Urshanabi

Urshanabi is the man who loses his job for doing a favour. He works the only crossing of the Waters of Death, using equipment the text calls the stone things, and Gilgamesh — arriving in the usual manner — destroys them before asking what they are. The crossing is then made with three hundred poles, each used once and thrown away, because touching that water is fatal. Utnapishtim, seeing the boat come in without its tackle, works out what has happened and bars Urshanabi from the shore for good. So he goes back to Uruk with Gilgamesh, and the very last speech of the epic is Gilgamesh telling him to look at the walls, examine the brickwork, see what the city is — the poem's answer to mortality delivered to a ferryman who has just lost the sea. The text does not settle whether he is a god, and this record does not either.

Domains

• waters

Powers

• to cross the Waters of Death without touching them

Relations

• subordinate to: UtnapishtimUtnapishtim's boatman, and then not: having made the crossing for a man who should not have made it, he is barred from the shore and sent back to the world with him.Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablets X-XI: Urshanabi is Utnapishtim's boatman, and Utnapishtim dismisses him from the crossing for having brought Gilgamesh over. (primary)

Sources

• Urshanabi is the boatman in the service of Utnapishtim who ferries Gilgamesh across the Waters of Death, whose stone things Gilgamesh destroys, and who is dismissed from the crossing and returns with Gilgamesh to Uruk.: Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablets X-XI. (primary); Reference treatment of Urshanabi as the boatman in the service of the flood hero, responsible for bringing Gilgamesh to Utnapishtim. (secondary)