Gilgamesh

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The wall of Uruk is where the Epic of Gilgamesh begins and ends. The opening tablet calls on its audience to look at the city — one third built ground, one third date-grove, one third clay-pit — and to read the lapis lazuli tablet on which Gilgamesh deposited an account of his journey. The Standard Babylonian epic opens with the Akkadian ša naqba īmuru: “He who saw the deep.” The walls, the ancient brickwork — these are what the epic asks the reader to verify: evidence that the quest happened, even if the prize came home empty.

The historical question

Gilgamesh appears in the Sumerian King List as the fifth king of Uruk’s first dynasty, credited with a reign of 126 years — a figure that places him among the antediluvian and early-dynastic kings whose reigns in the list run to tens of thousands of years before settling into the merely implausible. The 126 years are not a historical datum. Yet the Sumerian King List is not pure invention: Gilgamesh is among the small number of pre-Sargonic rulers whose names appear in independent Early Dynastic inscriptions, and the list describes him as “whose father was a phantom, the lord of Kullaba” — Kullaba being the older name for one of Uruk’s two founding settlements. The conventional estimate places his rule somewhere in the early part of the Early Dynastic period, broadly between 2800 and 2500 BCE. Modern scholarship treats this range as an orientation, not a fixed point.

The external evidence is thin but real. The Tummal inscription — a thirty-four-line historiographic composition from the reign of Ishbi-Erra of Nippur (c. 1953–1920 BCE) — names Gilgamesh among the kings who built or rebuilt the Tummal sanctuary. A fragment from Mê-Turan records a tradition that on his death Gilgamesh was buried under the river bed of the Euphrates, his workers temporarily diverting the flow. The Sumerian poem Gilgamesh and Aga places him in conflict with the king of Kish, whose ruler Enmebaragesi is attested archaeologically — giving Gilgamesh at least an indirect contemporary. The epic’s own insistence on the walls of Uruk as the enduring monument — “Survey its foundations, examine its brickwork!” — has long been connected to the massive city wall of the Early Dynastic period — the mid-third millennium BCE in the conventional chronology — though the connection runs through the poem’s claims, not external epigraphy.

Where the historical man ends and the figure of tradition begins cannot be resolved. Both the epics and the Sumerian poems dress their king in deeds the archaeological record cannot touch. A king of early Uruk named Gilgamesh almost certainly existed; his reputation grew over centuries into an epic protagonist; the two are now inseparable.

The Sumerian poems

Before there was an Akkadian epic there were Sumerian poems, composed in the late third millennium BCE and copied through the Old Babylonian scribal schools. Five survive to a workable degree: Gilgamesh and Huwawa (the encounter with the Cedar Forest’s guardian), Gilgamesh and the Bull of Heaven, Gilgamesh and Aga (the confrontation with the king of Kish), Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the Netherworld, and The Death of Gilgamesh — the last poorly preserved but pivotal, as it records Enlil’s decree that Gilgamesh cannot escape mortality, and closes with a lament over the dead king.

The Sumerian figure is named Bilgames in these texts. His companion Enkidu is already present; the Cedar Forest and Huwawa (the later Humbaba) already appear. What the Sumerian poems lack is the organizing frame the Akkadian epic would impose: the quest for immortality as the great theme that draws all the adventures into a coherent arc. In the Sumerian poems the episodes are loosely linked; in the Akkadian epic they become causally chained by grief.

Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the Netherworld is pivotal for later tradition. Enkidu descends to retrieve objects that have fallen into the underworld; he ignores Gilgamesh’s warnings about the conduct required of the dead and becomes trapped. His shade rises to report what the dead experience: ranking by quality of burial, by surviving children, a king pronouncing judgment below. From this tradition Mesopotamian religion fashions Gilgamesh into a judge of the dead in his own right — later funerary texts name him among the divine judges of the netherworld alongside Nergal.

The Akkadian epic: versions and manuscripts

The Akkadian textual tradition divides into two principal strata. The Old Babylonian version (c. 1800 BCE), known especially from the Yale tablet and the Sippar tablet, carries the incipit Shūtur eli sharrī — “Surpassing All Other Kings.” It is in this version that the carpe-diem speech of the tavern-keeper Siduri survives most fully, preserved on the Sippar tablet. The Old Babylonian text is somewhat shorter and less polished than what followed; it lacks the fully developed Flood narrative as an inserted episode.

