwawa's face is much simpler and more down to earth than these far-flung ideas.

Quite simply stated, Huwawa is a volcano.

If you look below, you will see on the left, a picture of a pahoehoe flow from Mt. Kiluea in Hawaii. The Hawaiian volcanos are well known for these types of flows, which vary anywhere in texture from 'toothpaste' to 'ropes'. This is an example of ropey pahoehoe (pau'o'o). Beside it is a stylised mask of Huwawa. I don't think I need to explain anything here. It's very obvious. There is even an 'eye' in the pahoehoe, similar to those shown on the mask.

This same patterning is similar to the moko face tatoos of Maori chieftans. Maori facial tatoos were a kind of personal signature. When the chiefs signed deeds of land to the Europeans, they used drawings of their facial tatoos, instead of signatures. The Maori are the aboriginal peoples of New Zealand, which lies off the south-eastern coast of Australia. Queequeg, in 'Moby Dick' is tatooed in this same manner. The Maori are of Polynesian and Melansian descent, and as such are familiar with the products of volcanism and their appearance. They were also a 'sea-people' - mariners.

The person who wrote the commentary (Cardona?) on 'The Story of Stratonike and Kombabos' from "Peri Tes Syries Theoy De Dea Syria" or "The Syrian Goddess" by Lucian of Samosata associates Kombabos with Humbaba/Huwawa. Kombabos is apparently Iranian in origin and is the personification of the planet/god Saturn - who is, in turn associated with Cronos, one of the original Titans and the father of Jupiter/Jove/Jehovah. I would say that this idea is borne out in the castration myth assocated with both Cronos and Kombabos. In terms of the Sumerian pantheon, that would mean Huwawa was the equivalent of Anu/An - who was also castrated, come to think of it. However, in EoG, Huwawa is set by Ellil to guard the cedar forest, and Ellil is later equated with Jehovah. It just doesn't seem right that the son would set the father to guard the forest, in this context - unless, of course this is a set-up for the younger god to usurp the power of the elder god through the agency of his defeat by Gilga the hero.

DOES HUWAWA EQUAL JEHOVAH?

In the linguistic scheme of things, the word 'Huwawa' has many similarities with the words Jehovah, YHWH, Yeh-ho-voh, Jove, and Java. Inside the cover of my world atlas is a reproduction of an antique map. On this map, the island of Java is written Jaua - 'Yah-wah' or 'Jah-wah'. The letters U, V, B/P and W are interchangeable in many languages, particularly those of the Middle and Far East. This is evident in the transliteration of the Tetragrammaton (YHWH) to the name Jehovah. In these same languages, Js and Ys are also interchangeable. The name Jasmine is pronounced Yahz-meen. [Hard Js (the ones pronounced as 'juh' and not 'yuh') are combined with a D in both Indonesian and Aramaic languages. The words Djakarta, djed and djinn are examples. The Egyptian heiroglyph for this sound is a serpent.]

As I point out on the page following this one, the volcano Tambora (which has the distinction of having the greatest eruption in modern times) sits upon an island called Sumbawa. The sounds of CH, KH, SH, C, K and S are also interchangeable in many languages. In Hebrew, the letters CH are pronounced as a hard, gutteral H. In a less developed language, the closest sound to this would be an H. The C would be lost. In western India - what is now West Pakistan and Afghanistan, there is a large river that used to be called the Sind. The name of this river later evolved into Indus and that is in fact where the word 'Hindu' comes from. This is a perfect example of the substitutions that can take place as words metamorphosize. In the case of the word 'Sumbawa', it is easy to see - keeping these things in mind - that it could over a period of time denigrate into something like 'Humbaba' or 'Huwawa'. One could very well ask if the name of the Mexican city, Chihuahua, has the same genesis.

ANZU - THE THIEF OF THE TABLETS OF DESTINY

The Mesopotamian myth of Anzu also makes many references to fighting on the mountains and Anzu's mantle of radiance. Lines such as the following only convince me more that I am correct in saying that these stories are anthropomorphized tales of the volcanic upheavals that created the earth.

This is Ninma, Mistress and Mother of all the Gods, exhorting her son Ninurta to do battle with Anzu:

Muster your devastating battle force,
Make your evil winds flash as they march over him.
Capture soaring Anzu
And inundate the earth, which I created - wreck his dwelling.
Let terror thunder above him,
Let fear of your battle force shake in him,
Make the devastating whirlwind rise up against him.
Set your arrow in the bow, coat it with poison.
Your form must keep changing, like a gallu-demon.
Send out a fog, so that he cannot recognize your features!
May your rays proceed above him,
Make a high, attacking leap; have glare
More powerful than Shamash generates.
May broad daylight turn to darkness for him.

Anzu's beak is said to be like a saw and he is protected by eleven coats of mail. Flying rhyolite, obsidian shards and hardened coats of lava? Ninurta finally defeats Anzu by throwing something dubiously translated as a 'throwing stick' at him and then shooting him full of poison-tipped arrows from his bow. I believe it is in the portion of Disney's "Fantasia" about the centaurs, cherubs and Bacchus, that Diana is shown in the night sky pulling back on a bow and the arrow that she looses becomes a shooting star. (A lot of research went into that film.) Perhaps Ninurta's 'poison-tipped arrows' or arrow is an asteroid that hit the earth and obliterated this newly risen mountain of fire. Asteroids hitting the earth has been known to happen, and in primeval times it is said that it occured with some frequency. You have only to look at the face of the moon to see the sort of asteroidal traffic that once traveled through this part of the solar system and the mighty scars this sort of activity leaves. And doesn't this all sound vaguely familiar? Read 'The Revelation of St. John the Divine' again, if you happen to have a Bible handy. Wormwood. The 'dragon' waiting to swallow the 'woman clothed in the sun' is nothing more than an allegory for the primitive belief that it was a dragon swallowing the sun, when there was an eclipse. Volcanic explosions of great magnitute will also seem to cause an eclipse, by turning day into night, as you will see in the picture at the bottom of the fourth page of the Enuma Elish article (previous to this page if read in order). Could it be that what St. John 'saw' was not the future, but the past?

Right now, you may be asking yourself what something that happened in Indonesia has to do with Sumer and the Epic of Gilgamesh...or, for that matter, the Atrahasis and other Sumerian myths. It is well known that these stories come from a far earlier time and were written down after The Flood. Current dating techniques place the occurence of a flood around 4000 BC. This comes from the dating of the layers of mud found on Mesopotamian sites by Sir Leonard Wooley. The current theory on this flood is that it was a regional inundation and not a global cataclysm. The global cataclysm most likely occured at the end of the last Ice Age (Pleistocene era). In tablets found in Ashurbanipal's (7th century BC) library at Ninevah (Ninuah), the mighty king himself states that he knows how to read the language of the times before the Flood. It is my thought that these myths from Mesopotamia are derived from the time of the Ice Age cataclysm and that they all actually took place in Indonesia, in the Ring of Fire region. Read on, and maybe I'll convince you, too.