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244 Lugalbanda, he of beloved seed, stretched his hand out [and said]: "Like divine Shara am I, the beloved son of Inanna." But the Guardian of the sacred place turned Lugalbanda down with an oracle: indeed, he would reach far lands and make both himself and Erech famous, but he would do so on foot. Another long epic tale, originally called by scholars "Lugalban- da and Enmerkar" and more recently The Lugalbanda Epic, affirms Lugalbanda's semi-divine descent but does not identify his father; we can assume, however, from the circumstances and subsequent events, that the father was Enmerkar; confirming Enmerkar as the first one in a long list of rulers who, under the guise of a symbolic marriage or without it, were invited by Inanna to share her bed. This "invitation" by Inanna is featured in the well-known Epic of Gilgamesh. The fifth ruler of Erech, Gilgamesh sought to escape the mortals' destiny to die because, as a son of the goddess Ninsun and the high priest of the Kullab, "two thirds of him were god." In his search for immortality (examined at length in The Stairway to Heaven), he first journeyed to the "Landing Place" in the Cedar Mountain—the olden landing platform in the mountains of Leba- non (to which, apparently, Lugalbanda had also gone). Battling the mechanical monster that guarded the restricted area's perimeter, Gilgamesh and his companion were almost annihilated were it not for Utu's help. Exhausted from the battle, Gilgamesh took off his drenched clothes so that he might wash and rest. It was then that Inanna/Ishtar. who watched the struggle from the skies, was seized with a craving for Gilgamesh: He washed his grimy hair, polished his weapons; The braid of his hair he shook out against his back. He cast off his soiled things, put on his clean ones. Wrapped a fringed cloak about, fastened with a sash. When Gilgamesh put on his tiara, Glorious Ishtar raised an eye at the beauty of Gilgamesh. "Come, Gilgamesh. be thou my lover!" [she said] "Do grant me of thy fruitfulness; thou shalt be a husband, I shall be a wife." She reinforced her invitation with promises of a glorious (though not everlasting) life if Gilgamesh would accede to her otter. But Gil- THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN