What is the Epic of Gilgamesh?

The Epic of Gilgamesh is a poem from ancient Mesopotamia about Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, who searches for eternal life after the death of his friend Enkidu. Wikipedia describes it as the world's oldest surviving example of narrative literature, and Yale University Press calls it the oldest surviving literary work. No author is known. It is written in cuneiform on clay tablets. [1] [2] [3]

Gilgamesh is a powerful but oppressive ruler of Uruk, in what is now southern Iraq. The gods create the wild man Enkidu to rival him. After Enkidu is brought into human society, the two fight, become friends, and travel to the Cedar Forest, where they kill the guardian Humbaba. When the goddess Ishtar proposes marriage and Gilgamesh refuses, she sends the Bull of Heaven, and the two men kill it as well. The gods then decree that Enkidu must die. [2] [3]

Grieving, Gilgamesh sets out to find Utnapishtim, a man who survived a great flood and was granted immortality. Utnapishtim tells him that humans were created to be mortal. In the Yale account, Gilgamesh finds a plant that restores youth, but a snake steals it. He returns to Uruk understanding that he will die like everyone else, and the Met's account adds that he comes to see lasting fame in his achievements for his people. [2] [4]

The literary history begins with five Sumerian poems about Gilgamesh, some possibly dating to around 2100 BCE. These were later used as source material for a combined epic in Akkadian. The earliest surviving version of that epic, the Old Babylonian version, dates to the 18th century BCE, and only a few tablets of it survive. [1] [3]

The later Standard Babylonian version, usually copied on 12 tablets, is credited to the scholar Sin-leqi-unninni. Wikipedia dates it between the 13th and 10th centuries BCE, while the Met essay places it in the twelfth century BCE. About two-thirds of this version has been recovered, and some of the best copies came from the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal at Nineveh. Stories about Gilgamesh were also retold in Hittite and Hurrian. [1] [4] [3]

Cuneiform reading had been lost for centuries. In the 1870s George Smith of the British Museum brought the epic to light. The Biblical Archaeology Society dates his first translation of a line to 1872. The Yale account says he cracked the code himself, though the search results do not detail how cuneiform was deciphered more broadly. No complete intact set of tablets exists, so the version in modern books was pieced together by 19th and 20th century scholars from partial texts. [2] [3] [5]

Scholars also differ on some points. A King Gilgamesh appears in Sumerian king lists, and some believe he was a real figure of the third millennium BCE, but the American Historical Association notes there is no definitive evidence about his life apart from the fragmentary texts. Traditional scholarship holds that the work grew out of oral tradition, like Homer's poems, and so calls it an epic. Some prefer the more neutral term poem. The Met essay says the standard version was likely assembled from both oral and written sources. [5] [3] [4]