The Standard Babylonian version — ša naqba īmuru, “He who saw the deep” — was compiled by Sîn-lēqi-unninni, a lamentation-priest (kalû) named in later lists as the founding ancestor of the scholarly families who served in the Bīt Rēš temple at Uruk. His editorial work falls between 1300 and 1000 BCE. What he produced was a twelve-tablet composition; about two-thirds survives. Andrew George’s 2003 critical edition at Oxford University Press assembles the witnesses. The principal manuscript source is the Library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh (seventh century BCE), where Hormuzd Rassam excavated around 15,000 cuneiform tablet fragments beginning in 1853 — the cache from which George Smith would sort the text that changed the reception of the whole ancient world.

The epic’s arc

The epic opens with Gilgamesh as a king who oppresses his own people. The gods hear the complaint of Uruk and create a counterweight: Enkidu, a wild man formed of clay, living among the animals on the steppe. A woman named Shamhat is sent from Uruk to humanize him; afterward the animals flee him and she leads him toward the city. When Gilgamesh and Enkidu meet they fight first, then become inseparable.

Together they travel to the Cedar Forest, domain of Humbaba, the monstrous guardian stationed there by Enlil. Shamash, the sun god, supports the expedition; Enlil does not. Gilgamesh and Enkidu kill Humbaba despite his pleas and return to Uruk. Their triumph draws an unwanted proposal: Ishtar asks Gilgamesh to be her consort. Gilgamesh refuses, cataloguing her previous lovers and their fates. Ishtar, enraged, persuades Anu to loose the Bull of Heaven against Uruk. Gilgamesh and Enkidu kill the bull as well.

The gods convene and decree that one of the two must die. Enkidu falls ill and dies. What follows is the pivot on which the epic turns. Gilgamesh’s grief becomes terror: “Will I too lie down, and never get up again?” He watches the body until a worm falls from the nostril, then leaves the city.

The wandering brings Gilgamesh to the tavern-keeper Siduri, whose counsel — preserved best in the Old Babylonian Sippar tablet — is the epic’s sharpest statement of the mortal condition: the gods apportioned death for humanity and kept life in their own keeping; her counsel — the full belly, the dance, the clean garments, the child’s hand in his — is the oldest carpe diem in literature. Gilgamesh does not turn back. He finds Urshanabi, the ferryman of the waters of death, and is taken across.

Utnapishtim sits at the mouth of the rivers — the only mortal the gods ever made immortal, together with his wife, after a unique cosmic event. His story is the Flood narrative of Tablet XI, examined in the entry on comparative flood myth. The essential narrative point here is what Utnapishtim tells Gilgamesh: his immortality cannot be repeated. He sets Gilgamesh a lesser test: stay awake for six days and seven nights. Gilgamesh fails, falling asleep at once. Utnapishtim’s wife takes pity and reveals a plant at the bottom of the sea — “old man grown young again.” Gilgamesh dives for it, retrieves it, and starts homeward. At a well on the road he sets it down to bathe. A snake takes the plant and sheds its skin as it slithers away. Gilgamesh sits down and weeps.

The epic’s last gesture brings him home to Uruk, where Urshanabi is invited to inspect the walls — the same walls the prologue celebrated. What could not be carried back from the ends of the earth already stood here: brick, date-grove, clay-pit, and the Eanna precinct of Ishtar.

The Flood narrative and its place in the epic

Tablet XI’s flood account was drawn almost verbatim from the earlier Akkadian poem Atrahasis, behind which stands the Sumerian Eridu Genesis with its flood hero Ziusudra. In the epic the story is placed in Utnapishtim’s mouth as evidence for why his immortality cannot be repeated. The specifics — a cube-shaped boat of 120 cubits, six days and seven nights of storm, the grounding on Mount Nimush, the release of a dove, a swallow, and finally a raven — are the details that made Tablet XI the most consequential cuneiform text in modern reception history. The comparative frame, its relationship to the Genesis flood and to flood traditions across cultures, belongs to comparative flood myth.

