The oldest long poem anybody has is about a man who cannot accept that his friend is dead. Everything else in it — the monster in the forest, the bull, the walk through the mountain, the flood — is arranged around that fact, and the poem's last word on the subject is that he was right to be devastated and wrong to think anything could be done.
A king nobody could live with
Uruk had a ruler two parts god and one part man, and the complaint the city brought to heaven was that he would not leave anyone alone: no son left with his father, no girl left with her mother, the young men worn out, a drum beating and beating. Gilgamesh was not a tyrant in the ordinary sense. He was an excess of energy with no proper object, and the gods' solution was not to remove him but to make him a match.
The birth goddess pinched off clay, threw it into the wilderness, and made Enkidu: hairy all over, uncut, grazing at the waterhole with the gazelles, filling in the trappers' pits with his hands. A trapper whose livelihood he was ruining went to Uruk and was told to bring back Shamhat, a woman of Ishtar's establishment, and to leave her at the waterhole.
What follows is not a seduction so much as an initiation. She stays with him seven days and seven nights, and afterwards the animals shy away from him — he has become something they do not recognise. He finds his legs will not carry him as they did, and he sits down at her feet, and the poem says that he had grown wise and had understanding. She clothes him, and teaches him bread, and gives him beer, and he drinks seven jugs of it and becomes expansive and cheerful, and washes, and rubs oil into himself, and is a man.
He goes to Uruk intending to fight the king, and blocks the door of a wedding house, and they wrestle through the streets until a doorpost gives way. Then they stop, and embrace, and after that they are never described apart.
The cedar forest, and the bull
The two of them go looking for something to do with themselves, and settle on killing Humbaba, the guardian Enlil appointed over the cedar mountain in the west — an expedition with no defensive justification whatsoever, undertaken, as Gilgamesh says, so that his name will stand after him. The full account of the forest and its keeper belongs elsewhere; what matters for this story is the shape of it. They go, they win with the sun god's help, the monster begs for his life and Enkidu tells his friend to finish it, and they cut the great cedars and float the timber home. They have killed a divine functionary in the performance of his duties, and they have done it for fame.
Back in Uruk, Ishtar sees Gilgamesh wash and put on clean clothes, and proposes marriage. His refusal is a set-piece of controlled insult: he goes through her previous partners one by one — the shepherd she turned into a wolf so that his own dogs bit him, the horse she gave the whip and the spur, the gardener she turned into a creature that could not climb out of its own hole — and asks how long, exactly, she expects to remain interested in him.
She goes up to her father and demands the Bull of Heaven, and backs the demand with the formulaic threat she uses elsewhere: break the doors of the underworld and let the dead out to eat the living. She gets it. The Bull comes down, and its snorting opens pits in the ground that swallow hundreds of the men of Uruk. Enkidu takes it by the tail; Gilgamesh puts a sword in behind its horns. And then Enkidu tears off one of its haunches and throws it at the goddess, and tells her he would do the same to her, and that is the moment the poem turns.
The council, and the twelve days
The gods meet. Two divine servants killed — the forest guardian and the bull — and someone has to answer for it. Anu, Enlil, Shamash and Ea argue, and Ea and Shamash argue for the defence, and Enlil rules that one of the two friends must die, and it will be Enkidu.
Enkidu dreams the verdict and wakes knowing it. His first response is fury at everything that brought him out of the wild: he curses the cedar door they made, he curses the trapper, and he curses Shamhat at length and with real venom, wishing her homelessness and the drunk's abuse and a life in the shadow of a wall. And Shamash speaks to him out of the sky and asks why — why curse the woman who fed him bread fit for a god, and gave him ale fit for a king, and clothed him, and gave him Gilgamesh for a companion. And Enkidu takes it back, and blesses her instead, with a blessing as long and as detailed as the curse was.
Then he dreams the other thing. A man with a lion's head and an eagle's talons takes him and leads him down to what the standing formula calls "the house from which no one who enters comes out, on the road that has no return": a place where the inhabitants have feathers for clothing like birds, where light is not seen, and where dust and clay are the food. He looks around it and sees kings there with their crowns put away, and priests, and the great men of the world, serving.
He is ill for twelve days, and on the twelfth he says something to Gilgamesh that the tablet does not fully preserve, and dies.
What grief does
Gilgamesh does not behave well and the poem does not want him to. He circles the body like a lioness whose cubs have been taken. He tears his hair, tears off his fine clothes, veils his friend's face like a bride's. He commissions a statue of him in gold and lapis. And he refuses to allow the burial — for six days and seven nights he will not give the body up, until a maggot drops from its nose.
Then he goes out into the wilderness in unwashed skins with his hair matted, walking, and the reason he gives to everyone who asks is not that he is mourning. It is that he is afraid. He has seen what death does to a body he loved, and it has become perfectly clear to him that it is coming for his own.
So he goes to find the one man it did not take.
Through the mountain
The road runs to Mount Mashu, where the sun goes in at evening and comes out in the morning, and its gate is kept by scorpion-people whose gaze is death. They tell him what is on the other side, and that no one has made the crossing, and then — because he explains himself, and because they can see what he is — they open it.
The passage under the mountain is twelve double-hours long and it is entirely dark. The poem counts the stages, and at each one it says the same thing: dense darkness, no light, he could see nothing ahead and nothing behind. He runs. At the eleventh stage a faint light; at the twelfth he comes out ahead of the sun into a garden by the sea where the trees bear carnelian fruit and lapis foliage, and the poem, which has been almost unbearably bleak, gives him one page of beauty.
