Gilgamesh

The walls of Uruk rose higher than any city had a right to, baked brick still warm from the day’s sun, and the man who raised them could not rest. He wore out the young men of the city in contest after contest, claimed brides on their wedding nights, and exhausted fathers and sons alike with the sheer weight of his appetite. Two parts god and one part human, Gilgamesh carried a strength that no rival and no wall could hold, and the people of Uruk lifted their complaint to heaven until the gods heard it.

Their answer was not to break him but to match him. The mother goddess pinched off a piece of clay, and out of the wilderness came Enkidu, a hairy wild man who grazed with the gazelles and drank at the watering hole among the herds. He was tamed not by force but by a temple woman named Shamhat, who spent six days and seven nights with him until the animals would no longer run beside him. Civilized, clothed, and angry on behalf of the oppressed, Enkidu went to Uruk to stop the king. They met in the street and fought like two bulls, splintering doorposts, shaking the walls. Gilgamesh won, barely, and in that instant the rivalry turned into the deepest bond either of them would ever know.

Gilgamesh was the son of Lugalbanda, a deified former king of Uruk, and the goddess Ninsun, the wise wild cow. That parentage is where the arithmetic of his divinity comes from, two-thirds god through a line of half-divine ancestors, the remaining third stubbornly mortal. The Sumerian King List counts him among the early rulers of Uruk, and there may well have been a real king behind the legend who reigned somewhere in the centuries around 2700 BC. What survives of him, though, is not administration but story. Five older Sumerian poems circulated for centuries before a scribe named Sin-leqi-unninni gathered the material into the long Akkadian epic copied onto twelve clay tablets, the fullest of which were dug out of the buried library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh in the nineteenth century.

Restless even in friendship, Gilgamesh wanted a name that would outlast him, so the two heroes marched to the Cedar Forest to kill its guardian. Humbaba was a monstrous sentry whose face was a coil of intestines and whose roar was the flood, set by the god Enlil to keep the sacred cedars safe. The forest was cool and resinous and enormous, and the giant nearly turned them back with his curses before Shamash sent the winds to pin him down. They cut off his head. They felled the great cedars and floated them down the Euphrates, and Gilgamesh had his glory.

Glory drew the wrong kind of attention. The goddess Ishtar, watching him bathe and dress, offered herself to him in marriage, and Gilgamesh refused her with a brutal catalogue of the lovers she had ruined, the shepherd turned to a wolf, the gardener turned to a mole, the bird with its wing broken. Humiliated, she demanded the Bull of Heaven from her father Anu and loosed it on the city, where its snorting opened pits that swallowed hundreds of men. The two friends killed it anyway, and Enkidu, past caution now, tore off a haunch and hurled it in the goddess’s face.

That insult was the one the gods would not let pass. They decreed that one of the two must die, and the lot fell on Enkidu. He sickened, dreamed of the dust-choked house of the dead where the dead eat clay and wear feathers like birds, and faded over twelve slow days while Gilgamesh sat beside him helpless. When he was gone, Gilgamesh would not give up the body until a maggot dropped from its nose. The grief broke something in the king. The man who had feared nothing was now terrified of one thing, the same end coming for him.

So he ran. He put on animal skins and went into the wild searching for Utnapishtim, the one man the gods had ever made immortal, the survivor of the great flood. The road took him past the scorpion-people who guard the mountain of the sun, through a tunnel of total darkness he raced against the dawn, to the edge of the world and the waters of death. Utnapishtim, when found, was no help in the way Gilgamesh wanted. He told the story of the flood, how the gods resolved to drown mankind and how Ea warned him to build a boat and load it with the seed of every living thing, and he made his point plainly: that reprieve was a one-time gift of the assembled gods, not a prize a man could chase down. To prove the point he challenged Gilgamesh to stay awake for six days and seven nights, and the exhausted hero fell asleep almost at once.

There was one consolation. Utnapishtim told him of a thorny plant at the bottom of the sea that restores lost youth. Gilgamesh tied stones to his feet, sank to the seabed in the cold dark, and tore the plant loose with bleeding hands. He did not even eat it. He saved it to test on an old man back home, and while he stopped to bathe in a cool pool a serpent smelled it, took it, and slid away shedding its skin, renewed. He failed. He came home with nothing but the journey itself, and standing again before the great walls of Uruk he understood that the brick was the only immortality on offer, the city outlasting the king.

His powers were the obvious ones, strength beyond any human measure, endurance that could outlast a journey to the ends of the earth, the favor of the sun god in battle. His weakness was the one he shared with everyone who ever read about him. For all the divine blood, the mortal third was enough. The wall still stands in part, low and broken on the Iraqi plain, which is more than most kings can say.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Gilgamesh?

Gilgamesh was the legendary king of the Mesopotamian city of Uruk and the hero of the oldest surviving great work of literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh. He was described as two-thirds divine and one-third mortal, the son of the goddess Ninsun and the deified king Lugalbanda. There may have been a real king of Uruk behind the legend who ruled sometime around 2700 BC.

What is the Epic of Gilgamesh about?

The Epic of Gilgamesh follows the king of Uruk from arrogant tyrant to grieving man to humbled mortal. After he befriends the wild man Enkidu and the two perform great feats together, Enkidu dies as punishment from the gods, and Gilgamesh sets out on a doomed quest to escape death by finding the immortal flood survivor Utnapishtim. The story is ultimately about accepting human mortality.

Who was Enkidu to Gilgamesh?

Enkidu was Gilgamesh’s closest friend and equal, a wild man created from clay by the gods to challenge and curb the overbearing king. After an initial fight that Gilgamesh narrowly won, the two became inseparable companions who killed the forest guardian Humbaba and the Bull of Heaven together. Enkidu’s death is the turning point that sends Gilgamesh on his quest for immortality.

Did Gilgamesh become immortal?

No, Gilgamesh never gained immortality. He reached Utnapishtim, who taught him that eternal life was a one-time gift from the gods and not something a hero could win, then found a plant that restores youth, only for a serpent to steal it while he bathed. He returned to Uruk empty-handed and accepted that his city’s walls would be his only lasting monument.

Why did Gilgamesh and Enkidu kill Humbaba?

Gilgamesh and Enkidu killed Humbaba, the monstrous guardian of the Cedar Forest, so that Gilgamesh could win an enduring name through a famous deed. Humbaba had been set by the god Enlil to protect the sacred cedars, and the heroes felled the great trees after taking his head. The killing later contributed to the gods’ decision that Enkidu must die.

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Enkidu, Humbaba, Utnapishtim, Ishtar, Inanna, Shamash, Enki, Enlil, Ereshkigal, Nergal, Tiamat, Marduk, Gidim, Lamassu