over his head (even if it is not explicitly said in the text). The passage in the Old Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh has to be interpreted as representing belt wrestling: the victorious wrestler bent one knee on the ground and lifted his adversary. Even if the hero was wrestling with a hull, that animal was wearing a belt (as did the hero) that the wrestler grasped (see Gordon 1939: 5). On some seals we see the victorious hero with a bent knee, holding a lion over his head. Both these examples indicate that the Mesopotamians practiced belt wrestling. From roughly the same period is a fragment of a stela on which we find the oldest representation of wrestlers (Fig. where each wrestler is gripping the girdle of the other (Fig. I refer the reader to a well-known statuette from Khafaji dating to about 2600 B.C.E. The “heroes” depicted on Near Eastern seals frequently wear girdles, even when they are otherwise unclad. The last two lines of this passage describe the position of the victorious wrestler who has succeeded in lifting his opponent from the ground, holding him by his girdle over his head while bending his own knee. 1700 B.C.E., the original is housed in The University Museum): This episode is preserved in the Old Babylonian version of the Epic of Gilgamesh (ca. When he approached the place where this wedding was to be performed, Enkidu, who had been sent into Uruk to compete with Gilgamesh, stood in the street to bar the way. Gilgamesh, the king of Uruk (modern Warka in southern Iraq), was on his way to the place where a couch had been prepared for the “sacred marriage” between him and the goddess Ishhara. The earliest representaiton of wrestlers occurs on a stela (detial shown here) from Badra, Iraq, now in the Iraq Museum. Clay tablet on which is written in Sumerian the Hymn to King Shulgi of Ur ca 1800 B.C.E. Map of Mesopotamia and surrounding regions. Statuette from Khafaji, Iraq, showing two wrestlers grasping easch other’s girdles ca 2600 B.C.E.
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