What Is the Epic of Gilgamesh? The Oldest Story We Have

Gilgamesh was probably a real king of Uruk, a city on the Euphrates, some time around 2700 BCE, and stories about him were being told in Sumerian within a few centuries of his death. The epic that combines them was composed in Akkadian, the later language of Babylonia, and the fullest version, on eleven tablets plus a twelfth added later, was assembled by a scholar named Sin-leqi-unninni around 1200 BCE.

It opens with Gilgamesh as a tyrant, two thirds god and one third man, exhausting his city with building projects and demands. The people appeal to the gods, who create Enkidu, a hairy wild man who lives with the animals, as a counterweight. A temple woman is sent to civilise Enkidu, which she does over a week, after which the animals no longer recognise him; he goes to Uruk, wrestles Gilgamesh in the street to a standstill, and the two become inseparable.

The friends set out to win fame by killing Humbaba, the monstrous guardian of the Cedar Forest, and they do, though Humbaba begs for his life and Enkidu urges the killing on. Back in Uruk the goddess Ishtar proposes marriage to Gilgamesh, who refuses her with a catalogue of what happened to her previous lovers. In fury she sends the Bull of Heaven against the city, and the friends kill that too, and Enkidu throws part of it in her face.

That is one insult to the gods too many. They decree that one of the two must die, and it is Enkidu, who sickens over twelve days, cursing the woman who civilised him and then, reminded of what civilisation gave him, blessing her instead. Gilgamesh refuses to allow the burial until a worm falls from his friend's nose. The poem's tone changes here entirely. Gilgamesh, who had sought fame as a substitute for immortality, has now seen death close up and wants the thing itself.

He goes looking for Utnapishtim, the one man the gods made immortal, at the edge of the world. He passes lions, the scorpion-men who guard the mountain where the sun rises, a tunnel of total darkness, and a garden of jewelled trees, and at a tavern by the sea the alewife Siduri gives him the advice the whole poem circles: he will not find what he seeks, so he should eat, dance, love his child and his wife, because that is what a human being is given.

He crosses the waters of death anyway, and Utnapishtim tells him how he became immortal. The gods decided to drown the world; one of them warned Utnapishtim to build a boat and load it with his family and every kind of animal; the storm raged for six days; the boat grounded on a mountain; he released a dove, a swallow and a raven to find land. The parallels with the biblical flood are exact enough that when George Smith, a self-taught assistant at the British Museum, first read the tablet in 1872, he reportedly began undressing in his excitement and had to be restrained.

Utnapishtim's immortality was a one-off, and Gilgamesh cannot have it. As a test he is challenged to stay awake for a week and falls asleep at once. As a consolation he is told of a plant at the bottom of the sea that restores youth, and he dives for it and finds it. On the way home he stops to bathe, a snake eats the plant and sheds its skin, and Gilgamesh sits down and weeps. He returns to Uruk with nothing.

Except that the poem has told us, in its opening lines, what he did have. It invites the reader to climb the walls of Uruk and admire their brickwork, the work of the king who saw everything, and it ends by repeating the invitation. What survives a man is what he built and what he learned, and the story that says so is itself the proof, four thousand years on.

The epic was copied in scribal schools across the Near East for over a thousand years and then, as cuneiform writing died out around the first century CE, was completely forgotten. Its recovery began when Austen Henry Layard and Hormuzd Rassam excavated the palace library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal at Nineveh in the 1850s and shipped tens of thousands of broken tablets to London. Decipherment of cuneiform was still new, and it took twenty years before Smith recognised the flood story among the fragments.

The text is still incomplete. Tablets and pieces keep turning up in museum drawers and in the antiquities market, and a fragment bought by a museum in Iraq in 2011 added twenty lines to the Cedar Forest episode. Every modern translation has gaps marked by brackets and dots, which is part of reading it: the oldest story we have is also one we are still finding. The shape of the poem:

• •Tablets 1 to 2: the tyrant king, the wild man, the friendship
• •Tablets 3 to 6: the Cedar Forest, Humbaba, Ishtar and the Bull of Heaven
• •Tablets 7 to 8: Enkidu's death and Gilgamesh's grief
• •Tablets 9 to 11: the journey, Siduri's advice, the flood, the lost plant
• •Tablet 12: a later addition, Enkidu's report from the underworld

Once the epic could be read again, scholars began noticing its shapes in stories written much later. The flood is the clearest case, but there are others. The grief of Gilgamesh for Enkidu, a hero mourning the companion whose death was bound up with their shared exploits, is strikingly close to Achilles mourning Patroclus in the Iliad. The wanderer who crosses the sea to the edge of the world, receives counsel from a woman and returns home changed has features in common with Odysseus. And the snake that steals the plant of life invites comparison with the serpent in Eden.

