Gilgamesh

• 1. Introduction

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  Gilgamesh was king of Uruk, a city-state in ancient Mesopotamia, and he may have walked the earth sometime between 2800 and 2500 BC. That gap of three centuries tells you something important: the man was real enough to leave traces, but mythic enough that scholars have spent generations arguing about where the history ends and the legend begins. His name, borrowed from the Akkadian Gilgamesh, traces back to an earlier Sumerian form, Bilgames, and most scholars translate it as something close to "the kinsman is a hero." What drove him from a probable historical king to the hero of the oldest surviving long poem in the world? What does it mean that his story shaped the Iliad, the Odyssey, and possibly the flood story in the Hebrew Bible? And why, after nearly two thousand years of obscurity, does Gilgamesh's name keep reappearing in German novels, Iraqi presidential speeches, and an Australian psychedelic rock album? The answers begin in the ruins of Nineveh, where an archaeologist named Austen Henry Layard was looking for proof of the Bible and found something far older instead.

• 2. The Historical King

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  A thirty-four-line text known as the Tummal Inscription, written during the reign of Ishbi-Erra around 1953 BC, credits Gilgamesh with building the walls of Uruk. That claim appears in lines eleven through fifteen of the inscription, and it is one of the few pieces of evidence that a real king by this name existed. A second piece of evidence surfaced in the archaic texts at Ur: an inscription likely belonging to an official who served under Gilgamesh, which reads "Gilgamesh is the one whom Utu has selected." Gilgamesh also appears on the Sumerian King List, placing him in the lineage of Uruk's rulers. The scholar Stephanie Dalley notes that precise dates cannot be given for his lifetime, but they are generally agreed to fall between 2800 and 2500 BC, within the broader Early Dynastic Period spanning roughly 2900 to 2350 BC. He is also connected to King Enmebaragesi of Kish, a figure historians can date with more confidence. According to fragments found at the site called Mê-Turan, modern Tell Haddad, when Gilgamesh died the workers of Uruk temporarily diverted the Euphrates River so he could be buried beneath its bed. The scholar Andrew George has compared this layering of legend over history to the case of King Arthur in Britain: there may well have been a real King Bilgames in Uruk, but the figure who appears in the epic traditions is a literary character to whom any number of originally separate stories have accrued.

• 3. From King to God

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  During the later Early Dynastic Period, Gilgamesh began to be worshipped as a deity at sites across Sumer. King Utu-hengal of Uruk adopted him as a patron god in the 21st century BC. The kings of the Third Dynasty of Ur, a dynasty that began around 2112 BC, held a particular affection for Gilgamesh, addressing him as their "divine brother" and "friend." King Shulgi of Ur, who ruled from 2029 to 1982 BC, went so far as to declare himself the son of Lugalbanda and Ninsun and the brother of Gilgamesh himself. Prayers inscribed on clay tablets address Gilgamesh specifically as a judge of the dead in the Underworld. Over the centuries, stories may have accrued around his name from the real lives of other historical figures, including Gudea, the Second Dynasty ruler of Lagash, who governed from 2144 to 2124 BC. Five independent Sumerian poems about Gilgamesh survive, and they show the shape of the legend before any single poet had woven it into a coherent whole. In the earliest of these, "Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the Netherworld," Gilgamesh is Inanna's brother, not her spurned lover, and his companion Enkidu serves him as a servant rather than as an equal. Gilgamesh helps Inanna by driving away a serpent, the Anzû-bird, and a Mesopotamian demon called Lilitu from her huluppu tree, a plant that the Sumerologist Samuel Noah Kramer thought might be a willow growing on the banks of the Euphrates. The reward Inanna gives him, a pikku and a mikku, possibly a drum and drumsticks, falls into the Underworld. Enkidu goes to retrieve them, disobeys the laws of that realm, and can never return.

