The Epic of Gilgamesh

Overview

Gilgamesh is about a hundred pages in translation and it is older than anything else on this shelf by a wide margin. Sumerian poems about the king of Uruk date from around 2100 BCE; the Akkadian version that gets translated, the Standard Babylonian Epic, was assembled around 1200 BCE and is attributed to an exorcist named Sin-leqi-unninni, which makes him the earliest named author in the world.

It survives on clay tablets in cuneiform, most of them broken. The main copies came from the library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh, buried when the city fell in 612 BCE and dug up in the 1850s. New fragments are still being found; a substantial piece of Tablet V surfaced in 2011 in a Sulaymaniyah museum and added twenty lines about the Cedar Forest.

The brokenness is a feature of reading it. Andrew George’s translation marks every gap and every conjecture, so the page is full of brackets and ellipses. This is honest and it is also an obstacle; Stephen Mitchell’s version smooths everything into continuous English and is not a translation. Read George to know what is there, Mitchell to hear it as a poem.

A note on the flood. Tablet XI contains a story so close to Genesis that when George Smith read it to the Society of Biblical Archaeology in 1872 it made the front pages. The relation between the two is still debated, and the Mesopotamian version is certainly older.

What happens

Tablets I to II: the wild man. Gilgamesh is king of Uruk, two-thirds divine, and intolerable. He exhausts the young men in contests and takes the brides of the city on their wedding nights. The people complain to the gods, who respond not by restraining him but by making a match: Enkidu, formed from clay, covered in hair, living with the gazelles at the waterhole.

Enkidu is brought into human society by a temple prostitute, Shamhat, who is sent out to meet him and stays with him for six days and seven nights. Afterwards the animals will not have him; he has become weaker and wiser, and she teaches him to eat bread and drink beer and clothes him. It is the oldest account in literature of what civilisation costs and provides.

He comes to Uruk to stop Gilgamesh at a wedding door. They wrestle, the doorposts shake, and when it is over they kiss and become friends.

Tablets III to VII: the exploits. Restless, Gilgamesh proposes an expedition to the Cedar Forest to kill its guardian Humbaba and make a name. The elders advise against it, Enkidu is afraid, and they go. They kill Humbaba, who begs for his life, and cut down the greatest of the cedars.

Back in Uruk the goddess Ishtar proposes marriage. Gilgamesh refuses her in a long and insulting speech listing what became of her previous lovers. She demands the Bull of Heaven from her father and sets it on the city; the two men kill it, and Enkidu throws its haunch at her.

The gods meet. Two of these killings must be paid for, and they decide Enkidu will die. He curses the trapper and the prostitute who brought him into the human world, is rebuked by the sun god and takes the curse back, describes a dream of the house of dust where the dead sit in darkness with feathers for clothing, and dies over twelve days.

Tablets VIII to XI: the journey. Gilgamesh’s grief is the most affecting thing in the poem. He covers the body like a bride, tears his hair, refuses burial for six days and seven nights until a maggot falls from the nose, and then puts up a statue.

Then terror. If Enkidu could die, so can he. He leaves the city, wears skins, roams the wilderness, and sets out to find Uta-napishti, the one man granted eternal life. He passes the scorpion-people, travels twelve leagues through a mountain tunnel in absolute darkness, and comes out in a garden of jewelled trees.

At the shore he meets Siduri the tavern keeper, who asks why he is so wasted and, in the older Babylonian version, gives him the advice the poem is most loved for: you will not find what you seek, so fill your belly, make merry, wash, wear clean clothes, and cherish the child who holds your hand.

He crosses the waters of death with the ferryman Ur-shanabi and finds Uta-napishti, who is not impressed. He tells him how the gods sent a flood because humanity was too noisy, how Ea warned him to tear down his house and build a boat, how he loaded it with the seed of all living things, how the storm frightened the gods themselves, how he sent out a dove, a swallow and a raven, and how he was granted eternal life as a one-off that will not be repeated.

Then two tests. Gilgamesh cannot stay awake for six days and seven nights and fails the first immediately, falling asleep as soon as he sits down. He is given a second chance: a plant at the bottom of the sea that restores youth. He ties stones to his feet, dives, gets it, and on the way home stops to bathe, and a snake takes it and sheds its skin.

He comes back to Uruk with nothing, and shows the ferryman the walls: the fired brick, the foundations laid by the seven sages, the extent of the city. The poem ends where it began, with the same lines about the walls, which is the answer it has been working toward.

Tablet XII is an appendix, a partial translation of an older Sumerian poem, and does not fit with the rest. Most translations print it separately and most readers can skip it.

How to read it

Use Andrew George’s Penguin translation and read the brackets. Knowing where the text is broken changes how you read it, and his introduction is the best short account of how the poem was assembled and found.

Read Tablet VIII, the lament for Enkidu, slowly. Four thousand years have not improved on it.

Notice that the heroic half causes the tragic half. Humbaba and the Bull are the achievements that make a name, and they are exactly what the gods punish. The poem is not celebrating the exploits.

Read Siduri’s speech and then ask whether Gilgamesh needed to make the whole journey to arrive at it. He is told the answer before he crosses the water and does not hear it until he has failed twice and come home.

Compare the flood with Genesis 6 to 9 directly. The boat, the animals, the birds sent out, the mountain landing and the sacrifice afterwards are all there, and so are the differences: the gods here are frightened, hungry and divided, and the reason for the flood is noise.

Questions it raises

• The poem begins and ends with the walls of Uruk. Is that an answer to death or a consolation prize?
• Enkidu is civilised by a week with a prostitute and loses the animals. What is the poem saying about what becoming human costs?
• Gilgamesh grieves for Enkidu and is then terrified for himself. Are those the same emotion, and does the poem distinguish them?
• Siduri gives him the answer at the halfway point. Why must he go on, and does the journey add anything?
• The gods send a flood because people are too loud, and are then appalled by what they have done. What kind of universe is that?
• It was lost for two thousand years. What else is missing, and what does it mean that the oldest story we have is about wanting not to die?