What the parallels mean is genuinely debated. Some scholars think Greek poets knew versions of Mesopotamian stories, carried along trade routes through Syria and Anatolia where cuneiform was read for many centuries; others think the resemblances come from a broad shared stock of Near Eastern themes rather than from any single text. The flood is the strongest case for direct borrowing, because so many details match in sequence. Either way, the epic shows that questions about friendship, grief and the limits of human ambition were being worked out in writing long before Greek literature began.

There is no single original text of Gilgamesh. The oldest material is a set of separate Sumerian poems about episodes in his life, including his expedition against Huwawa, the Sumerian form of Humbaba, the Bull of Heaven, and his death. Around the early second millennium BCE, poets writing in Akkadian joined episodes into a continuous epic, now called the Old Babylonian version. The flood narrative was borrowed from another Babylonian poem, Atrahasis, which tells of the gods sending a flood to silence noisy humankind and of a man warned to build a boat.

The versions differ in revealing ways. The Old Babylonian epic opened with the words surpassing all other kings, celebrating Gilgamesh's might. The later standard version opens with he who saw the deep, presenting him first as a man who gained wisdom. Siduri's famous advice to enjoy food, family and dancing is known from an Old Babylonian tablet and is not found in the surviving standard text. Tablet twelve is a close Akkadian translation of the second half of a Sumerian poem, which is why it sits awkwardly after the story has ended.

The poem has a clear idea of what separates a civilised person from a wild one, and it is surprisingly everyday. In the Old Babylonian version, after his week with the temple woman, Enkidu is taken to a shepherds' camp and offered bread and beer. He has only ever sucked the milk of wild animals and does not know what to do with them. Encouraged, he eats his fill and drinks seven jugs of beer, grows cheerful and sings, rubs his hairy body with oil and puts on clothes, and the poem says that he became a man.

To a Mesopotamian audience those were the marks of settled life: grain grown in fields and turned into bread and beer, oil pressed from crops, cloth woven from wool, and a city to live in. The city in the poem was real. Excavations at Uruk, in southern Iraq, have traced a defensive wall around nine kilometres long, built early in the third millennium BCE, close to the time a historical Gilgamesh may have reigned, and later tradition credited him with building it. Within it lay what was probably the largest city in the world at the time, home to tens of thousands of people.

Before anyone could read Gilgamesh, scholars had to be convinced that Akkadian cuneiform had really been deciphered, and many were doubtful. The key had been a cliff inscription at Behistun in western Iran, carved for the Persian king Darius I in three languages, Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian. The British officer Henry Rawlinson copied it in the 1830s and 1840s, at times hanging from ropes above a sheer drop, and the Old Persian, already partly understood, offered a way into the Babylonian. But that script used hundreds of signs, many with several possible readings, and critics suspected the decipherers were partly guessing.

In 1857 the Royal Asiatic Society in London ran a test. Copies of a newly found inscription of the Assyrian king Tiglath-Pileser I were sent to four scholars, Rawlinson, Edward Hincks, Julius Oppert and William Henry Fox Talbot, a pioneer of photography, who translated it independently and returned their versions sealed. A committee opened them and found that they agreed closely in substance, far too closely for chance or invention. The decipherment was accepted, and within two decades George Smith could sit in the British Museum reading Assyrian tablets well enough to recognise a story about a flood.

The Epic of Gilgamesh is a Babylonian poem from around 1200 BCE, drawing on stories a thousand years older, about a king who learns through the death of his friend that he too will die, searches for immortality and comes home without it. Recovered from a ruined library in the nineteenth century, it is the earliest surviving work of literature and still missing pieces.