Abstract. We consider Gilgamesh travels, as described in the surviving Gilgamesh epic. Assuming that the epic in based on actual travels, we propose different itineraries than usually assumed. We claim that Gilgamesh aimed to the heart of Asia, possibly the original land of the Sumerians, via two different routes: one taking him through the Karakorum, the other via the Balkash lake and most probably the Zungarian gates. Final aim was a mountain range still now sacred to the local Ngolok tribe.
 
 
 
 

This work is dedicated:
 
 

to the late Leonard Clark,
whose adventures in Amazonian Peru fascinated my young years,
whose report of his military duty in Northern Tibet
opened a new light on the dawn of civilization,
in the year of my first flight over Amazonian Peru,
land of secrets to be unveiled
 
 

to the Ngolok
fierce tribe of North Tibet
preservers of the ancient sacred Anu Mashu mountain,
let them for ever own the land of their fathers
and keep faithful to their traditions
 
 

to Khubaba
and to the Yetis
peaceful creatures in the high mountains,
our genetic brothers,
hunted down by Homo Sapiens Sapiens,
by homo homini lupus.
 
 
 
 
 
 

Sunt nomina lumina
 
 

Oh, Geography Cinderella of sciences!
 
 

S.H. beautiful daughter of the Hunza people learn Burushaski language of your ancestors language of a special people of a very special place...
 
 
 
 

1. Introduction
 
 

The Gilgamesh epic deals with the adventures of Gilgamesh, king of the Sumerian city of Uruk (biblical Erech), son of the semigod Lugalbanda and of the goddess Rimat Ninsun, hence himself two thirds "god", one third man, but mortal as all men. The text of the epic is not known in its entirety. The first tablets were found in the excavations of the library of Assurbanipal (668-627 BC) in Ninive by Layard in the 1840s. The first communication that these tablets contained a Chaldaic story of the Universal Flood was made on December 3, 1872, in London, by the assyriologist Smith. It is now known, see Pettinato (1992), that the epic in the version of the Assurbanipal library (where apparently four copies were kept) consisted of 12 large tablets, each one having about 300 lines, for an estimated total of 3059 lines. Currently about 2000 lines are known. More may be discovered in future excavations or more simply in the deposits of the world museums. It is interesting to note that the first four lines of the epic were found in September 1998 by Theodore Kwasmann while searching among the collections of the British Museum (see the article of R.J. Head in Odyssey, July-August 1999). The four lines, published in Nouvelles Assyriologiques Brèves et Utilitaires, are given here in the original Assyrian text and in their published translation:
 
 

(sha nagbu iimuru i) shdi maati

(xxx-ti iid) uu kalaama hhassu

(Gilgamesh sha n)agbu iimuru ishdi maati

(xxx-t)i iidu kallama hhassu
 
 

He who saw the nagbu (the country’s foundation)

who knew.... was wise in all matters!

Gilgamesh (who saw the nagbu), (the country’s foundation)

who knew.... was wise in all matters!
 
 

In the above translation the correct meaning of nagbu was a point of discussion. In the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary the word is translated as "totality" or "spring, fountain, source". We will see at the end of this essay an intriguing relation with "spring", in both a geographical and an ethnographical sense. In addition to the Assyrian version of the epic found in Ninive, fragments in different languages, including non semitic Hurrian, Sumerian and Hittite, have been found in several locations in the Middle East, most of them predating Assurbanipal time. At least ten documents are dated to the paleobabylonian period (i.e. Hammurabi’s time, circa 1800 BC), while half a dozen documents in Sumerian are dated to the second half of the third millennium BC. There is the intriguing possibility that the epic was originally composed by an advisor of Gilgamesh (no more a semigod apkallu, but a human ummanu), named Sileqiunnini, see Pettinato (1992). About the historicity of Gilgamesh opinions are divided. Gilgamesh is listed in ancient tablets as the fifth king of the first dynasty of Uruk, often dated at the period 3500-3100 BC. Now the dendrochronological record, see Baillie (1999), suggests that in the year 3195 BC a dramatic climatic event occurred, possibly associated with a substantial world flooding episode of extraterrestrial origin (i.e. a cometary or asteroidal impact or the close passage of a large body). If the suggested flood event is the one described as the Utnapishtim/Ziusudra flood in the Gilgamesh epic (and as the Noah flood in Genesis, the Pygmalion flood in Greek traditions, etc.), then the dating of the first Uruk dynasty should be lowered by a few centuries. This would be in agreement with the chronological revision proposed in the last fifty years by several authors, starting from Velikovsky (1953), see in particular Rohl (1998), who dates Gilgamesh at circa 2500 BC. The following Tables provide some of Rohl’s dating.
 
 

Table 1: Rohl’s dating of First Uruk dynasty
 
 
 

3000 BC	Heskiagkasher (biblical Cush)
2900 BC	Enmerkar (biblical Nimrod)
2800 BC	Lugalbanda
2588 BC	Dumuzi
2487 BC	Gilgamesh
2348 BC	Urlugal

 

Table 2: Roh’ls dating of first four Egyptian dynasties
 
 
 

2789-2669 BC	Menes and First dynasty
2669-2514 BC	Second dynasty
2514-2459 BC	Third dynasty
2459-2350 BC	Fourth dynasty

 

Rohl dates the Flood to about 3100 BC, but has a discrepancy in his chronology. Indeed he notices (p. 425 of his monograph) that a different counting of dynasties lengths based upon the Turin Royal Canon would provide 2898 BC for Year 1 of Menes. If we take the suggested dendrochronological dating (at 3195 BC) of the Flood and we notice that according to Manetho there was in Egypt a period of 350 years of confusion and crisis before Menes, a period that can be naturally explained as the aftermath of a huge destructive flood, then we would have a date of 2845 BC for Year 1 of Menes, about half way between the date provided by the Turin Canon and the date in Table 2. In view of likely unavoidable errors that may affect both the dendrochronological record (despite the high accuracy claimed by its proponents) and the surviving lists (where coregencies have always been a question difficult to extricate), it seems safe to conclude that the Flood should be dated in the period between 3100 and 3200 BC. An additional support for dating in this century a catastrophic climatic event is provided by the analysis of ice cores at Camp Century, Greenland, where a large acid layer has been identified and dated at 3150 plus or minus 50 BC. It is interesting to note that another acid layer at Camp Century, dated at 1390 plus or minus 50, comes close to the dating of the Exodus at exactly 1447 BC, proposed first by Velikovsky (1953) and again claimed by Rohl (1995). Both Velikovsky and Rohl have identified the pharaon of the Exodus with the last pharaon of the 13th dynasty, the obscure Dudimose, whose name appears in the Turin canon, and whose tragic kingdomship is certainly more characterized by a great natural catastrophe and by the onslaught brought by the Hyksos than by the departure of a few hundred thousand Hebrews. In this paper we will not discuss the historicity of Gilgamesh and its dating. We will not propose explanations of the extraordinary semigod qualities that he shows in the epic (see for instance Sitchin (1980) for the nonstandard interpretation of Gilgamesh mother "goddess", as a female belonging to a group of extraterrestrial "gods" that according to him visited the Earth in ancient times, "created" man by genetic engineering and were able to copulate with their creatures, as also Genesis states with regard to the Nephilim). Under the assumption that the epic is based upon an actual traveller’s experience, we will try to identify the routes in the two trips of Gilgamesh, the first one to the "Forest of Cedars", the second one to the mountain called "Mashu". Our proposed routes and final destinations are wholly different, as far as we know, from those usually considered, these being not too far from Sumer. We claim that Gilgamesh final destination was the heart of Asia, the land where quite possibly the Sumerians came from, the land which in the case of a catastrophical flood of extraterrestrial origin is the best protected in the whole world from the effects of a global tsunami and of long lasting torrential rains. According to our thesis Gilgamesh tried to reach this land via the two most natural routes from Sumer. The first one, shorter but of much more difficult terrain and of great altitude, took him to the Karakorum passes (e.g. Kilik, 4755m, Mintaka, 4709m, or Khunjerab, originally 4934m now after the construction of the Karakorum highway reduced to 4602m), quite probably via Iran, Afghanistan, Kashmir (Barda, Buner, Hazara, Kohistan, Dardistan, Punjal, Hunza), from which he could have descended into the heart of Asia via eastern Pamir and the Tarim basin region. This approach failed, probably for the extreme difficulty of the Karakorum trails, often closed by landslides and snowslides, possibly also for the failure of Gilgamesh to acclimitize to the high altitude of the Karakorum passes. The two heroes consoled themselves by killing poor Khubaba (we will suggest who Khubaba might have been) and by cutting a large cedar tree that they brought back to Uruk. The second route is longer, by some 3000 km, and went most probably through very little populated land. It allowed however access to the heart of Asia by the much easier Zungarian Gates pass, less than 500 meters. Mount Mashu, we claim, is the great sacred mountain range surrounded on three sides by the Yellow River, still locally called Maqu (pronounce "Machu"), whose sources are not far from it. The mountain is sacred to the local north Tibetan Ngolok tribes and till the fifties was closed to foreigners. Its name still bears obvious reference to Mashu and to the highest god of the Sumerian pantheon.
 
 

2. The trip to the Forest of Cedars. Numerics and geographical information in surviving tablets
 
 

The first trip takes Gilgamesh and Enkidu to the Forest of Cedars, in a land called "Lebanon", which is reached overland. Here they kill the monster Khubaba (in Assyrian; Huwawa in the Hittite text) and cut a very big cedar to be taken to the temple of Enlil in Nippur. They return to Uruk via water, navigating a river called "Euphrates". It is commonly assumed that the Forest of Cedars is present Lebanon. The trip is described in Tablets II 184 to V 266 in the Assurbanipal text, affected by several lacunes, only partially remedied by use of the other texts. For the following discussion of the route, here we report the passages containing numerical and geographical information. These passages are translated from the italian version of the whole corpus of surviving material given by Pettinato (1992). We first give the passages from the Assyrian texts in Assurbanipal library.

 

1. II, 184-193: Khubaba whose cry is stormy.....who can hear at 60 leagues through the forest trees..... to protect the Forest of Cedars he has been commanded by Enlil and a bodily fatigue takes possession of anyone who tries to enter this forest....

