THE NARRATIVE OF GILGAMESH, as mythic narrative if not as literary, unfolds within the space between two trees. The first marks the point at which his heroic career authentically begins; the other iconically designates that career’s final limit, its terminus post quem non. That is to say, the full range of his heroism both literally and figuratively spans the seemingly vast distance between the cedars guarded by the monster Humbaba, whom Gilgamesh and Enkidu kill at the end of Tablet V, and the otherworldly trees that bear rare jewels for fruit in the garden into which the hero emerges alone from the tunnel of the sun at the close of Tablet IX.  In this essay I propose to measure some of that distance by reference to a number of different but closely interrelated scales.

The first such scale is simply topographic: these two trees represent the boundaries of the physical world through which Gilgamesh passes in the course of his career. Whatever arguments can legitimately be raised over specific details of what Campbell styles the heroic “monomyth” (itself by and large an elaboration of Raglan and Propp), his characterization of the overall shape of the hero’s life is certainly true to the mark. For in its most basic form the heroic narrative proceeds along the looping track of Departure outward and subsequent Return, travel to the limits of the world and then the long way home again. Of course, nothing prevents (and much in fact encourages) repetitions of this pattern within a single narrative,  and The Epic of Gilgamesh (EG) in its Late Babylonian or Standard Version (SB) indeed encompasses two major journeys: the first from Uruk to the Land of Cedars and back (Tablets II-V); the second (and also the last) from Uruk arduously to the ends of the world, then home to Uruk once more (Tablets IX-X).  The western cedars and the fabulous gem-trees presumably somewhere out in the distant east—at the sun’s ultimate rising—each represent one of the destinations to which the hero’s two journeys extend. They are the poles of his world.

This last claim would appear to ignore the literal itinerary in the story of the Old Babylonian (OB) text that fills most of Tablet X. The fact is that Gilgamesh, after emerging from the tunnel of the sun, enters the garden of jeweled trees and then passes beyond it—to the “tavern” of Siduri and the shore where Urshanabi’s boat is moored, and finally across the waters of death to the home of Uta-napishti, where he is destined to fail the test and to return to Uruk bound by his mortality. The status of the Uta-napishti episode as an integral part of the narrative has of course long been questioned, and there is consensus that it was not part of the earliest OB version of the tale.  More recently, Abusch’s arguments in favor of reading the Gilgamesh-Siduri episode as a (if not “the”) more original destination of the hero’s wandering, and thus as the goal of an earlier version of the OB narrative itself, lend plausibility to the status of the garden as a truly terminal space and not just one more station along the way to an interview with Uta-napishti. The present essay may to a certain extent provide additional support to that larger thesis. For the time being it is enough to acknowledge the possibility of a narrative in which “Utnapishtim was not part of the tale” and instead “Siduri was . . . the goal of the journey.”  In what follows I propose that whether the failure of his quest for immortality is indicated by the rejection of his (implicit) offer of marriage to Siduri or by his inability to pass the test of wakefulness that Uta-napishti sets before him, either failure is already implicit in his encounter with the jeweled trees themselves. They can prefigure both his alienation from hope of everlasting life and also his literal expulsion from the paradise of Uta-napishti.

The prefigural value of the jeweled trees derives from the fact that this simple topographic scale is itself implicated in more complex and far more significant frameworks of reference. Among the many striking things about EG is the narrative’s sophisticated awareness and artful manipulation of spatial registers. Full exploration of this issue is the aim of a separate study; here a few summary points can be made. The story of EG unfolds within and across what can be called three major “epistemic” spaces: the Wilderness, the City, and the Otherworld. Each space provides the venue for encounter with beings (Enkidu, Shamhat, Humbaba, Ishtar, Bull of Heaven, Scorpion Creatures, Siduri, Stone Ones [?], Uta-napishti) and also with objects (cedar forest, tunnel of the sun, jeweled trees, Stone Ones  [?], waters of death) that are principally defined by their radical otherness, their qualitative difference from the world of the narrative subject (the trapper, Enkidu, Gilgamesh) who meets up with them. To understand these spaces—each one divisible in turn into smaller (though perhaps sometimes culturally “larger” or more important) venues—as mere backdrops to the narrative is to ignore their rich metonymic value and the critical role they play in this and other mythic narratives. Each space, along with the others it contains, in fact functions as the embodiment and expression of a distinct matrix of ideas and relationships mapped out by Mesopotamian culture in the process of organizing and understanding its world. In a sense, the physical spaces in this mythic narrative are just as much agents in the generation of meaning as the characters are.