Enkidu on the floor

I have to rethink. Right now, the project I have set myself (not the same as the reminiscent article of 1966/1894) is going badly. There's nothing in me to dig up about it beyond a few potential conversational flashes. Bleah. Passed my library to notice a book on the floor. It was the Epic of Gilgamesh. Puzzled to see it there, I opened it to find;

'There is the house whose people sit in darkness; dust is their food and clay their meat. They are clothed like birds with wings for covering, they see no light, they sit in darkness. I entered the house of dust and I saw the kings of the earth, their crowns put away forever; rulers and princes, all those who once wore kingly crowns and ruled the world in the days of old. They who had stood in the place of the gods like Anu and Enlil, stood now like servants to fetch baked meats in the house of dust, to carry cooked meats and cold water from the water-skin. In the house of dust which I entered were high priests and acolytes, priests of the incantation and of ecstasy; there were servants of the temple and there was Etana, that king of Kish whom the eagle carried to haven in the days of old. I saw also Samuqan, god of cattle, and there was Ereshkigal the Queen of the Underworld; and Belit-Sheri squatted in front of her, she who is recorder of the gods and keeps the book of death. She held a tablet from which she read.

She raised her head, she saw me and spoke; 'Who has brought this one here?'

Then I awoke like a man drained of blood who wanders along in a waste of rushes, like one whom the bailiff has seized and his heart pounds with terror....'

It's been a long time, and I have questions.

1) The birds who sit in the darkness? Owls no? Sitting around in a ruined house in the dark? I know peeps who would call this bliss!

2) There is meat and drink in the house of dust, it's just that the once mighty, now dead, serve that food to eternal masters. What would happen if they just scarfed it themselves?

3) The Epic of Gilgamesh is thought to date back to around 2000 BC, and mentions Etana of Kish in 'the days of old,' whose reign would be 800 years earlier by some estimates of that king's reign. Around the same time as this, a civilisation of expansive prosperity worshippers disappeared from Malta, and we don't have one single written thing from them. All we know is that they loved the good life, created hypnotic ossuaries, and had calendrical temples measuring solstices and equinoxes. Can't do that without maths, and who doesn't write maths down? So where are the sums? Where were the scribes? They couldn't all be in ancient Iraq copying out the epic of Gilgamesh!

4) I don't like Enkidu much. He threatens the goddess Ishtar out of what I can only surmise is pique at her coming on to Gilgamesh, then when things unsurprisingly turn to sht for him, he curses the harlot Shamhat who lured him to civilisation away from his wife in the desert. There's nothing that happens to this bloke for which he can't blame a woman. Fade away, fade away Enkidu, and become an owl in the house of dust. Maybe that'll teach you some sense.

Hmm. So I can waffle happily re Sumerian literature but the actual thing I set out to write today? Nah.