 

2. II,221-224: I have made my mind. I will leave to the far away land where Khubaba lives. I want to face a defy even if of uncertain outcome, I want to explore an unknown way

 

3. III, 6-7: Let Enkidu preceed you, he knows the way to the Forest of Cedars

 

4. III, 48-51: He (Gilgamesh) intends to take the long travel to the place of Khubaba. He will engage a fight of uncertain outcome, he will walk over unknown trails till the day when, after a long way, he shall reach the Forest of Cedars.

 

5. IV, 1-6: After 20 leagues they took a meal, after 30 leagues they stopped for sleep, 50 leagues they had made in their daily march, a distance of one month and a half they made in 3 days, reaching the "mountains of Lebanon".

 

6. IV, 78: Gilgamesh ascended the mountain

 

7. IV, 84: ... spit blood...

 

8. IV, 87: was overwhelmed by sleep

 

9. IV, 100: let us go back to the steppes

 

10. IV, 91: why am I so nervous?

 

11. IV, 93: why do I feel so week?

 

12. IV, 207-208: ... a difficult trail, that a single person cannot easily take, better to be in two...

 

13. V, 2: ...they were astounded at the height of the cedars...

 

14. V, 5-8: there were nicely cut trails, they looked at the mountain of cedars, the place where the gods dwell, the sanctuary of Irnini, the cedar was tall and majestic...

 

15. V, 5 (Uruk version): when you (Enkidu) were young, I saw you...

 

16. V, 255: Gilgamesh cut the trees...

 

17 V, 258-265: My friend, the wonderful cedar has been cut, it no more reaches the sky. I want to use it to build a gate, of height 6 times 12 spans, one span of width, the lower and the upper hinges one span. Let it be carried to Nippur by the Euphrates.... they put the trunk in the river, Enkidu guided it, Gilgamesh was carrying the head of Khubaba.

 

Information from other sources:

 

18. Yale tablet, 165: They made axes of 3 talents each

 

19 Yale tablet, 170: Gilgamesh and Enkidu each one were carrying ten talents of weapons

 

20 Yale tablet, 193: The forest extended 60 leagues in each direction

 

21 Yale tablet, 247-250: Let Enkidu lead you, let him check the way, he knows the access to the forest and every trick of Khubaba

 

22 Yale tablet, 255: May he (Shamash) open to you the close trails

 

23 Yale tablet, 262-269: ...in the river of Khubaba, as you wish, put your feet

 

24 Baghdad tablet 1-2: Climb the mountains crevasses, the gods have taken away my sleep...

 

25 Hittite version: When they arrived to the shores of Euphrates they made a sacrifice.... from there after 16 days they were in the middle of the mountains.... then they looked at the cedars.... Gilgamesh and Enkidu cut the cedars... when Huwawa heard the noise he got angry and said: who has cut the cedars I have grown?....

 

26 Huwawa said: I will lift you, I will carry you up hill, I will hit your head, I will put you in the black earth!

 

27 Gilgamesh and Khubaba, 53: Young men like him, in number of 50, went with him...

 

28 Gilgamesh and Khubaba, 82: The sons of your city who accompanied you should not wait long for you at the foot of the Mountain.

 

3. Identifying the location of the Forest of Cedars
 
 

From the above given texts, features of the Land of Cedars are the following:

• It is very far away
• Enkidu knows the way
• The taken overland route was previously "unknown", required a "long wandering" and in the final stage goes through a difficult terrain "which a simple person cannot easily take", where "it is better to be in two"
• The forest is large, extending in each direction 60 leagues: it is located in the "mountain of Lebanon"
• A river crosses the forest; by putting the cedar in the waters of the river one can finally reach Uruk
• The trip can be divided in two stages. The first one, equivalent to 45 days of normal travel, takes the two friends to the "Euphrates river". The second stage in 16 days takes them to the middle of the mountains.
• From the secondary text Gilgamesh and Khubaba we know that 50 friends of Gilgamesh waited for him at the foot of the mountain. Since they do not appear to have accompanied him along the new overland way, this suggests that they reached the waiting point by a different, presumibly easier and well known way.
• Khubaba could hear "60 leagues" away; his way of dealing with his opponents was quite peculiar: a hit on the head, lifting them, carrying them uphill, putting them in the black earth.

• it is in unresolvable conflict with a number of statements in the text
• it leads to a feat which is almost certainly physically impossible
• it is based upon a hasty identification of the names translated, albeit not incorrectly, as "Lebanon" and "Euphrates", with the present state and river in the Middle East
• it does not correspond to a route defined in the text, especially for the terminal phase, as new, very difficult and providing unusual bodily effects.

• The Forest of Cedars. The so called cedar of Lebanon, scientific name Cedrus Libanotica, presently grows wildly in extremely limited numbers in Lebanon, Siria and southern Anatolia, but its greatest natural habitat, in the variety Cedrus Deodara, is Kashmir, see Appendix 3. In view of the thesis strongly argued for by Kamal Salibi (1988, 1996, 1998) that the Hebrews previous to their deportation first to Assyria by Sargon II (722 BC), then to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar (587 BC), were living on the mountains of south-western Arabia (present Asir/Yemen region) and that the Phoenicians too originally lived along the arabian coasts of the Red Sea, it may even be argued that Kashmir, and not Lebanon, was the main source of cedar wood in ancient biblical times. See again Appendix 3 for the fact that Cedrus Deodara is the standard timber used even now in Asia for religious works. The timber had to be brought to the Red Sea by Phoenicians via the Indus river and the Indian Ocean. Trade of timber is well documented to Sumer from the Indus valley, not necessarily by Phoenicians. A further argument that the Forest of Cedars was not in Lebanon is the huge size given in the text. The forest is said to have an extension of "60 leagues", i.e. at least 600 km., in each direction. Such size is incompatible with the small dimensions of Lebanon. Jebel Liban is about 120 km long and no more than 40 km wide, Jebel el Sharqui (the Antilebanon) is even smaller. If the Kashmir region is defined by the mountain area whose waters feed the Indus, then this region is roughly a rectangle of over 700 by 500 km, in excellent agreement with the epic statement. It should be noted that Kashmir, now partially deforested, was in ancient times almost fully covered by forests (of course only partly consisting of cedar trees!), thanks to the rains brought by the monsoons. The tree line now approaches 4000 meters and barley can be grown up to 4400 meters on the slopes of the Hunza valley. At Gilgamesh time, around the middle of the third millennium BC according to Rohl’s revised chronology, which we deem to be basically correct, the world was experiencing a climatic optimum, with a megalitic civilization thriving in northern Europe, grape growing in Sweeden, wetter conditions in many regions now very arid, including central Asia, hence the tree line might have been even higher.
• The terms Lebanon and Euphrates. What is usually translated as "Lebanon" is a semitic word that in say the original, purely consonantal (vocalization was introduced only between the 5th and 8th century AD by the Masoretes, when ancient Hebraic was no more spoken since almost one thousand years) biblical text reads as LBN. We think it is correct to look at the most natural basic meaning of a consonantally spelled word. We believe that the natural vocalization for LBN is leben, that in Hebraic and in Arabic is a word for "milk" or "dairy products". Thus we are led to propose as a feasible translation for the term LBN in a geographical context the expression land of milk. Similarly the word usually translated as "Euphrates" appears in the biblical consonantical text as NHR PRT, where NHR is vocalized as nahar, meaning "river", while PRT is vocalized as farat, following the present way of calling the river Euphrates in Mesopotamia (nahar farat/furat). However PRT may more meaningfully and without violating linguistic rules be vocalized as PAROT, plural genitive of PARA, Hebraic word for "cows ", hence leading to NHR PRT as river of the cows, a term perfectly correlated with our proposed land of milk. Now cows, while certainly present in Middle East at Gilgamesh time, were not the most common cattle, since the relatively arid land favoured, in Mesopotamia as well as in Lebanon, Palestine and much of Arabia, sheep and goat. Cows and milk are plentiful in India, where climatic conditions are better and where cheese and yogurt are basic staples for the population. Moreover there is a curious special feature in the animal life in the Hunza valley, namely the presence of a unique type of small cow, about as big as a St Bernard dog, that produces some 4 liters of milk a day, is very useful for transport and can graze on extremely steep slopes. Not far from the Hunza valley, in fact just beyond its north-eastern ridge, there is the Vakhan corridor of Pamir, the "finger" that Afghanistan points between Pakistan and Tagikistan. This name also is a sanscrit term for a type of cow, related to the latin term "vacca ".... All above elements suggest a new translation for the terms LBN and NHR PRT, tied to a natural feature of the land of extreme importance for living. It may be even wondered if the sacrality of cows in Hindu religion may predate the Arian invasion of circa 1600 BC, being a surviving element of previous religions.
• The difficulty of the travel. The epic states that the travel was long, difficult and by a previously unknown route. Now reaching Lebanon (or Palestine) from Uruk via the shortest way, i.e. by a straight line through the Sirian desert, would in fact be a great, almost impossible feat, since the mainly stony reddish desert lying between lower Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean coast (Al Widyan and Badet esh Sham, namely the Arabia Deserta in Ptolemaic maps) is extremely poor in water and was always avoided in classical times. Even now the area, as shown e.g. by the satellite night picture found in the Times Millennium Edition, 1999, is totally dark in the night, a sign of absence of humans, while Saudi Arabia, except for the Rub-al-Khali desert, is dotted by many white spots, most of them unrelated to methane flaring in the oil fields, but indicative of villages and towns. We may here note that prof. Salibi in his last quoted monograph states that western Arabia was easily reached from Mesopotamia via a range of wadis from Kuwait to Al Madinah going through the extensive Kassim oasis (the power region of King Ibn Saud, possibly the original place of the Kassites?), a way that became the standard route taken by the pilgrims from the East to the Meccah (notice that the whole of present Saudi Arabia is called Arabia Felix in Ptolemaic maps!). However there is a natural and easy way from Mesopotamia to Lebanon, that was taken by most travellers, and that adds less than 15% extra mileage, namely by following the Euphrates (on foot or by boat, the current being not strong), up to latitude about 36°, close to ancient Thapsacus, then crossing the mildly ondulated stretch of land (about 150 km) to the Orontes, hence following the Orontes to the mountains of Lebanon via Homs, Baalbek and the Bekah. One must also notice that the mountains of Lebanon, maximum elevation 3086m, are of rather easy access, with rotund usually smooth slopes. Total distance from Uruk to the Bekah via the described route is just about 1500 km. Such a distance can certainly be made on foot by a fast athletic walker in two or three weeks, against the six weeks that the epic states were normally needed to reach the foot of the mountain. Notice also the absurd geographical statement, in the usually assumed scenario, that the river Euphrates was reached at the end of the first stage of the trip! It is moreover almost certain that the way to Lebanon over land (the only possibility by sea would imply to circumnavigation of Africa....) was known well before Gilgamesh times, since already in Ubaidic times contacts existed between the Mediterranean and the Gulf area. Thus accepting Lebanon as the final destination would wholly remove the aspects of difficulty and novelty.

• To the central Zagros mountains via lower Mesopotamia, Elam and the Persian Gates. Notice that according to Bibby the line of the southern coast of Irak surprisingly has not changed much from Sumerian times. So Gilgamesh may have initially just moved east, skirting the north side of the Shatt-el-Arab marshes, crossing the Tigris and the Karun river near present Ahwaz and entering the mountains near present Behbehan
• Crossing central Zagros via present Shiraz (near Persepolis) and Saidabad (previously Sirjan) towards Kerman, the capital of Khorasan, ancient Carmania. The road is via mountains never over 3000m, well watered, inhabited since millennia before Gilgamesh by tribes specialized in carpetry and among the first makers of pottery
• Towards Sistan by skirting the southern side of the Dasht-e-Lut desert via Bam and other oasis. At Gilgamesh time Sistan (ancient Drangiana/Paratacene), an extremely fertile region of about 30.000 square kilometers, was one of the few areas in the world where walled cities of substantial size had been built. One of the main activity in this area was mining, in particular of precious hard stones (turquoise, agate, possibly, as later discussed, even copper), certainly to be exported also to foreign lands. Among the cities we recall Shar-i-Sokhta, about 60 km south of Zabol, on the borderline between present Iran and Afghanistan, with an estimated population of about 10.000 people (notice that the population of Uruk is estimated at 50.000 people). We recall that Sistan cities were destroyed catastrophically in the period 1600-1800 BC, possibly in relation with the Arian invasion and/or the catastrophe that left a strongly defined sign in the dendrochronological record in the year 1629 BC. The name Sistan is relatively modern, having been given after the region was invaded by the Saci, a Scythian tribe, around 130 AD (SAKASTAN = SIGISTAN = SISTAN...). Sistan is the place of the adventures of Rustem, the hero of the Book of King of Ferdowsi (any relation with Gilgamesh?....).
• From Sistan there are two natural ways to the Indus valley. The southern one goes via Zahedan, then follows the southern side of the Chagai hills, rather well watered, north of the Baluchistan desert of Kharan. It enters the Indus valley after Quetta via the Balan pass, about 1000m high. It reaches the river near the historical city of Sukkur, about 60 km north-east of Mohenjo Daro. The second route follows the river Helmand towards Kandahar, then skirts the southern side of the Afghanistan mountain range and reaches Kabul via a number of valleys and easy passes. From Kabul it follows the river presently named Kabul, but till the first half of the 19th century named Peshawar, in an easterly direction. It enters Pakistan via the Khyber pass, 1067m, crosses Peshawar and reaches the Indus near Nowshera, close to the meeting of the Kabul and Indus. We would guess that the way between Sistan and Mohenjo Daro was used by caravans in view of the likely contacts between these areas; thus it would be more corresponding to an exploratory attitude that Gilgamesh choose the route via the Khyber pass.

• some information about the route had to be generally known by people in the Indus valley, since quite probably contacts and trade existed already between the Indus valley and present Xinjang (exchanges of silk and tea). Notice that the proposed route may also have been one of the routes taken, some 800 years after Gilgamesh, by the invading Arians from the North, since pockets of indoeuropean language speaking peoples are documented in the Takla-Makan region. These are the Tocarians, who even had a script (based on the Brahmi alphabet with additional 12 characters for nonsancrit sounds), several rolls in Tocarian, over 1500 years old, having been found at the beginning of the 20th century in a monastery in Dunhuang, the town of the One Thousand Buddhas (other manuscripts have been found in Turfan and in Kucha; some Tocarians, apparently quoted in Strabo XI, 8 as Asioi, moved to Bactriana circa 180 AD, most probably under pressure from the Mongols/Huns). It is however likely that most of the Arians came via a more westernly affluent of the Indus, namely the present Chitral/Kabul river, called till last century the Peshawar, that winds in dramatic gorges on the eastern side of the Hindukush (whose traditional meaning is "the killer of Hindus", with reference to the difficult and dangerous paths along the river).
• the road is the most direct one to the heart of Asia from the Indus valley. We have the suspicion that the real goal of Gilgamesh already in his first trip was to reach the place of Utanapishtim by the shortest way. We will claim in a next section that the place of Utanapishtim is a sacred mountain near the sources of the Yellow River. Failure to cross into the Tarim basin, most probably for acclimitization difficulties and the impassibility of the trails, even nowadays, like the Karakorum highway, often closed due to landslides, led Gilgamesh to substitute the original aim with the killing of Khubaba and the cutting of a great cedar. It should also be noticed that the trail to the Mintaka pass is cut in parts along almost vertical walls, as shown in a picture in Danziger’s book.
• a number of names in the Hunza region share intriguingly the first syllabe in Khubaba, indicating a possible common origin and meaning (that presently I am unable to specify). Such are: - the names of the pass and river, KHU-njerab, KHU-njerabi - the name of the river HU-nza; this is also the name of the valley and is the ancient name of the main town, now called Baltit - the name of other small town: KHU-dabad, Mor-KHUn....;an inspection of the names of the about 200 villages in the valley might enrich this list - KHU-rukuts, the name of one of the four clans of local population. We should note that the fact that KHU is often followed by N in the above names suggests, if our correlation is correct, that perhaps the correct prononciation of the Sumerian syllabe KHU might be more close to KHUN. Some information on the local population is interesting, even if unrelated to Gilgamesh travels, since probably he crossed unpopulated mountains. The local people are the Burusho and speak a language, Burushaski, apparently unrelated to any other world language, extremely rich in words defining different states of objects, persons, animals....The Burusho are very strong physically, walk fast over steep trails, have almost zero child mortality, live usually over 100 years, father children at very high age, keep perfect eyesight and hearing till their last days; before the opening of the Karakorum highway, their diet had very little fats, being based on a lot of fruits.
• the epic contains also a geographical reference to Saria, as a country not far from the Forest of Cedars, usually assumed to mean Siria. We can notice that SR can correspond to ZR, which appears in the name of a Hunza valley village, ZARA-bad, and moreover in the first mountain region crossed by the Indus, which is Ha-ZARA.

4. Numerics of the first trip
 
 

It is stated that the route from Uruk to the river Eupfrates, by us identified with the Indus river, was equivalent to a month and a half (i.e. to about 45 days) of normal travel, but was accomplished in 3 days, corresponding to a total distance of 150 "leagues", or, in Assyrian, "beru". Leaving aside the question of how this distance could have been made in three days (we think there is a symbolic meaning behind), we note that 150 beru imply a distance of at least 1500 km but possibly even of over 2700 km. Indeed one beru being equivalent to the distance walked in two hours, presumibly in the easy flat region of Sumer, it would depend on the speed of the walker. Nowadays a person used to walk easily walks 12 km in two hours; persons well trained in walking, which was the normal way of moving in Sumerian times, could certainly make more than 12 km in two hours, possibly even 18 km (notice that techniques for fast walking were developed on the plateaus of Tibet, as noticed for instance by Alexandra David Néel). Now the distance "as the crow flies" between Uruk and the Indus/Kabul joining point is about 2400 km. If the 150 leagues should be considered as the shortest distance between the two points, this would give a value for the beru of 16 km, certainly an acceptable value. The actual overland route is not along a geodetic and has unavoidable detours. A reasonable estimate of it would be around 4000 km. Such a distance can certainly be covered in 45 days by trained people who know the way. Gilgamesh and Enkidu, and most of their contemporaries, were certainly well trained in walking over long distances and Enkidu is claimed to have known the way (we will suggest in a next section why). Now 4000 km divided by 45 makes an average walk of about 90 km a day. That this is not an impossible feat is shown by the following examples:

• Fyona Campbell, see her book On foot through Africa, Orion, 1994, in her twenties crossed by foot North America, Australia and Africa (this continent from Cape Town to Tanger, over 17.000 km). In Africa she usually made daily stages of 50 km, in less interesting Australia she often made 80 km a day. She is not a tall woman. She walked about 10 hours a day and spent lot of time in reading, washing, hearing radio news (two people with a jeep were waiting for her), talking and even flirting with her escorts.
• Geronimo, the well known chieftain of the Apaches, used to raid the Mexicans (he hated them since they had killed his wife and children) in the rugged Sierra Madre region, which has the deepest canyons in the world. He was a very short man. In his biography, see Barrett (1906), he estimates that he usually walked 65-70 km a day during these raids.
• As stated in Polybius III, 41 (I read this passage 40 years ago, when I was 15; I was impressed and recalled it well; I have checked that memory did not fail me!), the Romans expected Hannibal to invade from Sicily, hence the main body of the army led by Tiberius Sempronius was stationed near Lilibeum, present Trapani, in Sicily, on the coast facing Carthago. When news came that Hannibal was going to cross the Alps, the army was relocated to Rimini (easiest access to Rome at that time was via Picenum) in just 40 days (Polybius III, 68), implying an average walk of about 50 km a day. Notice that Roman men were usually stocky but short. Moreover Roman soldiers were carrying heavy weapons (the weight of the Roman pylum was no less than 30 kilos) and food for 40 days (salted pig, vinaigre and cereals in grain), for a total weight certainly greater than their body weight. Notice also that a whole army cannot move as fast as a few persons. The Roman soldiers were tired when they arrived in Rimini and were granted a good rest, possibly on the sandy beaches at those times cleaner than now, most probably in the cheap local brothels....
• John Chardin in his Travels in Persia, 1673-1677, second volume, chapter XII, Dover Press, 1988, describes a walking competition occurring in Ispahan every year where the winner walked from 4 in the morning to 6 in the evening, covering a fixed length corresponding to 36 French leagues, i.e. about 160 km (the French common league was 4.445 meters, the postal leugue 3.980; the UK league was 4.828 meters, the Spanish 5.572), at an average speed hence of about 13 km per hour; he says that people complained the winner was not so good, since in the reign of Sha Sefy the winner made the walk in 12 hours, averaging 15 km per hour. Chardin tried to follow the man when in the hot middle of the day he was slowing his pace, but he could not keep his pace at the walking mode; first prize was 500 tomans, equivalent to 22.500 french Livres.
• Julius Caesar was able to led his army on several occasions through daily walks of about 100 km, and this in a territory full of forests, marshes and often covered by over one meter of snow.

• the battle with Khubaba was difficult and he was not alone, other similar beings were in the region
• due to mountain sickness and the need to still go several hundred meters higher Gilgamesh felt unable to continue
• most likely, the trail was made impassable by landslides or snowslides.

5. Who were Khubaba and Enkidu?
 
 

Here we will offer a suggestion on the nature of Khubaba, and possibly of Enkidu. We let aside the possibility that the two characters are fictional or mainly loaded of symbolic elements. We try to identify which real creatures they could have been. According to our scenario the meeting with Khubaba took place in the heart of the high mountains between the Indus, the Tarim and the Amu Darya basins, a region where the three great ranges of Karakorum, Pamir and Hindukush join. That this is a very special place in history of mankind will be claimed in a forthcoming paper. We also observed that the meeting took place most probably on the way to the Mintaka pass and at an elevation well over 4000 meters, in view of the symptoms of mountain sickness shown by Gilgamesh. It is important to note that Enkidu did not show such symptoms. Now it is a fact known since very ancient times that people in the Himalaya, Karakorum, Pamir regions, and till last century at least also in Caucasus, have strong belief in the existence in their mountains of great bipedal walking creatures with the following features:

• they are tall, often over 2.5 meters, very hairy, with rather short legs but arms reaching the kneels; they are endowed with extraordinary good hearing
• they live in caves above the three line, in the 5000 meters region
• they keep hidden during the day, hunt in the night, especially in misty nights, but are occasionally seen at dusk
• they do not usually attack man nor do they eat human flesh. They eat roots and animal meat. They like yak meat. In the night they approach the fenced places where yaks are kept, jump inside, kill the animal hitting their head with their powerful fist, jump out with the yak under their arms, run overhill and hid their prey under earth or sand to keep it for the next days away of reach of vultures
• occasionally they are known to carry off women or men with whom they have sexual intercourse, leading, it is claimed, see below, to offsprings.

6. The second trip. Numerics and geographical information
 
 

The second trip has as destination mount Mashu, where Utanapishtim (in Assyrian; Ziusudra in Sumerian), a man who survived the Flood, was dwelling, having being granted immortality by the gods. Gilgamesh too hoped to get immortality, having gone through a period of depression at the thought of human mortality, especially after the death of his friend Enkidu. In the following we give the surviving information from the corpus of Gilgamesh texts offered by Pettinato (1992). Tablets from Assurbanipal library.

 

1. IX, 5-9: I wander by the steppes. I am going to the place of Utanapishtim, the son of Ubartutu. I am moving fast towards this place. In the night I have reached a mountain pass. I have seen lions, I was scared

 

2. IX, 36: The name of the mountain is Mashu

 

3. IX, 55-59: Who are you who came by far away roads, who wandered till you got to my presence, crossing with difficulty ever fast flowing watercourses?

 

4. IX, 132-134: You, Gilgamesh, do not be afraid! I open for you mount Mashu, cross without fear the mountains and the hills!

 

5. X, 1: Siduri, the hostess who lives far away at the shore of the sea..

 

6. X, 43-47: Why do you look like someone who has travelled over long distances? Why does your face show the signs of a hot and of a cold wheather? Why do you wander only covered with a lion skin?

 

7. X, 76-91: Gilgamesh insisted: Please, hostess, which is the direction to Utanapishtim? Give me accurate information. If necessary I will cross the sea, otherwise I will take the way by the steppe. Gilgamesh, there has never been a boat for the crossing, no one in memory has ever crossed this sea. Only Shamash can cross it... The crossing is difficult, full of dangers, in the middle there are lethal waters that make navigation impossible. How, Gilgamesh, can you cross this sea? Once you get to the mortal waters, what will you do? There is however, Gilgamesh, the boatman of Utanapishtim, his name is Urshanabi. You can find him cutting trees in the woods, near the stone "stela"

 

8. X, 156-160: Gilgamesh, take an axe, go to the wood, cut planks of 30 meters length, work them smooth, bring them to me

 

9. X, 166-170: Gilgamesh and Urshanabi entered the boat and began the voyage. A route of one month and a half towards the land of..... they made in three days. Then Urshanabi arrived at the waters of death

 

10. X, 259-261: I have killed bears, hyenas, lions, leopards, tigers, deer...

 

11. XI, 194-195: Now let Utanapishtim and his wife be like gods. Let Utanapishtim dwell far away, at the mouth of the rivers

 

12. XI, 257-258: Gilgamesh and Urshanabi enter the boat. They free the boat and begin the [return] voyage

 

Berlin/London tablet

 

13. 100-104: So Gilgamesh spoke to Surshanabu: Gilgamesh is my name. I have come from Uruk, from the Eanni, I have wandered by the mountains. I have made a long way towards the rising Sun

 

14. 115-119: The stones "stela", Gilgamesh, are my guide, so that I avoid the waters of death. In your fury you have broken them. I keep them with me, so that they can guide me

 

Hittite version

 

The god of the Moon (Sin) said: bring these two lions you killed to the city, bring them to the temple of Sin

 

Hittite version by J. Friedrich (in Die hethitischen Bruchstuekes des Gilgamesh-Epos, quoted by Sitchin (1980), without date)

 

After crossing the death waters with Urshanabi, they were in Tilmun, aiming to the Mashu mountain in a straight way, in the direction of the far away great sea. On the way there was the town Itla, sacred to the god Ullu-Yah

 

 

7. Identifying the route of the second trip

 

According to the proposal defended here, Gilgamesh trip took him to the heart of Asia, to mount Mashu, that we will identify, close to the sources of the Yellow River, with a huge mountain range still sacred to the local population, the Ngolok tribe. Then he returned to Uruk by water, first following the Yellow River (for about 4000 km), then coasting the eastern-southern side of Asia, for at least 15.000 km. Thus Gilgamesh truly succeeded in completing a voyage of epic dimensions, perhaps, after him, surpassed, in terms of mileage and difficulties, only by Ibn Battuta, who crossed the Sahara, the Central Asia deserts and visited China, India, the Meccah nine times.... Gilgamesh reached mount Mashu by a route about which vague information had to be available. The distance travelled in the second trip was about 3000 km longer than by the route he had attempted in the first trip, but now it did not take him through the almost impassable high ranges of the Karakorum. It took him through wild and almost unpopulated steppes, fraught of difficulties in term of quick sands, salt flats and lack of sweet water. We think that without the guiding help of Urshanabi he would have been lost after the about 5000 kilometers that had taken him to the "sea" where he met Siduri, the custodian of the temple of Sin. It is perhaps interesting at this point, before unveiling the final destination, to introduce a digression on how the routes proposed here came to the mind of this author. Gilgamesh epic was first read by me, in the popular Penguin edition, in 1971, when I was visiting the University of Essex in UK for research on Quasi-Newton methods with professor C. Broyden. During my visit a theatrical stage of the epic was performed, where two stark naked actor and actress represented the erotic meeting of Enkidu and the sacred prostitute Shamkhat (the following day a colleague at the CS Department asked me: did you like the performance of my wife? She had acted Shamkhat). Already at that time I had doubts about the real destination of Gilgamesh trips. Several years ago, having reread the epic in the 1992 book of Pettinato, I looked in the Enciclopedia Treccani, the great italian encyclopedia (almost twice the size of the Britannica), about cedars of Lebanon. To my delight I found out that they grow in the variaty Cedrus Deodara in Kashmir. Since the Indus basin and Mesopotamia at Gilgamesh time were in well documented contacts via water, it made sense to hypothesize that not only Kashmir had to be a well known source of cedar timber, but that reaching and exploring that region might have been an interesting goal - personal and even political, in view of incipient trends towards forms of "imperialism" - to a strong willed, intelligent and physically powerful person as king Gilgamesh. Perhaps it is worth here to remember that Alexander too aimed to that region (but perhaps only visited Swat, in the lower reaches of Kashmir), and that before him, apart from the Persian emperors, also Sesostris I the Great had accomplished this feat, at least according to the classical sources (Diodorus, Herodotus) that modern historians have yet to accept. Sesostris I lived some 700 years after Gilgamesh (in a forthcoming paper we will claim that Abraham was his contemporary, worked for him, got a wife from his family and a new land "of honey and milk" in Asir, better than his previous land somewhere located in eastern Anatolia/Azerbaijian/Armenia, not in Sumer). The identification of mount Mashu came suddenly to my mind on a day of May 1999, while I was reading Sitchin’s "The stairway to heaven" (in its Italian translation as "Le astronavi del Sinai", Piemme, 1988). At the point where Sitchin, whose source is mainly the Hittite text in Friedrich’s translation, describes how Gilgamesh, after crossing a mountain pass, saw a water extent, near which there was a city with a temple dedicated to Sin, I closed the eyes and tried to visualize the map of central Asia (since a child I have been fascinated by maps; I possess a remarkable collection of maps and of atlases, several of them of the 18th and 17th century; I sadly miss not having bought a beautiful 1613 edition of the Mercator Atlas, but is was priced 45.000 pounds....). It dawned to me that the water expanse, certainly not a sea but a large lake, had to be the Balkash lake, which, as will be discussed soon, fully satisfies the features in the text. Then I thought what mount Mashu might be in this geographical context, and the answer flashed back immediately, the product of a geographical and anthropological information I had memorized a couple of years before from a book by Leonard Clark, to whose memory this paper is dedicated. Of Leonard Clark, possibly with Heyerdahl the greatest explorer of this century, I had read and reread in my teens the fascinating book The rivers descended to Orient, describing his exploration of the Tambo, Perenè, Ucayali and Maranon rivers. If I had not read his other book The Marching Wind (Funk and Wagnalls, New York; italian translation as Alle porte della Mongolia, Garzanti, 1960), mount Mashu would still remain unidentified. I was lent the book by my cousin Sergio Risso, after it was recommended to me by my aunt Amelia Risso, who at over 80 still reads several books a month. It is quite remarkable that the sacred mountain of the Ngolok has remained unnoticed in the community of people who investigate world places that have ancient religion connections or esoteric significance. As far as I can recall, it is never quoted in the works of the great Tibetanologist Alexandra David Néel. It not cited in the recent book listing sacred mountains by Roux (1999). It is quoted in passim by Messner without any special notice. Almost nothing about it was known by the people I met March 3, 2000, in the Tibetan Foundation in London. Let us now discuss the route that we propose to mount Mashu. Of course the precise itinerary is beyond any possible identification, since the text does not provide sufficient elements. Perhaps if more of the missing lines are found our proposal will have more elements for support or for rejection. Ours is an educated guess, as we did in relation the the route to the river "Euphrates" at the foot of the mountains of the Forest of Cedars. Our guess comes very naturally once the "sea" with the temple of Sin and mount Mashu are identified. Further elements in favour will be presented in a forthcoming paper, Spedicato (2000). Let us first discuss the "sea" with the temple of Sin. The text calls it a "sea", and the Kirgisi actually call it a "sea" (their word for sea being just "Balkash"), but we identify it actually with a large lake. Notice that what we call "Caspian sea" is actually a large lake, the remnant of a previous very large lake, hence in a sense a "sea", that included at least also the Aral lake, as it still appears in the Atlas of Ptolemy, see the edition by Pagani (1990). Notice also that the Caspian is called by Persians "Darya-ye-Khazar", i.e. the "sea" or "water" of the Khazars (whose empire flourished along its northern and eastern sides for seven centuries before the arrival of the Mongols in the 13th century). Now "Darya" is a Turkish word that means generally "water expanse" and is used in the whole of central Asia for both rivers, lakes and sea. Thus we claim that Gilgamesh reached this "sea" after a very long way, in a main easterly direction, along which he met wild attacking animals, had to cross large rivers always full of water (the crossing of easily fordable rivers would not merit any mention). The "sea" appears just after the crossing of a mountain pass, appears difficult to cross directly, the steppes around it also appear difficult, making Gilgamesh feel depressed. Near the "sea" there is a city with a temple to Sin, the god, inter alia, associated with the Moon. We identify the above "sea" with the Balkash lake on the following grounds:

