Legend has it that 5,000 years ago the gods created Gilgamesh, a being two thirds divine and one third human. That gave him the power of the former and the weaknesses of the latter. His story was told in 12 clay tablets and cuneiform writing that make up one of the oldest literary works. An incomplete story, however, whose gaps have been filled in by Charles Berberian in a comic written and drawn on another type of tablet, a digital tablet. The result is Los amantes de Shamhat, published by Ponent Mon with a translation from French by Fabián Rodríguez Piastri.
Although the trigger for the book was a visit by Charles Berberian to the Louvre museum, the origin must be sought a few decades earlier, when the author, originally from Iraq, visited the hanging gardens of Babylon with his family. His father warned him that it was one of the seven wonders of the world, but little Charles failed to appreciate the beauty of the visit. However, much later, now an adult and one of the most respected cartoonists in France -Angouleme Grand Prix along with his colleague Dupuy-, he changed his mind after a visit to the Parisian museum.
There he felt a strong emotion before a sculpture 50 centimeters high, the statue of Ebih-Il immortalized at the time of making an offering to Ishtar, the Babylonian goddess of love and war. The piece is made of translucent alabaster and stands out for its powerful hazelnut-shaped lapis lazuli blue eyes. Berberian was captivated by the mystery of that creature with its penetrating gaze and intriguing smile, and by the sweetness of its forms, to the point of wanting to revive it as a cartoon character and turn it into the scribe and narrator of the epic of Gilgamesh, king of Uruk. and hero of Mesopotamia, an area located in present-day Iraq.
The first pages of The Lovers of Shamhat show a bored and capricious Gilgamesh, tyrannical with his subjects. He lives in his palace surrounded by concubines but has a soft spot for the beautiful and courageous Shamhat. Gilgamesh asks Shamhat to find him someone capable of challenging him. Shamhat introduces him to Enkidu and Gilgamesh is immediately seduced by him, a wild creature whose life contrasts with the way of life of those who live in the city. From the initial fight they will move on to a very close friendship that Shamhat will want to break definitively.
Berberian combines the mythological story with freely adapted passages that allow him to introduce some humorous notes. Although above all, the comic stands out for the calm beauty of the drawing, which breathes the same sobriety in the lines of the Ebih-Il statue and is executed with freedom and sensuality. The earthy beige color of these pages evokes the aridity of Mesopotamia and especially the color of the stone and clay figures of Sumerian art, combined with a blue like that of the scribe's eyes. Only at very specific moments do bursts of red or green colors appear.
The figures, especially that of Shamhat, maintain the sweet aesthetic and chic elegance that we discovered years ago in the pages of the unforgettable Monsieur Jean series and combine it with the robustness of the forms, the restrained expressiveness and the stylized lines typical of art. mesopotamian. In this search for a synthesis between the comic strip and Mesopotamian art, Berberian knows how to extract a beautiful graphic result of Picasian modernity, as in the scene of the bull.
The comic, edited in collaboration with the Louvre museum, captures sexuality with the same freedom and naturalness that the cultures of the Middle East did, where sex is linked to the achievement of happiness and that explains the abundant artistic representations with sexual scenes in Babylonian art or in the Gilgamesh epic itself. Sometimes echoes of Satyricon's Fellini resonate in these pages.
Berberian stops to draw magnificent landscape vignettes, some of which are very close to abstraction. With them he imagines life in Mesopotamia and at the same time recalls the Iraq that the author knew during his childhood, a landscape to which he has not returned and does not intend to return, as he points out in the epilogue. Somehow, the author seems to tell us, the landscape of his childhood is as distant and elusive as the landscape of the disappeared and mythical Mesopotamia.