Rediscovery: George Smith and Tablet XI

The tablets from Ashurbanipal’s library had been shipped to the British Museum by Rassam in the 1850s. George Smith — who taught himself Assyrian cuneiform as an engraver’s apprentice, spending his lunch hours at the museum’s cases until Henry Rawlinson noticed him — was appointed to the Assyriology department in 1870 and began sorting through the fragments.

On 3 December 1872, Smith read a paper before the Society of Biblical Archaeology in London, with the sitting Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone in the audience. What he presented was a flood account on a cuneiform tablet anticipating the Genesis story by a millennium: a boat, a storm, birds sent to find dry land, a grounding on a mountain. His coworkers’ accounts describe him beforehand stripping off articles of clothing and running around the reading room. The anecdote rests on workplace testimony, not a formal record, but its persistence registers the magnitude of the discovery as those around him experienced it.

The Daily Telegraph funded an expedition to Nineveh in January 1873 to find the missing tablet pieces; Smith found the needed fragment within the first week. He died in Aleppo in 1876, aged thirty-six. The account had appeared in 1876 as The Chaldean Account of Genesis; Archibald Sayce revised it in 1880. Andrew George’s two-volume critical edition of 2003 (Oxford University Press, ISBN 9780198149224) remains the scholarly standard; his Penguin reading translation the same year (ISBN 9780140449198) brought the text to a general audience. In 2015 a newly identified tablet from the Sulaymaniyah Museum in Iraqi Kurdistan expanded Tablet V (the Cedar Forest episode) with previously unknown lines — a reminder that tablets continue to surface.

The figure’s afterlife

The immortality quest is what made the epic central to later comparative religion and to certain strains of modern spirituality: a being of part-divine parentage sets out to defeat death and returns having learned that he cannot. For Renaissance and later readers encountering Mesopotamia through translation, Gilgamesh arrived as a figure who anticipated Greek heroic conventions — the semi-divine hero, the descent toward the underworld, the failed homecoming — while predating them by a millennium.

Modern spiritual readings have cast Enkidu’s death as the loss of the natural self to civilization, and the plant’s theft as a fall from original wholeness. The epic does set wildness against city and animal mortality against the divine keeping of life. What the text will not supply is a resolution: Gilgamesh does not transcend mortality, and the prologue’s implicit argument for fame as a kind of survival is not argued aloud. He goes home and looks at the wall. The poem’s equanimity at that endpoint — its refusal to console — is part of what has kept scholars and readers returning to it.

Sources and scholarship

The foundation for serious engagement with the epic is Andrew R. George, The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic: Introduction, Critical Edition and Cuneiform Texts (2 vols., Oxford University Press, 2003; https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-babylonian-gilgamesh-epic-9780198149224), which assembles the cuneiform witnesses across the Standard Babylonian and earlier versions with full philological commentary. His Penguin Classics reading edition (London, 1999/2003; https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/34757/the-epic-of-gilgamesh-by-trans-andrew-george-intro-andrew-george/9780140449198) is the scholarly translation now standard in universities. The Sumerian poems are treated in Alhena Gadotti, Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the Netherworld and the Sumerian Gilgamesh Cycle (De Gruyter, 2014; https://books.google.com/books/about/Gilgamesh_Enkidu_and_the_Netherworld_and.html?id=9wmOoAEACAAJ), the critical edition of the senior Sumerian poem and its relationship to Tablet XII.

George Smith’s discovery and its reception are documented at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Smith_(assyriologist), the source for the 3 December 1872 presentation, Gladstone’s attendance, and the subsequent Daily Telegraph expedition. The World History Encyclopedia overview at https://www.worldhistory.org/gilgamesh/ provides a reliable synthetic account of the historical questions. The British Museum Flood Tablet (K.3375), photographed by BabelStone under CC0, is at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:British_Museum_Flood_Tablet.jpg. The Louvre hero-mastering-lion relief (Sargon II’s palace at Dur-Sharrukin, 713–706 BCE; Louvre AO 19862), conventionally identified with Gilgamesh though not epigraphically labeled, is photographed in the public domain by Jastrow (2006) at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hero_lion_Dur-Sharrukin_Louvre_AO19862.jpg. The Sulaymaniyah Museum Tablet V fragment, photographed by Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin under CC BY-SA 4.0, is at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tablet_V_of_the_Epic_of_Gilgamesh.jpg.

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