The Epic of Gilgamesh

In brief

A king of Uruk oppresses his city. The gods make a wild man to match him, the two fight, and they become inseparable. They kill the guardian of a cedar forest and then a bull sent by a goddess, and the gods decide that one of them must pay. When Enkidu dies, Gilgamesh watches the body until it decays, then walks to the end of the world to ask the survivor of the flood how not to die. He comes home with nothing, and shows a stranger the city wall.

That story is a reconstruction. There is no single text of the Epic of Gilgamesh, only broken clay from different centuries and languages, and about two-thirds of the fullest version has been recovered. What readers meet in English is an editor’s assembly, and the most useful thing to know before opening any translation is how it treats the gaps.

The argument

The poem’s central event is a change of subject. For its first half it is a story about fame, and Gilgamesh says so as he plans the forest raid: he will cut the cedar for “fame everlasting”. He has the reasoning ready, in lines Thompson takes from the Old Babylonian text: “Who, O my friend, is unconquer’d by death?” Gods last, “mortals—their days are (all) number’d”, and “All that they do is (but) wind”. So a man should get his name written down. The young king states mortality as a reason for adventure, the way people do when it has not happened to them.

Then it happens. Enkidu dies in Tablet VII, and the same fact is now unbearable. Gilgamesh tells the wine-maker that he kept the corpse unburied until “He like a worm hath lain on his face”, and that he cannot rest because of it. Nothing about death has changed except that he has seen one. That is the poem’s real discovery: knowing that everyone dies is not the same knowledge as watching one person stop.

The later editors understood this. The old version opened with the king’s glory, its first words meaning “Surpassing all other kings”. The Standard Babylonian version opens with knowledge, “He who saw the deep”, and with a man who came back tired and wrote it down. The hero of the finished poem is the one who learned something, and what he learned is that he cannot have what he went for.

The twelve tablets

The Standard Babylonian poem runs to twelve tablets of about three hundred lines each, by Thompson’s count, with the twelfth about half that.

I and II. Gilgamesh, “Two-thirds of him are divine”, exhausts Uruk. Enkidu is made, is drawn out of the wild by a woman, Shamhat in modern editions, and fights the king.
III to V. The elders object, the pair go anyway, and they kill Humbaba.
VI to VIII. Ishtar proposes, Gilgamesh lists what became of her lovers, the bull is killed, Enkidu sickens and dies, and Gilgamesh mourns him “Like to a wailing woman”.
IX and X. The scorpion-people, the tunnel of the sun, the wine-maker Siduri, the boatman, the Waters of Death.
XI. Utnapishtim tells the flood, Gilgamesh fails a test of staying awake, finds a plant of youth and loses it to a snake.
XII. An appendix: Enkidu’s ghost reports on the underworld.

The true ending comes at the close of Tablet XI, where the plant named “Greybeard-who-turneth-to-man-in-his-prime” is gone and “Then Gilgamish sate him, (and) burst into weeping.” A few lines on he says to the boatman: “Do thou, Ur-Shanabi, go up and walk on the ramparts of Erech”. The words repeat the praise of the wall in Tablet I, so the poem closes its own circle. I do not read this as consolation. He offers the wall because it is there and it is what he has.

Tablet XII sits badly after that. It is mainly an Akkadian translation of a Sumerian poem, and Enkidu in it has not died as he did in Tablet VII. Many scholars therefore treat it as an addition. It does give the epic a colder last word, Enkidu’s “sit thee down weeping” and a ghost with no one to tend it, eating “Lees of cup, and broken bread”.

The voice

Akkadian narrative verse works by repetition. Messages are repeated whole and journeys counted in identical stages. The effect in a good translation is ceremonial, and shocking when a formula breaks.

The free English gives a distorted idea of that voice. R. Campbell Thompson’s version is, as his title page says, “rendered literally into English hexameters”, with thee and thou throughout, and it sounds like an Edwardian schoolmaster’s Homer. Yet its fussiness has a use. His round brackets mark words he supplied, half-brackets mark damaged signs, and rows of dots mark what is gone, so the reader sees the state of the text in every line.

How it was made

Three stages are reasonably clear, and none has a firm starting date. Any spoken tradition behind them is beyond dating: nobody can say how old the stories were when first written, and Thompson’s guess of the fourth millennium was only a guess. Gilgamesh appears on the Sumerian King List as a ruler of Uruk, and Andrew George compares him to King Arthur: a real king may lie behind the legend.

The Sumerian poems

Five poems in Sumerian are known, about a king the texts call Bilgames: Gilgamesh and Aga, Gilgamesh and Huwawa, Gilgamesh and the Bull of Heaven, Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the Netherworld and The Death of Gilgamesh. Some may go back to the Third Dynasty of Ur, around 2100 BC. They are separate stories and did not form an epic, and in them Enkidu is closer to a servant than a friend.

The Old Babylonian version

By about the eighteenth century BC, poets working in Akkadian had combined the material into a connected narrative, called Shūtur eli sharrī after its opening. Only scattered tablets survive, of different origins, including the Pennsylvania and Yale tablets and the Sippar tablet with Siduri’s speech.

The Standard Babylonian version

The twelve-tablet text, Sha naqba īmuru, is credited to Sîn-lēqi-unninni, a scholar-exorcist probably active between 1300 and 1000 BC. The credit comes from a Mesopotamian catalogue of texts and authors, published by W. G. Lambert in 1962, and that catalogue also names gods and legendary figures as authors, so it is tradition and not a signature. Whoever he was, his version pushes mortality to the front. The best copies come from the seventh-century library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh, dug in the early 1850s by Layard and Rassam.

What you can read free

The modern versions by George, Foster, Mitchell, Sandars and Dalley are in copyright. The legal free English covers exactly this.

