He is not born. The goddess Aruru — the birth goddess, called Belet-ili and identified with Ninhursag — washes her hands, pinches off a piece of clay, and throws it down in the wild, and what stands up is a man covered in hair, with hair like a woman's on his head, who knows nothing of people or of settled land. He grazes with the gazelles, drinks with the herds at the waterhole, and fills in the trapper's pits and tears out his snares.
Enkidu exists as an answer to a complaint. Gilgamesh is grinding Uruk down, the city cries out to the gods, and the gods do not restrain the king. They build him a rival instead — someone strong enough to occupy him. The plan works and then keeps working in ways nobody intended.
Seven nights, and the price of understanding
The trapper's father sends for the temple woman Shamhat, and what she does at the waterhole is the hinge of the whole epic. Six days and seven nights they are together, and when he goes back to the herd the gazelles bolt from him; his legs, the text says, will not carry him as they did, and his body is heavy. But he has gained understanding, he is wide of mind. Speed traded for reason, in one line, without any suggestion that the bargain was bad.
The completion of it is a meal. Brought to a shepherds' camp, he does not know what bread is or what to do with beer; he is coaxed into eating, drinks seven jugs, becomes cheerful and sings, then washes himself, rubs oil on his skin and puts on clothes — and becomes, the poem says, a man. Mesopotamian civilisation defines itself here with unusual candour: baked bread, brewed beer, oil, cloth, and a haircut. Not law, not writing, not gods. The domestic technologies of a city.
He then takes up weapons and hunts the wolves and lions that had been his neighbours, which the shepherds regard as excellent news and which the poem does not comment on at all.
The fight, and the friendship
He hears of the king's claim on brides and blocks the door of the marriage house with his foot. They wrestle through the streets, the door-posts shake, the walls shudder — and Gilgamesh throws him, or in some manuscripts the grip is broken with neither man down. The fury ends instantly and they kiss and become friends. Gilgamesh's mother Ninsun formally adopts him, which converts an accidental double into a brother with legal standing.
From there Enkidu is the cautious one. He knows the cedar forest because he has lived in it; he tries to talk Gilgamesh out of going, describes Humbaba's roar and the seven auras, and then goes anyway and is the one who insists the guardian be killed when he begs for mercy. When Inanna sends the Bull of Heaven, Enkidu seizes it by the tail while Gilgamesh drives the knife in — and afterwards he tears off the bull's haunch and throws it at the goddess, promising to do the same to her. That is the act that kills him. The gods' assembly decides one of the two must die for the guardian and the bull, and Enlil's choice falls on the made man rather than the king.
Cursing the woman, and taking it back
Dying, he curses the door he had made from the tallest cedar and sent to Nippur, wishing he had left the tree standing. Then he curses Shamhat, at length and viciously — may you never have a home, may the drunk soil your festival dress, may you be beaten in the street — because she is the reason he left the herd. Utu/Shamash speaks from heaven and rebukes him: she gave you bread fit for a god and ale fit for a king, she clothed you, she gave you Gilgamesh for a companion. And Enkidu, whose heart is calmed, revokes the curse and replaces it with a blessing as elaborate as the curse had been.
This retraction is easy to skim past and hard to overstate. A dying man argues with the sun about whether his life was worth having and concludes, correctly, that it was — and the poem gives him the last word on it.
Twelve days, and a lament
His death is not a battle wound. He sickens, dreams of the bird-clothed dead in their house of dust, and lies twelve days getting weaker. Gilgamesh's lament calls on the roads they walked, the cedar forest, the bear and hyena and panther and stag, the elders of Uruk and the herds of the steppe to weep for him, veils him like a bride, circles the body like an eagle, and rages like a lioness robbed of her cubs. He refuses to give the body up for burial until decay makes it undeniable — a detail so brutal, and so exactly observed, that it is quoted in almost every discussion of grief in ancient literature. Then he has a statue made of gold and lapis lazuli, and walks out into the wilderness dressed in skins, becoming what his friend had been.
Where else he appears
The Sumerian Bilgames poems know an Enkidu who is a servant, not a brother — he attends the king, gives advice, and carries no origin story about clay or gazelles. The wild-man beginning and the equality are the Akkadian poet's contribution, which means the friendship that the epic exists to describe is a literary invention layered onto older material.
Tablet XII, the appendix translated directly from Sumerian and stitched onto a poem it contradicts, has him alive again and volunteering to go down and fetch two objects Gilgamesh has dropped into the underworld. He ignores the instructions for passing unnoticed among the dead, is seized, and his shade comes back only to answer questions about conditions below — the origin of much of what is known about the Mesopotamian afterlife's social arrangements.
Questions the wild man raises
Is he the original of the "noble savage"?
Not quite, and the difference is worth having. The pattern he actually founds is the wild man tamed and made civilisation's defender — a figure who reappears in Near Eastern and later European art as the hairy man with a club, and in the Babylonian iconographic type of the laḫmu, the hairy hero shown mastering animals on cylinder seals. What he is not is a critique of civilisation. The epic is unambiguous that becoming human was an improvement; it is the eighteenth century, not Babylon, that made wildness morally superior.
Was Shamhat a "sacred prostitute"?
The term she is given, ḫarimtu, has been translated that way for a century, and the translation carries assumptions the Akkadian does not support. The word denotes a woman outside the ordinary household structures — unmarried, self-supporting, associated with the tavern and often with a temple's staff — and the elaborate institution of ritual prostitution once confidently reconstructed for Mesopotamia has been steadily dismantled by specialists over the past thirty years. What the epic shows is a professional woman doing a job for a fee arranged with the trapper, and being praised by a god for it.
Why does he die and not Gilgamesh?
Enlil's ruling is not explained, which readers find unsatisfying and which is probably deliberate. Shamash argues against it; the sentence stands anyway. The structural answer is that the epic needs its king to survive and be destroyed at the same time, and killing the friend accomplishes both. The theological answer, in a tradition where death has no appeal and no reward, is that decrees do not come with reasons. Where that leaves Gilgamesh is the subject of the search for immortality.