• It is certainly far away from Sumer, about 4000 km as the crow flies, probably well over 5000 km by the route taken by Gilgamesh, where many detours and false starts had to occur.
• It lies in a rather flat basin, elevation around 350-400 meters, which is surrounded on the north and west side by a chain of hills (the Khaisaghin Daban hills in the north reach 1559 meters, the Chu-Ili hills on the west reach 1053 meters). On the south-east, beyond the mainly flat gently sloping delta of the Ili, there are quite high mountains, namely the Zailiski Alatau and the Zungarian Alatau, reaching respectively 4951 and 4463 meters.
• The lake is fed mainly by a river coming from a valley among high mountains, where the city of Alma-Ata is located. The river has the intriguing name Ili, easily associated with the semitic EL, one of the main gods.
• The waters are salty, undrinkable by man, actually so salty that only small fish lives in the lake. It has a tormented coastline, it is surrounded by marshes, quick sands and deposits of salt, over which it is extremely difficult to move by foot, either for man and for camel, see Hedin (1943) for the claim that these areas, called scior in eastern central Asia, are avoided by everyone. Around the shores there is a lot of woods. The lake has sources of sweet water on his bottom, that apparently have contributed in significantly reducing the high salinity noted in the 19th century to a more moderate salinity in the 20th century, especially in the southern part (industrial pollution is now poisoning the lake).
• From a description of the lake at the end of the 19th century by Grégoire (1876) we have the following information (to be probably updated in the sense of a decreasing size of the lake, the phenomenon of drying up of inner lakes being common worldwide and being probably related to the fact that such lakes were filled over their normal capacity during some catastrophical flooding event, the Noah-Utanapishtim flood being one such likely events):

- the lake is long 530 km, large at most 85 km, area 22.000 square kilometers; the lake around 1950 was very shallow, max depth only about 11 meters;

- present elevation (Times Atlas, Comprehensive Edition, 1974) is 339 meters over sea level. Just east of it two smaller lakes are found aligned in an easterly direction: lake Sasykul, elevation 334m, and Alakul, 340m. In case the water level in the Balkash would increase by about ten meters, these two lakes would join with the Balkash, as appears it was the case from maps in atlases of the 18th century, then giving rise to a lake over 800 km long but no more than 100 km wide;

- the form of the lake is arcued, rather half-Moon like;

- if the level of the lake would increase to the isoipse 500 meters, quite a possibility in the event of a great flood, it would give rise still to a water expanse with no outlet to the ocean, with a size of circa 150.000 square kilometers, about the area of the Caspian Sea. We do not know how was the elevation of the Balkash at Gilgamesh time. We guess, in view of the drying up tendency, that it was significantly higher than now; the lake could have had the characteristic half Moon shape before the Flood, making it sacred to the god Sin; an increase of the water level to ther isoipse 500m, for instance, about 160 meters higher than now, would completely change its shape.

• The name of the lake is indicative, in the linguistic analysis that we will propose, of a relation with the god Sin, to whom perhaps the lake was sacred in view of its peculiar half-Moon shape (as said above, if not at Gilgamesh time, before the Flood).

Let us now discuss our proposal about the meaning of the name BALKASH. We have been unable of getting literature information on the ethymology of that name, even by asking an educated Khazack met on a flight to Oman, and by contacting the greatest expert in Italy on Turkish and Islamic civilization, professor Jibril Mandel, author of close to 200 books, proficient in several central Asia languages, descendent of a noble Afghan family, owner of an 8th century Koran and of some objects that belonged to Gengis Khan (professor Mandel is muslim, the head of the Milan Sufis, his three children are one catholic, one muslim, one jewish...). Our proposal is that the name BALKASH is the contracted form of a more ancient name BALKASHIN. It was to my delight that after having got this idea, I found that atlases and geographic dictionaries up to half the 19th century call the lake BALKASHI, one step closer to the proposed BALKASHIN. Now there are no linguistical problems in the equivalence BALKASHIN = BALKASIN, that we see as a word composed by three each one meaningful one syllabe words, namely BAL - KA - SIN, for which we claim the validity of the following translation: Sin, Lord of the people. The reference to Sin and the term Lord is obvious. The main point is the validity of the identification KA = PEOPLE, that is addressed in Appendix 2. Having on the above grounds identified the "sea" with the temple of Sin with the Balkash lake, we can now make our educated guess on the first stage of Gilgamesh trip, from Uruk to the Balkash lake.

From the Hittite text in Friedrich translation, but not from the corpus in Pettinato, the trip appears to have started when Enkidu was still alive, and by sea, on board of a boat named MA-GAN. The boat sank near the coast of MA-GAN, with Enkidu dying in the accident. Then Gilgamesh continues the trip alone overland. Sitchin identifies Magan with Egypt, while most scholars identify Magan with the easternmost coast of the Arabian peninsula, i.e. mainly Oman and part of the Emirates, in view of the fact that copper was among the exports of Magan and that bronze age mines of copper have been found in the mountains of Oman. If the Hittite version used by Sitchin is correct, then we may think that Gilgamesh again intended to reach the heart of Asia by the Karakorum passes tried before, reaching however the foot of the Kashmir mountains not along the overland route explored in the first trip but by the more usual way via the Indian Ocean and the Indus river. Moreover we claim that MAGAN, also read as MAKAN, is neither Egypt nor Oman, but the southern coast of the Iranian plateau, the ancient Gedrosia, a vast expanse of low mountains extremely poor in wells, that Alexander insisted to cross on the return from India, for reasons that are not clear in the surviving reports of his adventures (Arrianus, Curtius Rufus, Plutarch), perhaps not unrelated to a memory of the feat that we are now proposing Gilgamesh accomplished. This region, while difficult and even now very sparsely populated, is not a complete desert. Now mainly inhabited by Baluchi people, divided between Iran and Pakistan, in classical times, as reported in that superb navigational reference book that is the Periplus of the Erithraean Sea, had a number of ports and a coastal population, the Icthiophagy, that took water and food from sea life. The present local name of this region, attested as I have checked at least in atlases of the 18th century, is MAKRAN (sometimes also spelled as MEKRAN, MUKRAN). The name MAKRAN has obvious similarity with MAGAN/MAKAN, a fact reinforced by the observation that the sound KR does not belong to the Sumerian phonema. Incidentally, let us note that Vinci (1998), in his seminal monograph Omero nel Baltico, (where mainly on geographical grounds he sets the Homeric world and sagas in the Baltic/North Sea region at a time before the circa 1600 BC migration of several indoeuropen people from Northern Europe/western Siberia to central/southern Europe, Anatolia, Iran and India) notices that Homeric TROIA must be located with the southern Finnish town of TOIA, the sound TR not existing in Finnish....

Whether or not the second trip of Gilgamesh began by boat, the "sea" with the temple of Sin was reached overland. The likely route is the following.

