The Epic of Gilgamesh

The story

A man reads a tablet and is moved

London, 3 December 1872. In the hall of the Society of Biblical Archaeology a young scholar from the British Museum, George Smith, already known for having grown up as a banknote engraver and taught himself Assyrian, is reading a translation to an audience. It speaks of a man who, warned by the gods, builds a great ship, loads his family and the animals on it and survives a flood, until the ship comes to rest on a mountain and he lets a dove go, then a swallow, then a raven. The audience, who knew the story of Noah, is left breathless: that tale had been written in cuneiform long before the Bible. It was on a tablet, number 11 of a still unknown poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh.

The tablets had been found twenty years earlier, between 1849 and 1853, at Nineveh, in the north of Iraq, by the archaeologists Austen Henry Layard and Hormuzd Rassam, in the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal. That king, who reigned in the 7th century BC, had collected more than thirty thousand tablets of every kind: prayers, laws, medical formulas, lists of stars and ancient poems. A treasure of which nobody, for more than two thousand years, had been able to read a line.

The story, in a few lines

Gilgamesh is the king of Uruk. He is strong, very handsome and very proud, two-thirds god and one-third man. The people suffer from his whims and call for help. The gods then create a rival: Enkidu, a wild man, born on the steppe, who lives with the animals. After being civilised by a woman, Shamhat, Enkidu comes to Uruk and wrestles with Gilgamesh. Neither wins, and the two become inseparable friends.

Together they set out for the Cedar Forest, where the giant Humbaba (or Huwawa), guardian of the sacred trees, lives, and they kill him. When the goddess Ishtar proposes marriage to Gilgamesh and he refuses, the goddess sends the Bull of Heaven; the two heroes defeat this too. But the gods demand a victim: Enkidu falls ill and dies. Gilgamesh, devastated, for the first time understands what it means to die and is afraid.

He then sets out on a long journey in search of Utnapishtim, the only man to whom the gods granted eternal life after the flood. He crosses mountains and deserts, passes the scorpion-men, and meets the tavern-keeper Siduri, who gives him advice that has remained famous: fill your belly, enjoy yourself day and night, wear clean clothes, wash, look at the child who holds your hand, embrace your wife: this is the lot of men. Gilgamesh does not listen and goes on. Utnapishtim tells him about the flood and sets him a test: to stay awake for six days and seven nights. Gilgamesh falls asleep at once.

In the end he is told of a plant at the bottom of the sea that makes you young again. He picks it, but on the way home, while he is bathing in a pool, a snake takes it from him. Gilgamesh returns to Uruk empty-handed. Yet the poem does not end in sadness: he looks at the walls of his city and understands that the works of men remain even when men die.

How the poem was formed

Gilgamesh was probably a real king of Uruk, who lived around 2700–2600 BC (the Sumerian King List puts him fifth of his dynasty). However, no inscription of his time names him, so we cannot be sure. Stories about him began to circulate in the form of short poems in Sumerian, written around 2100 BC, in the time of the Third Dynasty of Ur. King Shulgi of Ur even called him “brother” and boasted of descending from him.

In the following centuries Babylonian scribes gathered these tales into a single poem in Akkadian. The most complete version, on twelve tablets, is the one from Nineveh: tradition attributes the final form to a scribe named Sin-leqi-unninni, who lived perhaps around 1200 BC. The twelfth tablet, which does not continue the story, is a translation of an older Sumerian poem added later. The work is more than three thousand lines long, and many are damaged: scholars fill the gaps with other copies, found all over Mesopotamia, in Turkey and in Syria.

Why it still speaks to us

The poem begins with praise of the walls of Uruk and an invitation to climb the walls to admire the bricks. It is the story of a friendship, of the fear of death and of the need to leave something of oneself behind. The scholars who translate it point out that some lines are surprisingly modern: the hardness of the orphan who weeps for his friend, the king who realises he is not all-powerful.

A word of caution: Utnapishtim's flood resembles Noah's, but also an older Babylonian tale, that of Atrahasis. Historians believe the biblical story drew on Mesopotamian traditions, but how this happened is an open question. Nobody can say for certain which traditions were truly original.