Why is it notable that the "monkey tablet" has monkeys?

Question

My literature professor has been very insistent on the importance of having an updated translation which incorporates recently-discovered (well, recent on the scale of Gilgamesh discoveries) sections of Tablet V. I was interested in what exactly the new stuff was and found an article excitedly covering the discovery. This bit jumped out to me:

• Gilgamesh and Enkidu saw ‘monkeys’ as part of the exotic and noisy fauna of the Cedar Forest; this was not mentioned in other versions of the Epic.

Curious as to why "monkeys" were important enough to merit their own bullet point, I plugged "gilgamesh monkey" into a search engine and stumbled on an old Literature SE question which calls the recent discovery the "monkey tablet". Other articles covering the new tablet (1, 2, etc.) invariably also mention the monkeys, though not with as much emphasis.

Is there any particular reason that people care about the revelation of monkeys in Humbaba's forest?

Answer 1

This answer may be incorrect, as per this comment on Mythology Stack Exchange.

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I think that the question may be over-interpreting the linked article by Osama S. M. Amin. The author is excited by the discovery, but that’s natural: if the tablet is genuine, it provides twenty new lines from a four-thousand-year-old epic, filling a gap in the text of tablet V. Whatever the content of the new lines, even if it just contained material that was similar to the existing text, the find would be exciting!

But as Amin points out in the article, the new lines contain material (the description of the Cedar Forest and its wildlife) that is unique in the Babylonian corpus.

The most interesting addition to knowledge provided by the new source is the continuation of the description of the Cedar Forest, one of the very few episodes in Babylonian narrative poetry when attention is paid to landscape. The cedars drip their aromatic sap in cascades (ll. 12–16), a trope that gains power from cedar incense’s position in Babylonia as a rare luxury imported from afar. The abundance of exotic and costly materials in fabulous lands is a common literary motif. Perhaps more surprising is the revelation that the Cedar Forest was, in the Babylonian literary imagination, a dense jungle inhabited by exotic and noisy fauna (17–26). The chatter of monkeys, chorus of cicada, and squawking of many kinds of birds formed a symphony (or cacophony) that daily entertained the forest’s guardian, Ḫumbaba. The passage gives a context for the simile “like musicians” that occurs in very broken context in the Hittite version’s description of Gilgameš and Enkidu’s arrival at the Cedar Forest. Ḫumbaba’s jungle orchestra evokes those images found in ancient Near Eastern art, of animals playing musical instruments. Ḫumbaba emerges not as a barbarian ogre and but as a foreign ruler entertained with music at court in the manner of Babylonian kings, but music of a more exotic kind, played by a band of equally exotic musicians.

_{F. N. H. Al-Rawi & A. R. George (2014). ‘Back to the Cedar Forest: the Beginning and End of Tablet V of the Standard Babylonian Epic of Gilgameš’. Journal of Cuneiform Studies 66, p. 74.}

These are the lines referred to (ll. 12–26):

For one league on all sides cedars [sent forth] saplings,
    cypresses […] for two-thirds of a league.
The cedar was scabbed with lumps (of resin) [for] sixty (cubits’) height,
    resin [oozed] forth, drizzling down like rain,
[flowing freely(?)] for ravines to bear away.
    [Through] all the forest a bird began to sing:
[…] were answering one another, a constant din was the noise,
    [A solitary(?)] tree-cricket set off a noisy chorus,
[…] were singing a song, making the … pipe loud.
    A wood pigeon was moaning, a turtle dove calling in answer.
[At the call of] the stork, the forest exults,
    [at the cry of] the francolin, the forest exults in plenty.
[Monkey mothers] sing aloud, a youngster monkey shrieks:
    [like a band(?)] of musicians and drummers(?),
    daily they bash out a rhythm in the presence of Ḫumbaba.

_{Al-Rawi & George, p. 77.}

The presence of monkeys in the Cedar Forest is unexpected, because these cedars have often been assumed to represent the cedars of Lebanon, Syria and Asia Minor. However, monkeys are not native to these forests, so this gives weight to theories that this part of the story was set among the cedars of the western Himalayas instead.

Answer 2

Apparently, the significance is less the monkeys and more the forest god that they kill.

The previously available text made it clear that [Gilgamesh] and Enkidu knew, even before they killed Humbaba, that what they were doing would anger the cosmic forces that governed the world, chiefly the god Enlil. Their reaction after the event is now tinged with a hint of guilty conscience, when Enkidu remarks ruefully that … "we have reduced the forest [to] a wasteland."

More details on the contents of the tablet are found here.