• First from Uruk to Sistan. This could have been done via sea and then crossing the Makran region, along one of the valleys (e.g. the Dasht or the Rakshan valleys) that certainly allowed the precious hard stones mined in Sistan to reach the Indian Ocean for trade to the east and to the west. Notice also that there are important copper mines in Birjand, just about 150 km north-west of central Sistan, that possibly were already exploited in bronze age time, therefore voiding the claim that Oman was Magan, because of the presence of copper in Oman. Notice that on Makran coast a well protected bay is the Gwatar bay, on whose probable ancient coastline, near a river, was located the town of Kalataki, now in ruins; many ancient tombs are found also on the south-eastern promontory that closes the bay, near the village of Jiwani. Or it could have been done via overland, possibly even by same route taken in the first trip. >From Sistan the natural way to Balkash, not less than 3000 km, skirts on the west the mountains of Afghanistan and Pamir, in a basic direction north-east. On this way he had to cross a few really large rivers, certainly not fordable and rich of water the whole year around, including the Amu Darya (classical Oxus, see Spedicato (2000) for more exciting information on this river), the Syr Darya (classical Jaxartes/Araxes, the northermost river reached by Alexander, who built on his shores Alexandria Ultima; previously reached also by Cyrus and Semiramis, convincingly identified by Pettinato (1985) as Sammurat, circa 800 BC; possibly also reached by Sesostris I the Great), and, finally, the Chu river. The epic states that Gilgamesh was attacked by dangerous animals along the way. Leopards and hyenas are still found in the area; the famous Aral tiger, a variety of royal tiger well adapt to swimming and living among river reeds, became extinct around 1950 (a similar variety along the Tarim river disappeared around 1900); lion became extinct several centuries ago (it was the favourite game of Achaemenid and Sassanid rulers), but we should quote unconfirmed reports, see the Lonely Planet Guide for Iran, that it has been sighted by peasants in Mazandaran, along the southern coast of the Caspian Sea.
• Let us now discuss the second stage of the trip, from lake Balkash to Mount Mashu. As remarked before, at Gilgamesh time lake Balkash was almost certainly much larger, with a length close to 1000 km, a width possibly over 100 km on average. We do not know where the temple of Sin was, certainly close to the ancient higher shore, so at some distance of the present shore, but a look at a map, e.g. that in the Times Atlas of the World, Comprehensive Edition, 1974, suggests that Gilgamesh, who presumibly had coasted the western side of the Tien Shan (Mountain of the Sky), likely crossed the Chu-Ili hills in the pass where both a road and a railway cross now, near the small towns of Khantau and Burubaytal (are the Burushaski speaking Hunza anyhow related with the place named Burubaytal?), hence approaching the lake at its southern shore. At his time the lake probably filled much of the Zhusandala steppe, that extends east of the present southern side of the lake. As is the case for many flat bottomed lakes in central Asia, navigation is often extremely dangerous due to the low level of the waters. Once a boat gets stuck in the muddy bottom, putting it again in motion may be an almost impossible task, because the soft bottom is extremely dangerous for anyone who would jump in the waters trying to push the boat. For a graphic description of what can happen in so called quick sands or quick muds, recall the death of the friend of Carrière, the author of Papillon, who slowly disappeared in a muddy mangrove shore. This navigational problem was remarked by Sven Hedin, see Hedin (1943), and was his main problem during the exploration of the new Lop Nor, the flat bottomed lake where the Tarim ends, which at the beginning of the 20th century, after an unusually rainy season, changed its location by about 200 km, reoccupying an area that had been the ancient location till about 2000 years ago (at that time the change of location led to the abandonement of the important city of Lou-Lan, where many perfectly conserved mummies have been found). This navigational problem suggests that the "stone stelae" that looked so important to Urshanabi and that Gilgamesh had broken might have been magnetite, and could have been used as a compass (recall that compass comes from China, and that actually many elements of Chinese culture and science have their original source in the heart of Asia). This would also explain why Urshanabi was still able to navigate using apparently fragments of the broken stelae, since they of course would still maintain their dipole characteristics. There is however an even more interesting possibility. If the water level of lake Balkash at Gilgamesh time was about 150 meters higher than now, the lake would extend into Zungaria flooding the pass of the Zungarian gates and would come close to the present city of Urumchi. Now near Urumchi, precisely on the northern side of the Bokhda-Ula mountain range, there is a huge solfatara, with a perimeter of some 25 km at the beginning of the 19th century, see Marmocchi (1856), where large amounts of poisonous gases are emitted, killing every being, birds included, that would attempt to cross the area. The gases would escape from the waters and kill anyone on a boat. We are presently unable to ascertain the actual coastline of the Balkash at Gilgamesh time, but the phenomenon here described would provide a perfect explanation of the "waters of death" described in the epic.

If our localisation of the crossing point is correct, then it is likely that Urshanabu took the boat beyond the Ili river. From here there are two ways towards the heart of Asia. One follows the Ili towards Kuldjia (now named Ining). The Ili valley is cut among very high mountains, reaching 7345 meters in the soviet named Peak of Victory, ancient name Khan Tengri, but entrance into Zungaria is possible via a pass elevation about 2000 meters. The second way skirts for about 350 kilometers the Zungarian Alatau range and meets the other way near the Ebinur/Aipi lake. From this point the distance to our proposed Mount Mashu is about 2000 km, along a series of oasis and high plateaus steppes, with plenty of game and of water.

 

 

8. Mount Mashu and the return to Uruk

 

According to a recent proposal by Temple (see Hera Magazine, n. 1, 2000), Mashu means "the place where the sun rises in the orient". This interpretation fits perfectly with our identification and the considerations that we will put forward in a forthcoming paper about on the original land of the Sumerians. Now, to introduce our identification of Mount Mashu, let us recall some bellic events of the 20th century. At the beginning of 1949 the armies of Mao Tsedong were already in control of the whole eastern part of continental China. On the western part Tibet in the south was still dreaming it could keep its former practically complete autonomy, while in the north, along the corridor Xining-Lanzhou, a rather large and combative muslim army led by general Ma Pufang was waiting to check the advance of a Chinese army led by the great general Lin Biao, the man who, with He Long, Peng Dehuai and Chu Teh, implemented in military terms the strategy devised by Mao Tsedong. The muslim army was soon wiped out and Ma Pufang escaped for a golden exile as a guest of his friend King Faruk of Egypt, taking with him 600.000 ounces of gold (perhaps some of it from the graves of Lou Lan) and a rather large number of young girls, presumibly attractive and not particularly expert in military techniques. Xinjang, where attempts had been made several times in the course of last century to gain independence, returned under the firm control of Beijing and was later subject to a policy of Han immigration, that is going to reduce the local Turkish population to a minority, as will also probably happen to Tibet. The way was then opened for the Chinese army to enter Tibet, via the eastern, warriors inhabited, Kham and Amdo regions.

During the few months when Ma Pufang army still hoped to stop Lin Biao, Leonard Clark, acting as a secret officer of the US army, operated behind the lines of the muslim army with the aim to ascertain whether it would be possible to continue resistence against the communists from the northern Tibetan territory. This meant in particular evaluating the food reserves available locally, quite poor in fact, since in practice that would have meant stealing the animals (horses, sheep, yaks) bred by the local tribes. Clark made a quite extensive recognition of northern Quinghai, particulalry of the Tsaidam Basin (Quaidam Pendi), rich of rivers and lakes, including two lakes, Gyaring Hu and Ngorin Hu, formed by the Yellow River at about 100 km from its multiple sources. This region was inhabited by a local Tibetan tribe called the Ngolok (also spelled as Gu-Lok, Go-Log, Mgo-Log). Among the interesting features of these people:

• they still practiced the ancient Tibetan pre Buddhist religion, named Bon-Po. Clark once visited the tent of a chieftains and noticed that 108 lamps were burning in front of a divinity statue; see Patten and Spedicato (2000) for a proposed explanation of the "sacrality" of 108, and of 54, 27, 216..., in ancient religions throughout the world
• they were excellent horsemen and superb fighters; neighbours considered them as bandits
• they were very diffident, in view also of continued incursions into their territory by both Mongol and Turkish tribes.

The territory of the Ngolok included a huge mountain range that had never been explored before by westerners and that some geographers had claimed might include the highest mountain in the world. The height of this mountain range is not given in the quoted 1974 Times Atlas, but is given at 6282 meters in the 1992 Revised 6th Edition of the National Geographic Atlas, this figure most probably having been taken from the 1989 Atlas of the People’s Republic of China (APRC), Foreign Languages Press, Beijing. The whole mountain range was sacred to the Ngolok and entrance to it was strictly prohibited to foreigners. The range is over 300 km long and, except for the northern part, is surrounded by the Yellow River that defines its border for over 800 km. As noted before, this huge sacred mountain has escaped attention of apparently all people who have studied sacred mountains. The name of the mountain is so given in the following atlases:

• ANYE MAQEN SHAN, in the quoted APRC Atlas and in the quoted 1992 National Geographic Atlas
• AMNE MACHIN Range and ANI MACHING Shan, in the quoted 1974 Times Atlas
• AMNIE MACHIN, in the Grande Atlante Geografico, M. Beretta and L. Visintin editors, Istituto Geografico De Agostini, 1927
• AMNIA MACHER, in the book Dach der Erde, Berlin, 1938, quoted by Messner (1999).
• in Richardson (1998) the mountain is spelled as A-MYES RMA-CHEN and the local name of the Yellow River is spelled as RMACHU

The Yellow rivers, which embraces most of the range, has also a special local name, written as follows:

• MACHU, in The Times Atlas, 1895 (notice that no local name is given in the otherwise rich in information 1974 edition)
• MAQU (read as above), in the APRC Atlas.

From the APRC Atlas we also notice a small river named MEQU entering MAQU in a marshy area, and that the administrative capital town of the district is named MAQEN (previously DAWU). Now one can linguistically accept the equivalence between MAQU=MACHU with the Gilgamesh epic word MASHU, especially since these wordings do not completely characterize the exact local prononciations, which moreover certainly has local variations and changes in time. The term ANI, ANYE (ANY-E ?, E turkish-like genitive suffix?) is intriguingly suggestive of the Sumerian name of the god ANU, the head of the Sumerian pantheon. Changes from I to U are indeed linguistically well documented, e.g. in the well known iotization underwent by modern versus classical Greek and in some transitions from Arabic to Farsi in personal names (e.g. ADHUB becomes ADHIB, HAMUD becomes HAMID....Adhib and Hamid are two of my iranian collaborators, Adhub and Hamud were friends of Laurence of Arabia...). Hence on linguistical grounds the sacred mountain of the Ngolok can be equated with the sacred Sumerian Mashu, and this relation is reinforced by the additional reference to ANI=ANU. Thus we conclude that the sacred mountain of the Ngolok fits the basic requirements for an identification of Mashu (a sacred place; a place in the east; a place named Mashu) and we propose, using also Temple’s claim, the following translation of the name/names of the sacred mountain

 

ANYE MAQUEN = ANU MASHU

= the place of god Anu, where the Sun rises.

