Anu’s mediation of Ishtar’s wrath in this council implies three possible
degrees of apocalypse, presented in descending order. Ishtar’s initial threat
to unleash the dead so that they eat the living would probably result in the
destruction of all or most human life, a full-scale apocalypse:
If you don’t give me the Bull of Heaven . . .
I shall set my face toward the infernal regions,
I shall raise up the dead and they will eat the living,
I shall make the dead outnumber the living!
Gilgamesh VI.iii9
Full-scale apocalypse is also extant in Noah’s flood (itself modeled on
the earlier Mesopotamian myth of Utnapishtim/Ziusudra), and Hesiod’s
earlier races (of Gold, Silver, and the first Bronze race).
Anu’s concern that the Bull would cause seven years of famine in Uruk,
which would perhaps destroy the population, represents a middle degree
of apocalypse, the destruction of an entire city,
On no account should you request the Bull of Heaven from me!
There would be seven years of chaff in the land of Uruk.
Gilgamesh VI.iii
This middle degree, the destruction of a whole city (often leaving a lone
survivor, “the one just man,” discussed in Chapter 13), is the most common
degree of apocalypse in ancient myth, manifest not only here in Anu’s
concern for Uruk, but in the myth of Troy, in the myth of Sodom and
Gomorrah, in Ovid’s Baucis and Philemon (Metamorphoses 8), in Poseidon’s
initial wish to punish the entire city of the Phaiakians (Od. 13.152), and
in many others (cf. Works and Days 240–1; discussion at Louden 2006:
227–9).
Anu here mediates Ishtar’s wrath, persuading her to adopt the lowest of
the three levels of apocalyptic destruction. Her subsequent annihilation of
several hundred people instead of the majority of the race, or the whole
city, is a significantly lower degree of destruction, which I call a contained
apocalypse.