THE STONE ONES OF URSHANABI’S BOAT

In the famous Mesopotamian GILGAMESH EPIC, mysterious objects (or personages?) called by various translators either the ‘Stone Things’ or the ‘Stone Ones’ (more accurate might be ‘Those of Stone’) play an important role in an episode involving the boat that carries the hero across the sea and the Waters of Death to where Utnapishtum, the survivor of the Flood, resides.  

Theories abound as to the precise nature of these Stone Ones.  See, for example, https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/23864736.pdf?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents.  I once was fairly well convinced these were merely ballast rocks.  But that solution proved to be naive.

The most recent scholarly version of the Epic summarizes the various identifications as follows, and offers its own solution to the problem posed by these objects. From A.R. George’s THE BABYLONIAN GILGAMESH EPIC: INTRODUCTION, CRITICAL EDITION AND CUNEIFORM TEXTS, VOLUME I (Oxford University press, 2003):

 

What George is alluding to in this last statement is the apparent caulking or sealing of the boat by the Stones Ones.  Here is his modern English rendering of the relevant passage:

 

I personally asked Professor George about the word transliterated/translated as ‘seal’ in Line 102, and he assured me that while once the text here was deemed uncertain, thanks to the discovery of subsequent cuneiform portions of the Epic, there is now no doubt about the correct reading. 

Other references to the Stone Ones read as follows:

“O Gilgames, there is Ur-sanabi, the boatman of Uta-napishti, and the Stone Ones are with him as she strips a cedar in the midst of the forest.”

“Your own hands, Gilgames, have prevented [your crossing.] You have smashed the Stone Ones, you have dropped [them in the river,] the Stone Ones are smashed and the cedar is not [stripped.]”

“Why are the boat’s [Stone Ones] smashed, and aboard [it] one who is not its master?”

Going solely by the Hittite recension, I once wanted to make a case for the Stone Ones being idols representative of Shamash and a divine companion.  This seemed to make sense, since we are more than once told that only the Sun God can cross the Waters of Death.  After all, Urshanabi’s boat is itself probably divine in nature.  George demonstrated how the boatman’s name is actually a cypher for ‘Man of Ea’ (or, better, ‘Servant of Ea’):  

Ea is the same water god as Enki and we know that his boatman was the god Sirsir.  Thus it is quite possible that Urshanabi is, in fact, merely a moniker for Sirsir.

But if the Stone Ones are the statues of gods, what are they doing caulking the boat?

I now think we must look to some other possibility than symbolic divinities.  The most promising, in my opinion, is that the Stone Ones stand for rock asphalt.  While bitumen was commonly used in ancient Mesopotamia to seal boats, it could take more than one form.  One such was a solid. 

In its discussion of the use of bitumen in Mesopotamia, “The Iraqi Marshlands and the Marsh Arabs: The Ma'dan, Their Culture and the Environment”, by Sam Kubba (Trans Pacific Press, 2011), says:

The cedar that Urshanabi was cutting and trimming could only have grown in the mountains. And it was from the mountains that rock asphalt was obtained.  

The Stone Ones or Those of Stone were not, therefore, the agents who caulked the boat, but rather the actual material used to seal it.  Probably such rock asphalt was imbued with supernatural energy or was deemed sacred to this or that deity.  

Ironically, Gilgamesh’s smashing of the Stone Ones may be a folk memory of the pulverizing of rock asphalt, an important step in the processing of this form of bitumen. Originally, then, he may have been assisting in, rather than interfering with, the sealing of the boat.  

  Natural rock asphalt.  Photo courtesy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asphalt.