By the shore is an alewife, Siduri, who bolts her door when she sees what is coming up the beach. In the Standard Babylonian version she directs him onward to the ferryman. But in the older Old Babylonian tablet from Sippar she says something else, and it has become the most quoted passage in Mesopotamian literature: that the life he is hunting he will never find; that when the gods made humanity they kept life for themselves and allotted death to people; that he should fill his stomach, be happy day and night, keep himself clean, wash his head, look at the child holding his hand and hold his wife close, because this is what there is. That advice is largely absent from the later, longer, more famous version of the epic — an editorial decision by somebody, three and a half thousand years ago, to cut the consolation.
The ferryman Urshanabi takes him across, though Gilgamesh has to cut three hundred punting poles first, because the Waters of Death may not touch the skin and each pole can be used once.
The bread, and the plant, and the snake
Utnapishtim is on the far shore, and he is not what Gilgamesh expected: an ordinary-looking old man, lying at his ease. His first question is why a man who has everything should have made himself look like this.
Then he tells how he came by his own immortality — a unique grant, from a divine assembly that will never be convened again for the purpose, in compensation for the drowning of the world. He asks who, now, would call the gods to assembly on Gilgamesh's behalf.
And then he sets the test. Stay awake for six days and seven nights.
Gilgamesh sits down and falls asleep almost immediately. Utnapishtim tells his wife to bake a loaf every day and set it by the sleeper's head. When he is finally shaken awake he claims he only dozed off for a moment — and is shown the row of loaves, the first dried out and hard as rock, the second like leather, the third damp, the seventh still on the coals. A man who cannot stay awake for a week is proposing to defeat death. It is the cruellest and cleanest demonstration in ancient literature.
He is sent away washed and in fresh clothes. And then, at his wife's prompting, Utnapishtim gives him a parting gift of information: there is a plant on the bed of the freshwater deep, thorny like a rose, that gives back a man's lost youth. Gilgamesh ties stones to his feet, sinks, cuts it, cuts the stones loose, and comes up with it.
He does not eat it. He decides to carry it back to Uruk and try it on an old man first, and then take it himself, and the name he gives it means something like "the old man becomes young again". On the way home he stops at a pool of cool water and goes in to bathe.
A snake smells the plant, comes up silently, and takes it — and as it goes it sheds its skin.
Gilgamesh sits down on the bank and cries. Everything is gone: the friend, the journey, the tunnel, the water, the plant, and now even the consolation prize, and he did not lose it heroically, he lost it while having a wash.
The ending, which is not despair
What he does then is the reason the poem is great. He takes Urshanabi by the hand, brings him up to Uruk, and shows him the wall.
Go up on it, he says. Walk it. Look at the brickwork. Examine the foundation, see whether it is not kiln-fired brick, whether the seven counsellors did not lay it. And then he gives the measurements: a third of the city, a third orchard, a third clay pits, and the temple precinct. The lines are the same ones with which the epic began. The poem loops back onto itself, and what it has decided, having gone to the ends of the world and come back with nothing, is that the wall is the answer — not because a wall is consolation for death but because it is what a mortal can actually leave.
Textual notes worth having
The version most people read is the Standard Babylonian recension, eleven tablets, attributed in antiquity to the scholar Sîn-lēqi-unninni, known chiefly from copies in Ashurbanipal's library at Nineveh. Behind it lie Old Babylonian Akkadian tablets from around 1800 BCE with real differences of wording and emphasis — the Siduri speech being the clearest case — and behind those, five separate Sumerian poems about a hero named Bilgames, which are not chapters of an epic but independent compositions.
Tablet XII is a partial Akkadian translation of one of those Sumerian poems, appended to the eleven-tablet epic, and it flatly contradicts the story: Enkidu is alive again and goes down to the underworld to retrieve lost objects. Nearly all modern editors treat it as an appendix rather than a twelfth chapter, and most translations either omit it or fence it off.
The text is still growing. Fragments continue to surface, and the last significant addition — twenty lines expanding the cedar forest — was published in 2014 from a tablet in the Sulaymaniyah Museum. Anyone reading a translation from before about 2003 is reading a materially shorter poem than the one that now exists.
Questions people ask
Was Gilgamesh real?
Possibly. He appears in the Sumerian King List as a ruler of Uruk, with a preposterous reign length; a much later king of Uruk, Utu-hegal, invoked him as a patron; and an early administrative document credits him with building work on Enlil's temple. A king of that name at Uruk in roughly the twenty-seventh century BCE is a reasonable guess and is not demonstrable. No contemporary inscription of his own has been found.
What is the relationship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu?
The text describes Gilgamesh loving Enkidu the way a man loves a wife, has him veil the corpse as a bride is veiled, and uses in the pre-arrival dreams a word for an object of attraction that is also a pun on the word for axe. Some Assyriologists read the relationship as erotic; others as an intense but non-sexual heroic friendship of a kind well attested in the ancient world; and some point out that the categories being argued over are modern. What is not in doubt is that this is a love story, that the poem says so repeatedly, and that its subject is bereavement.
Why does the snake matter so much?
Because it explains something observable. Snakes shed their skins and appear to renew themselves, and the poem accounts for that by having one steal the renewal that was meant for us. It is a small, exact aetiology dropped into the middle of the emotional climax — and it means the loss is not merely a misfortune but the origin of an asymmetry we can still watch happening in the grass.
Which translation should I read?
Andrew George's is the scholarly standard and his Penguin version is readable and honest about the gaps, which are extensive and which some popular versions quietly smooth over. Stephanie Dalley's and Benjamin Foster's are excellent. Sophus Helle's 2021 translation is the most recent and comes with essays that are genuinely useful. Avoid any version that presents a seamless narrative without brackets or ellipses: the tablets are broken, and a translation that hides it is telling you a different story from the one that survives.