• 4. The Epic Assembled

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  By the Old Babylonian Period, around 1830 BC, the scattered Sumerian poems had been woven into one or several longer narratives. The version that most people mean when they say "the Epic of Gilgamesh" was composed in Akkadian during the Middle Babylonian Period, roughly 1600 to 1155 BC, by a scribe named Sîn-lēqi-unninni. The fullest surviving copy is recorded across twelve clay tablets dating to the seventh century BC, found in the Library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh. Many pieces are missing or damaged. In this Akkadian telling, Gilgamesh is introduced as "two thirds divine and one third mortal" and at the start he is described as a brutal and oppressive ruler. The god Anu creates the wild man Enkidu as a kind of counterweight. Enkidu is tamed by a woman named Shamhat and travels to Uruk to challenge Gilgamesh. In the second tablet the two men wrestle; Gilgamesh wins, but he is so struck by Enkidu's strength and spirit that they become close companions of equal standing, a notable change from the Sumerian texts where Enkidu is a servant. Together they cross seven mountains to the Cedar Forest, where the god Shamash blinds the guardian Humbaba with eight winds so the heroes can decapitate him. After Gilgamesh rejects the goddess Ishtar's offer to become her consort, recounting the fates of all her former lovers, Ishtar sends the Bull of Heaven against the city. Gilgamesh and Enkidu kill it. Enkidu tears off the Bull's right thigh and throws it at Ishtar. The gods then decree that one of the two heroes must die, and they choose Enkidu. Tablets IX through XI follow Gilgamesh as he travels to find Utnapishtim, the sole human survivor of the Great Flood, who was granted immortality by the gods. On the way Gilgamesh passes through the mountain of Mashu, wanders in darkness for twelve days, and meets Siduri, the divine Alewife, who tries to convince him to accept mortality. Utnapishtim sets him one test: to stay awake for an extended period. Gilgamesh fails and sleeps for seven days. Utnapishtim then tells him of a rejuvenating herb at the bottom of the sea. Gilgamesh retrieves it but leaves it on a shore while swimming, and a snake steals it, which the epic uses to explain why snakes shed their skins. Gilgamesh returns to Uruk empty-handed.

• 5. Shadows on the Iliad

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  Classics scholar Barry B. Powell argues that early Greeks were probably exposed to Mesopotamian oral traditions through their extensive contacts with ancient Near Eastern civilizations. German classicist Walter Burkert identified a close parallel between the sixth tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh and the fifth book of the Iliad. In the Gilgamesh tablet, Ishtar complains before her mother Antu and is mildly rebuked by her father Anu after Gilgamesh rejects her. In the Iliad, Aphrodite, her Greek equivalent, is wounded by the hero Diomedes, flees to her mother Dione, and is mildly rebuked by her father Zeus. The parallels between Gilgamesh and the Odyssey go further. Both heroes encounter a woman capable of transforming men into animals. Both descend into the Underworld. Both spend time in an otherworldly paradise in the company of a seductive immortal woman, Siduri for Gilgamesh and Calypso for Odysseus, while remaining unhappy. Both miss their chance at immortality. Powell notes that the opening lines of the Odyssey seem to echo those of the Epic of Gilgamesh, with both poems praising and pitying their protagonists in a similar register. Gilgamesh's reach into antiquity extended beyond Homer as well. Around 100 BC, the Qumran scroll known as the Book of Giants names both Gilgamesh and Humbaba among the antediluvian giants. The Egyptian cleric Al-Suyuti, writing around 1500 AD, preserves an Arabic form of the name, Gilgamish or Jiljamish, as the name of a demon, transmitted through Manichaean communities that had used a related text across the Middle East.

• 6. The Flood Story's Aftershocks

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  Austen Henry Layard discovered the Akkadian text in 1849 in the Library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh. He was originally searching for evidence to confirm the historical truth of the Hebrew Bible. George Smith, a scholar at the British Museum, produced the first translation in the early 1870s and published the flood story from Tablet XI in 1880 under the title The Chaldean Account of Genesis. The name Gilgamesh was misread at first as Izdubar. Early attention focused almost exclusively on the flood parallel, with the rest of the epic largely ignored. In January 1902, the German Assyriologist Friedrich Delitzsch gave a lecture at the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin before the Kaiser and his wife, arguing that the flood story in Genesis was directly copied from the Epic of Gilgamesh. The controversy was intense. By September 1903 Delitzsch had accumulated thousands of articles and pamphlets attacking both this lecture and another he had given on the relationship between the Code of Hammurabi and the biblical Law of Moses. By the fall of 1904 the Kaiser had distanced himself from Delitzsch, who was reduced to giving his third lecture in Cologne and Frankfurt am Main rather than Berlin. Delitzsch carried these arguments to their extreme conclusion in his 1920 to 1921 book Die große Täuschung, or The Great Deception, in which he argued that the Hebrew Bible was so contaminated by Babylonian influence that Christians could only find the true message of the New Testament by eliminating the Old Testament entirely. Meanwhile, the German Orientalist Peter Jensen had already taken the comparisons in a different direction in his 1906 book Das Gilgamesch-Epos in der Weltliteratur, claiming that nearly every figure in the Old Testament, from Moses to Abraham to Jesus, was simply a version of Gilgamesh. Hermann Gunkel dismissed these arguments as baseless sensationalism, accusing Jensen and similar scholars of "conspicuous mistakes and remarkable aberrations."

• 7. Modern Lives of Gilgamesh

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  The first modern literary adaptation of the epic was Ishtar and Izdubar, published in 1884 by Leonidas Le Cenci Hamilton, an American lawyer and businessman who had learned rudimentary Akkadian from Archibald Sayce's 1872 Assyrian Grammar. Hamilton expanded the roughly 3,000-line original into roughly 6,000 lines of rhyming couplets grouped into forty-eight cantos, omitted the flood story entirely, and shifted the tone from what he called the original's "grim realism" and "ironic tragedy" to a "cheery optimism." His characters dressed more like nineteenth-century Turks than ancient Babylonians, shaped in part by his admiration for Edward FitzGerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Edwin Arnold's The Light of Asia. After World War II, German writers found the epic's themes of grief, futility, and confronting death particularly resonant. In his 1947 novel Die Stadt hinter dem Strom, Hermann Kasack reimagined Enkidu's dream of the Underworld as a metaphor for the bombed city of Hamburg. Hans Henny Jahnn's trilogy River Without Shores, published between 1949 and 1950, built its middle section around a composer whose twenty-year friendship with another man mirrors the bond between Gilgamesh and Enkidu. The 1966 novel Gilgamesch by Guido Bachmann became a landmark of German queer literature and helped establish an international trend of portraying Gilgamesh and Enkidu as lovers, a reading supported by scholars like Susan Ackerman, who notes that in both versions of the epic Gilgamesh says he will love Enkidu "like a wife." By 1998, the Epic of Gilgamesh was included in The Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature as a major early work of that genre. Philip Roth's The Great American Novel from 1973 features a character named Gil Gamesh, the star pitcher of a fictional 1930s baseball team called the Patriot League. Saddam Hussein, the former President of Iraq, drew on the epic repeatedly. His novel Zabibah and the King, published in 2000, is an allegory for the Gulf War set in ancient Assyria, and its king begins as a brutal tyrant, exactly as Gilgamesh does in the Akkadian epic, before being humanized by a commoner woman. In February 2003, when the United States pressured him to step down, Saddam gave a speech to his generals in which he cast the idea of resistance in terms of Gilgamesh's own heroic defiance. A modern statue of Gilgamesh by the Assyrian sculptor Lewis Batros was unveiled at the University of Sydney in Australia in 2000, and in October 2023 the Australian psychedelic rock band King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard released a song titled "Gilgamesh" as the fifth track of their album The Silver Cord, with lyrics drawing directly on the epic.