The Erin Forest

Old European Culture asks about the Erin Forest in the Gilgamesh Epic. He thinks it refers to a time when tigers roamed the deep forests, and the people lived near them.

As an aside Enkidu seems to me like a shaman who made up his own face like a tiger. The invention of jungle camouflage...

"Sumer" at the time it was writing stuff down was (to use OEC's term) the lower-Mesopotamia. Over the Mesolithic before any literacy, that land was a noisome marshland: uninhabitable. It took Chalcolithic technology to irrigate this. Also - as OEC points out - erosion in the hills around it, so the people (and tigers) could not live there.

OEC points to Mount Ararat, the Urartu Mountain. The Sumerians didn't call it that of course. Still, of interest that a serious version of the Semitic flood-myth (a prerequisite for the Gilgamesh epic) remembered that northern site, alongside the coracles of Iraqian marshland. Did the Bible here take an Assyrian topos?

The myth-spinners, according to OEC, located the Erin Forest in the greater Armenia in the 5000s BC, and then shifted to the Zagros and/or Lebanon as the old forests retreated and as the people found new forests.

If Bilgamesh was the Sumerian arch-myth, that language looks like an import from the north alongside Hurrian and other Caucasian languages. Probably not Elamite, that looks too southerly. Semitic looks like the indigenous language-family of what's now Syria and Arabia. If Sumerian is an intruder, this would explain how come Sumerian is isolated and, for all its later prestige, no match for the Semites in the Mesopotamia.