Its Sumerian name, GU.AN.NA, is written with the sign for bull, the sign for heaven, and a genitive — "the bull of the sky". The same three signs are the Babylonian name of a constellation, the one Greek astronomy inherited as Taurus. So the creature Uruk fights in the sixth tablet of the epic is not merely bull-like or heavenly in some poetic sense: it is a star group, brought down out of the sky and let loose in a river valley. Under the fuller form Gugalanna, "great bull of heaven", it appears in the Descent of Inanna as the dead husband whose funeral rites Inanna claims to be attending — which makes it, remarkably, Ereshkigal's consort as well as her sister's weapon.
The demand
The sequence in Gilgamesh Tablet VI is a chain of insults with consequences. Ishtar, watching the king wash and dress after the cedar expedition, proposes marriage and offers him a chariot of lapis and gold, kings kneeling, goats bearing triplets. He refuses, and does not simply refuse — he recites her previous partners and what became of each: Dumuzid, given over to annual weeping; the allallu bird, whose wing she broke; the lion, for whom she dug pits; the horse, for whom she decreed the whip and spur; the shepherd, turned into a wolf and driven off by his own dogs; and Ishullanu her father's gardener, who declined her and was turned into a frog or a mole depending on the manuscript. It is a very long speech and there is no version of it that is not deliberately humiliating.
She goes up to Anu in tears and demands the Bull. His objection is agricultural: if it comes down there will be seven years of empty husks, so has she stored seven years of grain and seven years of fodder? She says she has, and adds the threat she also uses at the underworld gate — smash the door, raise the dead, let them eat the living until they outnumber them. He hands it over.
What it does to the city
The Bull is a drought with hooves. Where it snorts, a pit opens and swallows a hundred men, then two hundred, then three hundred; it drinks the Euphrates down in gulps and lowers the river; the marshes dry.
The kill is a two-man operation described with unusual mechanical clarity. Enkidu circles behind and seizes it by the tail — the standard bull-wrestling grip in Mesopotamian art — and holds it while Gilgamesh drives the blade in between the nape and the base of the horns. They cut out the heart and offer it to Utu/Shamash.
Then Enkidu makes his mistake. Ishtar goes up on the city wall and curses them, and he tears off the Bull's haunch, hurls it at her, and shouts that if he could catch her he would do the same to her and drape her in its guts. She and the temple women hold a formal mourning over the hindquarter — the image is grotesque and clearly meant to be — while Gilgamesh has the horns, described as vast and inlaid with lapis, made into an oil vessel dedicated to his father Lugalbanda, and hangs them in his bedroom.
The gods' assembly meets. Two divine servants have now been killed, and someone has to answer for it.
Two poems, two bulls
The Sumerian Gilgamesh and the Bull of Heaven survives in fragments and is not the same story. There the goddess's demand comes after Gilgamesh refuses to sit in judgement in her temple, the negotiation with An runs differently, and there is no wounded courtship speech and no death sentence afterwards. The famous list of her discarded lovers is an Akkadian addition. Once again the version people know is a literary reworking, and the Gilgamesh page sets out how that assembly worked.
A constellation that predates the story
Taurus is one of the oldest attested constellations anywhere, listed in the Babylonian star compendium MUL.APIN and inherited by Greek astronomy along with much of the surrounding sky. Its role in the calendar was concrete: in the third and second millennia BCE the sun's position among the stars at the spring equinox fell in Taurus, so the Bull marked the beginning of the agricultural year. A myth in which the Bull of Heaven is brought down and its arrival means seven barren years is operating in the same conceptual space as a farming calendar keyed to when that constellation is visible — which is one reason the zodiac's Mesopotamian ancestry is more than an antiquarian footnote. The whole descent of the twelve signs from Babylonian star lists is traced in the myths behind the zodiac.
What people ask about the Bull
Is the seven years of famine the same motif as in Genesis?
Seven-year famine cycles are a shared regional convention rather than a borrowing. They appear in the Joseph narrative, in the Ugaritic Aqhat and Baal texts, in an Egyptian stela about a seven-year drought under Djoser, and here. Seven is the standard round number of the ancient Near East for a complete period, and multi-year drought was a real recurring danger across the whole region. The parallel is genuine and the direction of influence is not recoverable in any particular case.
Does this scene lie behind the Mithraic bull-slaying?
It is proposed and it is not established. Roman Mithraism's central image — a god killing a bull, with a scorpion, a dog, a snake and a raven attending, and the whole scene widely read as a star map — appears more than two thousand years after Tablet VI and in a religion whose transmission history is genuinely obscure. Some scholars have connected the tauroctony to Near Eastern astral traditions in general terms; nobody has produced a chain of evidence linking it to this episode specifically. Bull-killing is also independently attested as a ritual and artistic motif across the Mediterranean and Anatolia, which makes any single-origin claim hard to sustain.
Why does Enkidu's insult matter more than the killing?
Because it is a category error rather than a crime of force. Killing a divine servant is a serious business and the gods debate it, but throwing part of the carcass at a goddess in front of her own city is a public desecration of her person, and Enkidu compounds it by announcing what he would do to her body. In a religion where the god is genuinely present in the statue and the offering is a real meal, treating a goddess as meat to be thrown is not a taunt but a violation. The dream that follows, in which he sees himself dragged to the house of dust, begins immediately.