Shamhat (; also called Shamkat in the old Babylonian version of Gilgamesh") is a character who appears in Tablets I and II of the Epic of Gilgamesh and is mentioned in Tablet VII. She is often characterized as a sacred prostitute, though this identification has been contested, and she plays a significant role in bringing the wild man Enkidu into contact with civilization.
Shamhat (; also called Shamkat in the old Babylonian version of Gilgamesh") is a character who appears in Tablets I and II of the Epic of Gilgamesh and is mentioned in Tablet VII. She is often characterized as a sacred prostitute, though this identification has been contested, and she plays a significant role in bringing the wild man Enkidu into contact with civilization.
== In the epic == Shamhat plays the integral role in Tablet I, of taming the wild man Enkidu, who was created by the gods as the rival to the mighty Gilgamesh. Shamhat was a sacred temple prostitute or harimtu. She is used by the Hunter to use her attractiveness to tempt Enkidu from the wild, and his 'wildness', civilizing him through continued sacred love-making. Brought to a water source where Enkidu had been spotted, she exposes herself to Enkidu. He enjoys Shamhat for "six days and seven nights" (a fragment found in 2015 and read in 2018 appears to indicate that they had two weeks of sexual intercourse, with a break spent in discussion about Enkidu's future life in Uruk).
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).