The Epic of Gilgamesh

Summary

The Epic of Gilgamesh is the great poem of ancient Mesopotamia, known in its fullest form from the standard Babylonian version on clay tablets, many of them from the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal at Nineveh. The library holds no text of it: the public-domain English versions, by Stephen Langdon (1917), Morris Jastrow and Albert T. Clay (1920) and R. Campbell Thompson (1928), are fragmentary scholarly editions of a poem still being recovered, so this record describes the epic without quoting it. Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, two-thirds god and one-third man, oppresses his city with his restless strength, and the people cry to the gods. The goddess Aruru forms Enkidu from clay in the wilderness, where he runs with the gazelles until a trapper brings the woman Shamhat to him; after a week with her the animals flee him, and she leads him to the shepherds' camp, where he learns to eat bread and drink beer. Enkidu challenges Gilgamesh, they wrestle, and they become friends. Together they journey to the Cedar Forest and kill its guardian Humbaba, despite his pleas. Back in Uruk, Gilgamesh rejects the goddess Ishtar's offer of marriage by listing the fates of her former lovers; she sends the Bull of Heaven against the city, and the friends kill it. The gods decree that Enkidu must die. He falls ill, curses and then blesses Shamhat, dreams of the house of dust, and dies after twelve days. Gilgamesh mourns him for seven days and nights and will not give him up to burial until decay begins. Terrified of death, Gilgamesh wanders to find Utnapishtim, the one man granted eternal life. He passes the scorpion-people at the mountains of Mashu, walks through the darkness of the sun's road, meets the ale-wife Siduri by the sea, and crosses the waters of death with the boatman Urshanabi. On Tablet XI Utnapishtim tells how the god Ea warned him of the flood the gods had decreed, how he built a great boat, rode out the storm, landed on Mount Nimush and sent out a dove, a swallow and a raven. Utnapishtim challenges Gilgamesh to stay awake for a week, and he fails at once. Told of a plant on the sea-bed that renews youth, Gilgamesh dives for it, but a snake steals it while he bathes. He returns to Uruk and shows Urshanabi the city's walls, the lasting work of a mortal king. A twelfth tablet, a translation of a separate Sumerian poem, tells of Enkidu's descent to the underworld. The British Museum scholar George Smith announced his discovery of the flood story among the Nineveh tablets in December 1872.

Top Lessons

• Friendship that changes a king

  Gilgamesh begins as a tyrant whose energy has no rival; Enkidu is created as his match, and their friendship turns his strength outward to shared quests. When Enkidu dies, the king's grief becomes the engine of the second half. The epic is among the oldest literary portraits of a friendship that changes both friends.

• The search for a way past death

  After Enkidu's death Gilgamesh abandons his city to find Utnapishtim and learn the secret of eternal life. Every stage of the journey refuses him: Siduri urges him to accept mortal joys, Utnapishtim shows that the gods granted life to him alone, the test of sleep proves Gilgamesh cannot master even rest, and the snake takes the plant of youth. The poem treats the longing to escape death with sympathy while showing its limits.

• Walls that outlast the king

  The epic opens and closes with the walls of Uruk, inviting the reader to climb them and examine their brickwork. Gilgamesh's lasting achievement is not personal immortality but the city he built and the story inscribed in the tablet-box. The frame suggests that a mortal's work and memory are what endure.

• Mercy and its refusal: Humbaba

  When Humbaba is overcome he pleads for his life and offers service; Gilgamesh hesitates, and Enkidu urges the killing. The gods later choose Enkidu to die partly for this deed and for the Bull of Heaven. The episode raises the question of whether glory won by violence carries a price.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The epic is one of the oldest literary records of grief and the fear of death. Gilgamesh's mourning for Enkidu, his refusal to surrender the body, his neglect of washing and clothing, and his roaming of the wild in animal skins form an early portrait of bereavement that later readers have compared with what is now called complicated grief; that is a modern reading, not a claim the poem makes. Enkidu's death comes through an illness sent by the gods that lasts twelve days, consistent with Mesopotamian belief that disease could be a divine judgment, a belief reflected in the medical practice of the period, which joined the asû, who used drugs and bandages, with the āšipu, an exorcist-healer; a Babylonian diagnostic handbook was compiled around the eleventh century BC. Dreams in the epic are omens to be interpreted, as by Ninsun and Enkidu. Utnapishtim's sleep test, in which bread loaves spoil day by day to prove how long Gilgamesh slept, ties sleep to mortality, and the plant that makes the old young again is an early image of the hope of reversing ageing. Enkidu's introduction to bread and beer marks him as human, an early literary association of drink with civilisation. Because the text is reconstructed from damaged tablets, any medical detail should be checked against a modern critical translation.

• Tablet II

  Among the shepherds Enkidu is given bread and beer for the first time; he drinks seven jugs, becomes merry, and washes and anoints himself.

• Tablets VII-VIII

  Enkidu dreams of the gods' council and of the house of dust, falls sick, lies ill for twelve days and dies; Gilgamesh laments him and will not yield the body until decay begins.

• Tablets IX-X

  Gilgamesh wanders in skins with hollow cheeks and a face like one who has travelled far; each figure he meets asks why he looks so ravaged, and he tells of his grief and fear of death.

• Tablet XI

  Utnapishtim challenges Gilgamesh to stay awake six days and seven nights; he falls asleep at once, and loaves set out each day, in stages of staleness and mould, prove how long he slept.

• Tablet XI, close

  The plant from the bottom of the waters, whose name means that the old man becomes young, is carried off by a snake, which sheds its skin as it goes.