The Lady of the Wild Cows finished her prayer, and, wise and full of knowing, descended the carven stair and spoke to Enkidu, “Dear child, you were born of another womb, but I now accept you as my son.”

She hung a jewel-crusted amulet from Enkidu’s neck.

The Great Lady continued, “As a priestess adopts an abandoned child, I take Enkidu as my own, as my son, a brother for Gilgamesh. May he guide him to the Forest and bring him back.”

Enkidu, listening, wept, tears flooding his eyes.

They took their weapons: the broad heavy axes, the long sharp knives, the arrows cases, the great horned bows.

The elders made way.

The young men cheered.

The reverence for the weapons is more than an ode to power, but a remembrance of the joint nature of Uruk, a land of farmers and trappers, ruled by herders. This is a time before swords, of an ethos that gave rise to the cult of the sword. The weapon of the common man was the knife, that of the common warrior the spear. Axes were the weapons of the leadership who rode in war carts so as not to arrive for battle tired. There knives were the longest, strongest and sharpest that could be fashioned.

Most important was the bow, which was the favorite weapon of the nomad, but was best made by the bowyers of the settlements where time and care could be devoted to its construction. In later times, in the age just preceding the version of Gilgamesh that was inscribed at Babylon, the composite bow had been developed through this symbiosis of farmer and herder, using the raw materials of horn and sinew provided by the nomad’s herds, and the facilities, time, and resources [such as water, fuel and treating agents] of the settled craftsman, to develop a weapon that was unsurpassed by firearms until the Modern Age.