 

Having thus identified the final destination of Gilgamesh second trip, let us make an educated guess on his route from the Zungarian Gates.

 

(a) In a general east-east-south direction, for about 3000 km, pointing to the "great sea" in the Hittite text translation by Friedrichs, that we can now identify with a real great sea, namely the Pacific Ocean

 

(b) Skirting the northern side of the Tien Shan for about 500 km. This part of Zungaria has several oasis and rivers and at Gilgamesh time was probably even more rich in water than now. The recently completed railway of Xinjang passes here allowing a shorter way between Moscow and Beijing. Notice that the name Zungaria comes from the Mongolian JA’UN-GHAR and corresponds to the Chinese PE-LU, which is Northern Road. Zungaria produces rice, many fruits and till the beginning of last century even tigers were living there.

 

(c) Crossing into the Turfan depression by way of an easy pass where the city of Urumchi is now located. The Chinese name of Urumchi is TIWA or TI-HOUAS (see Atlas Classique de Géographie, Monin, Paris, 1839-1840). Allowing by metathesis the change TI in IT and noting that W = HOUA is a liquid vowel, essentially a consonant, we can claim the virtual identity of TIWA with ITLA, thereby retrieving the information in the Hittite text according to Friedrichs. Notice moreover that the present name Urumchi may be considered equivalent via the allowed transition fron R to L to ULUMCHI, the ULUM being intriguingly similar to the name of the god ULLUM to which the place was sacred, according to the Hittite text.

 

(d) Reaching Tun Huang, about 1000 km to the south-east, by way of the great oasis of Hami (also called Kumul or Khamil), which produces the best melons in the world, and by way of Anxi (An Hsi). Notice that Dun Huang (Tun Huang) is an historically very important town, famed for the One Thousand Buddhas, but more importantly for the invaluable cache of some 60.000 scrolls by chance found hidden behind a wall in a monastery around 1920, many of them about 2000 years old, some of them written in Tocarian. It has been fortunate that most of these scrolls were taken out of China to western collections. Thus they probably avoided the fate of ending in flames that affected the great libraries of the Tibetan monasteries, 99% of which were utterly destroyed during the Great Cultural Revolution (Tucci estimated that at least 200.000 different manuscripts of very great antiquity were contained in the Tibetan libraries. Notice that less than 1000 books have come to us from the Greek-Roman world, less than 1% of the important books! The destruction of the Tibetan libraries will certainly be considered by far the greatest crime committed during the Great Cultural Revolution, the loss of perhaps 20 million people in mainland China having been more than overcame in demographic terms by a population increase of two hundred millions, due to the collapse of the one child policy in that period).

 

(e) From Dun Huang there are several ways into the Tsaidam Basin and then to Any-e-Machen, a distance of about 1000 km. It is a region of elevation between 2000 and 3000 meters, rich of marshes, lakes, rivers, game and minerals. Lakes should be noted (or so were at the time Clark saw them) for the incredible transparency of their waters, allowing to see their bottom at great depths, and for the beauty of big richly coloured fish, never taken or eaten by the local population (Clark could easily catch them with his hands; curiously the same full respect of fish life, not a feature of the Chinese who came after Lin Biao, was practiced by several tribes on the Atlantic seaboard of Canada when Europeans first arrived there; possibly these American tribes, who migrated not several millennia before from northern Asia, had ancient ties with northern Tibetan tribes). This region, as is true for most of Tibet, is also full of aromatic medicinal plants, the so called Chinese herbal medicine having originated in the plateau of Tibet (the Tibetan School of Medicine was one of the very few Tibetan institutions to escape whole destruction during the Great Cultural Revolution). The area is also rich in rare minerals, including uranium ore. Perhaps these special features may explain certain "esoteric" details characterizing the region where Gilgamesh met Utanapishtim.

From the above observations, we suggest that the term "mouth" should be read as "source", i.e. the place where the river "drinks, gets" its waters. Moreover an inspection of the Qinghai map in APRC shows that the Yellow River, locally now and possibly already at Gilgamesh times called MAQU/MASHU, has several sources, none of which can really be pinpointed as the longest one, no less than 9 of them being located west of the village of Horgorgoinba. This interesting geographical feature may explain the plural "rivers". Additionally we may also note that, in a stretch of land no more than 500 km long south-west of the Yellow River in the Any-e-Machen region, several huge rivers are found, that wash almost half of Asia, namely the Yang Tze Kiang, the Mekong and the Brahmaputra. This region was historically eastern Tibet, but in the course of the last 150 years most of it has been added to the Chinese provinces of Yunnan, Szichuan and Quinghai. Present Tibet now covers less than half of what it was when the Mongols, as Chinese Yuan emperors, for the first time added it to the Chinese (more precisely then the Mongolian) empire. We will claim in a next paper that Tibet was originally even larger, arguing for the identity TIBET=TILMUN.
 
 
 
 

9. Final remarks
 
 

The above paper is based upon a quite limited amount of documentation. We believe that more research and use of documents from Central Asia will shed more light and, we believe, will give further confirmation of the thesis defended here. In the course of this research it suddenly dawned to this author that the proposed itinerary of Gilgamesh is associated with an apparently never before proposed identification of Eden, that appears to be a perfect fit with the biblical data, while several discrepancies are easily noticed in both the Salibi (1988) and Rohl (1998) proposals. Moreover our Eden identification leads naturally to identifying the route taken by Adam when he left Eden, Cain land of Nod and what is the special sign left to his descendents, Aratta, Dilmun and the original place of the Sumerians (it will be clear that they arrived in Middle East only after the Flood). Salibi and Rohl’s identifications are however valuable because they relate to two different places where the ancestors of the Hebrews moved in the course of their long peregrinations, when, reaching a new land, they renamed places according more or less to the geographical configuration in their previous territory, exactly as the Danai/Achaioi did when they came to the Mediterranean from their original Baltic lands, as Vinci (1998) has so convincingly claimed. These new identifications will be presented in a forthcoming paper, Spedicato (2000).
 
 
 
 

Acknowledgements - This paper would never have been written without the following contributions:

• the corpus of all Gilgamesh texts provided by Pettinato and several comments by him
• important comments by Pettinato’s collaborator D’ Agostino
• the Hittite text version of Friedrichs used by Sitchin (our itineraries are quite different from those proposed by Sitchin)
• the relation of LBN with "milk, dairy products" and the rendering of PRT as PAROT is due to dr. Lia Mangolini
• the information on the Hunza valley has come via dr. A. Agriesti, who, having studied some 150 languages, also helped much in the analysis of ethymology of some words
• the information on Any-e-Machen would never have been found without the suggestion of my aunt A. Risso and without my late uncle Umberto Risso unquenchable thirst for buying and reading books (till a stroke destroyed his brain area controlling reading)
• the information on the solfatara near Urumchi comes from Mariuccia Risso’s inspection of the Marmocchi’s four volumes, bought years ago by my uncle Umberto Risso.

Appendix 1: on some numbers in the epic
 
 

Numbers are given in the text in term of "talents". The Sumerian talent had a huge value, corresponding to 1800 kilos. This would make the weight of Gilgamesh and Enkidu’s axes 5.4 tons, which is an unrealistic value. We think that the talent referred to in the Yale paleobabylonian tablet, circa 1800-1600 BC according to standard chronology, but circa 1670-1370 BC according to Rohl (1997), must already be taken as the value corresponding to the Homeric and classical talent value, about 27 kilos. We base this claim on the fact that first it leads to load that, while still huge, will be shown to be acceptable in the context of unusually strong men; secondly because the recent revolutionary work of Vinci (1998), by dating the Homeric world to the full of the bronze age before 1600 BC (and locating it around the Baltic and the North Sea), implies the antiquity of the talent, that may have substituted at the beginning of the second millennium BC the talent in Mesopotamia, after Indoeuropeans arrived to Iran and the Caucasus (at least one indoeuropean tribe reached even southern Arabia, the Shihu, who live on the mountains of Sharjia, see Bibby (1970)). Let us start be recalling that Gilgamesh and Enkidu were tall and strong men, Enkidu perhaps the strongest, since he had beaten Gilgamesh in the fight that made the walls of the Uruk houses shake. While the figures for Gilgamesh given in the Hittite version ("he was taller than 11 "arus", his chest was 9 spans wide, his phallus was 3 ? ") seem to be exaggerated (but perhaps again here the unit of measure was no more the ancient original Sumerian measure) and would have led to some practical problems in his implementing of the "primae noctis ius", it does not appear impossible that his stature would have been well over two meters, such sizes being not a feature only of our age. This would correspond to a body weight of possibly over 150 kilos. The equipment of Gilgamesh and Enkidu included 3 axes (about 80 kilos assuming our late value for the talent) and more than 10 talents (over 250 kilos) of weapons. This would give a total load of over 300 kilos, about twice the estimated weight of their body. Now that man can make long hours of walk or of work under loads that are over his body weight is quite a common fact, as we show again by a few examples.

• My father in law, Antonio Campanile, in his prime was a short man about 150 cm tall and 45 kilos weight. He worked as a specialist mason. He used to carry on his shoulder blocks of "tufo" stone weighting 90 kilos over ladders reaching the top of church towers, this feat several times a day.
• At the end of the 19th century the carriers in the port of Gallipoli, Puglia, were famous for their strength, carrying normally 150 kilos, many of them even 200 kilos. They were men generally of low stature and worked over 10 hours a day. See Le cento cittá d’ Italia. Supplemento mensile illustrato del SECOLO, 28-2-1901.
• In his book "Se questo è un uomo" (Einaudi, 1958) Primo Levi, a Jew who spent over one year in one of the Auschwitz lagers, writes that one of his jobs was carrying, with the help of a companion, a sack of cement, weight not specified (usually cement sacks are now of 30 kilos). They found the work very hard, being also underfed. In their team there was a very short man, a real dwarf, with a stout body full of bulging muscles (well visible when they took the common cold shower...) named Elias Lindzin, lager number 141565. He usually carried four sacks at a time, with no sign of fatigue, jumping the sacks from one hand to the other, a load almost certainly over twice his body weight.
• As stated above from Polybius, Roman soldiers could carry a load well over their body weight for 50 km a day.

Appendix 2: on the meaning of KA
 
 

It is now believed by many language specialists, in the aftermath of the seminal work done by professor Joseph Greenberg of Stanford University, that all human languages descend from a single original language, paralleling the recent discovery, by sophisticated genetic analysis (of mithocondrial DNA and of the Y gene), that all present humans descend from a single woman and a single father, who lived an estimated circa 200.000 years ago. The work of Greenberg and coworkers has led to group the existing and the known extinct languages in different levels of families and superfamilies, one of which, called the Afroasiatic family, includes camitic, semitic, indoeuropeans, turkish and other previously defined families. Here we claim that the syllabe KA should be related to an afroasiatic word vowel - K - vowel with the general meaning of people, clan on the basis of the following instances:

• the great anthropologist Luca Cavalli Sforza, of Stanford University, spent many years researching a tribe of Pigmees living in Cameron; as many other "primitive" people, these pigmees called themselves AKA, a word meaning simply "people"
• there are four main tribes in Ghana who speak a common language, whose name, AKAN, means "of the people"
• a very interesting "primitive" tribe of hunters, living on a sacred mountain at the border of Uganda, Sudan and Kenya, which was led to extinction when the British prohibited their ancestral way of life based on hunting, called themselves IK, presumibly meaning "people", albeit the meaning of this name is not given in Turnbull (1972), the anthropologist who studied them. This tribe had anthropometric features unrelated to those of the surrounding Bantu tribes and a language apparently close to ancient Egyptian
• the work IK means "clan" in several dialects of the Berbers and in Guanche
• the Khazars had two leaders, one, the Bek, involved in administrative matters, another, the Kagan, involved in religious matters. Now the acceptable equivalences KA-GAN = KA-HAN (a Hebrew name) = CO-HEN (a high priest in Levi’s tribe)= KA-HN (the king of Mongols) = CAC- ANUS (the latin name used by Paulus Diaconus with reference to the chiefs of the Avars, by him related to the Huns) seem all to have the same original meaning, that we interpret as AN = divine light, KA = of the people, in perfect correspondence with the actual role associated with these names
• as above, perhaps the original meaining of the term Inca is IN-CA=AN-CA, = "divine light of people"
• the Afghani are divided into differently named tribes, but share, or at least shared till about half of last century, the common name Aklai = AK-LAI, where the exact meaning of LAI is not clear to me (perhaps by metathesis it is related to AK-EL, i.e. "divine people", "people of the gods"); in a future paper we will argue that the land where Sargon II relocated most of the 10 tribes deported from Samaria was Afghanistan/Kashmir, hence explaining the proposed origin of the word Aklai and the presence of many clearly hebraic words in local topography and in the pashtun language
• one of the tribes living in Swat (a mountain province of Pakistan, whose name derives from sanscrit Suvasto, country of the beautiful buildings) is called locally Assaka, the Assakenoi of the Greeks, see Tucci (1978). Now ASSA (prascrit) = ASVA (sanscrit) = ASPA (old Persian) means "horse", implying, with our interpretation of the word KA, the expressive meaning people of the horses. It is known that the Chinese called the invading Mongols of Gengis Khan the People of the Horses. In Spedicato (1997) it has been argued that the real meaning of the word Hyksos, the fierce warriors that invaded Egypt at the end of the 13th dynasty, is also people of the horses, from HYK = AK and SOS = SUS (hebrew) = HORSE.

Appendix 3: on the cedars in the world
 
 

Cedars grow naturally on the vast expanse of land from the mountains of Morocco up to the Himalayas, an arc of over 10.000 km. Cedars are denominated as belonging to different species, but in fact are now considered to be all a same species, which has developed varieties. Here are some information on cedars, taken from Emciclopedia Treccani, 1953 edition.

• Cedrus Atlantica (Manetti, 1842): grows in Morocco and Algeria, between 1000 and 2000 meters
• Cedrus Brevifoglia (Hook, 1880): is found in Cyprus between the villages of Kykko and Irka, elevation about 1300 meters
• Cedrus Libanotica (Linneus, 1831): grows in southern Anatolia and Siria, including Lebanon. Maximum height about 40 meters, but branches can spread to 100 meters, making it cumbersome for timber production. The first Libanotica was brought to England and planted in Chelsea in 1683, was first planted in Italy at the Botanical Garden of Pisa in 1787
• Cedrus Deodara (Roxb, 1832; Laws, 1838, who called it Pinus Deodara): grows in the Hindukush, in Afghanistan and in Beluchistan, between 1100 and 4000 meters, optimal growth occurring between 2000 and 3000 meters. It has leaves longer than in the Libanotica, a straighter trunk and less massive branches (I had one such tree in my garden: it suffered due to the climate of the north Milano region and died after some 20 years of unhealthy life). Deodara’s timber is locally called the wood of gods. It is used in Asia to build temples and to produce religious statues, one reason for this privilege being certainly the fact that such a wood is extremely resistent to weathering (the zapote tree, whose wood is heavier than water and which also does not rotten in humid climates, was similarly used in Central America, but is not found in Asia). Notice that Tucci (1978) quotes the existence of supporting wooden beams (type of wood not specified, I would guess cedar) 30 meters long in the Mosque of Calam in the Swat, a Kashmir region. I am not aware of what is the maximum lengths of beams in Asian temples, in particular if there are any corresponding to the length of the cedar cut by Gilgamesh.

Appendix 4: Yetis in Africa?
 
 

In Chioffi (2000) a translation is given of the integral text of a voyage by Hanno, a Carthaginian general, who followed the coasts of Africa at least up to the region of the great Cameroon volcano, which was in full eruption. The voyage description is preserved in a 10th century manuscript and contains intriguing description of some creatures whose behaviour is strongly reminiscent of the yetis. Here are the relevant passages:

• VII:...Further away from the shore there are unhospitable Aethiopians who live in a region full of wild animals and closed by great mountains. They say that the river Lixos is born there and that in the mountains live troglodytes of strange aspect who, according to the Lixiti, can run faster than horses
• IX:...there began very high mountains full of wild creatures covered with skins of wild animals, who threw stones at us, making landing impossible
• XVIII:...there was an island full of wild creatures. Most were females with hairy bodies; our interpreters called them "gorillas" (?). We hunted for them, but we were unable to catch any male, since they were skillful in climbing over crevices and defended themselves by throwing stones. But we caught three females, who bited and hit those who were carrying them. So we killed them and brought their skins to Carthago.

References
 
 

M. Baillie, Exodus to Arthur. Catastrophic encounters with comets, Batsford, 1999

S.M. Barrett, Geronimo’s story of his life, Duffield, New York, 1906

G. Bibby, Looking for Dilmun, Collins, 1970

R. Bircher, Gli Hunza, un popolo che ignora le malattie, Editrice Fiorentina, 1980 M. Chioffi, Pantelleria, antico approdo dei Fenici, Preprint, 2000

N. Danziger, Danziger’s travels, Beyond Forbidden Frontiers, Flamingo, 1993

L. Grégoire, Geógraphie Générale, Garnier, 1876

S. Hedin, Il lago errante, Einaudi, 1943-XXI

T. Heyerdhal, The Tigris expedition, Allen & Unwin, 1980

F.C. Marmocchi, Geografia Universale, SEI, Torino, 1856

J. McCarry, High road to Hunza, National Geographic, 1985, 114-134

R. Messner, Yeti. Leggenda e veritá, Feltrinelli, 1999

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G. Pettinato, La saga di Gilgamesh, Rusconi, 1992

G. Pettinato, Semiramide, Rusconi, 1985

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H. Richardson, High Peaks, Pure Earth, Serindik Publications, London, 1998

D. Rohl, A test of time. The Bible from Myth to History, Century, 1995

D. Rohl, Legend, the genesis of civilization, Century, 1998

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T. Severin, The Sindbad Voyage, Hutchinson, 1982

Z. Sitchin, The stairway to heaven, Bear and Company, Santa Fe, 1980

E. Spedicato, Apollo objects and Atlantis, a catastrophical scenario for the end of the last glaciation, Report 85/3, University of Bergamo, 1985

E. Spedicato, Who were the Hyksos?, C&C Review 1, 55, 1997

E. Spedicato, Beyond Salibi and Rohl: unveiling the location of Eden, Nod, Aratta and Dilmun, where the Sun rises, to appear, 2000

C. Turnbull, The Mountain People, Simon and Schuster, 1972

I. Velikovsky, Ages in Chaos, Sidgwick and Jackson, 1953

I. Velikovsky, In the Beginning (Worlds in Collision vol. 2), www.velikovsky.collision (J. Sammer editor, Ruth and Shulamit Velikovsky Copyright), 1999

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Emilio Spedicato è nato a Milano nel 1945. Laureato in fisica e PhD in matematica computazionale alla Dalian University of Technology, Cina, è attualmente ordinario di ricerca operativa presso l’Università di Bergamo. Ha lavorato anche sette anni per il CISE e 5 anni per il CNR. Ha soggiornato per alcuni anni in USA (Stanford University), Inghilterra e Germania. Oltre a lavori relativi all’ottimizzazione nonlineare ed all’algebra lineare (fondatore con Abaffy e Broyden dei metodi ABS ora documentati in circa 400 lavori, nel cui ambito è stata data recentemente la migliore soluzione del decimo problema di Hilbert), ha interessi per la storia antica, l’astronomia e l’origine delle mitologie e delle religioni.