Thompson (1928) is the only free version of all twelve tablets worth using. Thompson died in 1941, so it is out of copyright where the term is life plus seventy, and a 1928 book entered the US public domain in 2024; older notices of a nominal US copyright are out of date. It is also a patchwork: his Third Tablet is largely Old Babylonian, Tablet VII borrows from Hittite, and he drops into older text for Siduri until “Here the Old Babylonian Version breaks off and we must return to the Assyrian”. The gaps are large. About thirty lines are wanting early in Tablet I, some thirty-six lines are mutilated or missing at the start of Tablet IV, the sixth column of Tablet VIII is all lost, and Tablet XII loses about seventeen and then about twenty-five lines. His dates are old, and he has nothing found after him. Smith’s 1876 book and Jastrow’s 1898 chapter also survey all twelve tablets, from far less evidence.
Jastrow and Clay (1920) on Project Gutenberg is two tablets. It gives the Pennsylvania tablet of 240 lines and the Yale tablet of 292, whose obverse the editors call very badly preserved. They run from Enkidu’s first bread and wine, “Eat food, O Enkidu” and “Drink wine, the custom of the land!”, to the departure for the forest. Humbaba’s death, Ishtar, Enkidu’s death, the journey and the flood are all absent.
Langdon (1917), also on Gutenberg, is one tablet. It is the first edition of the Pennsylvania tablet, corrected by Jastrow and Clay.
George Smith’s 1872 paper on Wikisource gives the flood alone, read from fragments, and is of historical interest.

Where Thompson has Gilgamesh ask who is unconquered by death, Jastrow and Clay eight years earlier read the same line as “Whoever, my friend, overcomes (?) [terror(?)]”. That is the case for a modern edition.

The people

Gilgamesh

Gilgamesh starts as a menace and ends as a man who has been told no by everyone he meets. His arc depends on his being unteachable for most of the poem: elders, mother, goddess, wine-maker and boatman all give advice, and he takes almost none.

Enkidu

Enkidu is the most moving invention here, because he is educated into death. He runs with animals, is taught sex, bread and wine, and loses the animals. Dying, he curses the woman who civilised him and is talked into blessing her, since she also gave him his friend.

Siduri

Siduri, whom Thompson calls the Wine-maker, has the speech everyone remembers, on the Sippar tablet: “Gilgamish, why runnest thou, (inasmuch as) the life which thou seekest, Thou canst not find?” She then tells him what is left: “Gilgamish, full be thy belly”, clean clothes, and “Cherish the little one holding thy hand”. It may be the wisest advice in the poem, yet he ignores it and walks on. Jastrow and Clay read it as an innkeeper’s invitation to stay, which is a reminder that it can be taken more than one way.

Ishtar and Humbaba

Ishtar is written with hostility, and her rejection is comic before it turns lethal. Humbaba has grown since 2014: new text makes him less an ogre than a foreign ruler.

Utnapishtim

Thompson’s Uta-Napishtim is the only person who has what Gilgamesh wants, and he has no method to offer, since it was a one-off award by the gods. His story is the poem’s cruellest joke: Gilgamesh asks how not to die, and the answer is an anecdote.

George Smith and the flood

The modern history of the poem begins on 3 December 1872, when George Smith, a British Museum assistant who had trained as a banknote engraver, read a paper on a Chaldean account of the deluge to the Society of Biblical Archaeology. The prime minister, Gladstone, was in the audience. Smith’s colleagues later told the story that on recognising the tablet he began taking off his clothes.

The tablet, K.3375, is the eleventh of the series, though Smith did not yet know the shape of the whole. He could not even read the hero’s name, and he said so: he provisionally called him Izdubar. The parallel with Genesis made the news, especially the birds: “I put forth a dove, and released (her)”, then a swallow, then a raven. Andrew George says few now doubt that the biblical story derives from a Mesopotamian one. Many scholars also think the Gilgamesh editor took his flood from another poem, Atra-Hasis, so the most famous episode is itself borrowed. The Daily Telegraph paid for Smith to go to Nineveh for more tablets in 1873, and he died near Aleppo in 1876 on a later journey, aged thirty-six.

A poem still growing

The text is not closed. In 1998 Theodore Kwasman identified a British Museum fragment thought to preserve the epic’s first lines. Since 2015 the Fragmentarium project has used machine matching to join more pieces, and its results have reached published translations.

The best known recent find is the Sulaymaniyah tablet, T.1447. It is often called a 2015 discovery because that is when the news spread, but the museum acquired it in 2011, among other tablets of unknown provenance, and Farouk Al-Rawi and Andrew George published it in the Journal of Cuneiform Studies in 2014. It adds some twenty lines to Tablet V. The Cedar Forest turns out to be a noisy jungle of monkeys, cicadas and birds whose din entertains Humbaba like court music, and after the killing Enkidu seems to regret turning the forest into a wasteland. George judges the script Neo-Babylonian, probably no later than the sixth century BC, and calls that judgement subjective. The museum’s own label says Old Babylonian, a date repeated online and best not trusted.

The Gilgamesh Dream Tablet shows the darker side of the trade: brought illegally into the United States, bought by Hobby Lobby in 2014, seized in 2019, and returned to Iraq in September 2021.

Afterlives

The poem disappeared from memory for some two thousand years, yet echoes persist. Fragments of the Book of Giants at Qumran name Gilgamesh and Humbaba. Several scholars see Siduri’s advice behind Ecclesiastes, and numerous others, including Tzvi Abusch, have compared the epic with the Iliad and the Odyssey. How direct any of this was remains disputed.

Since Smith it has become a modern possession. John Gardner and John Maier published a translation in 1984, David Ferry a verse rendering in 1992, and Simon Armitage a verse translation in 2026. An episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, “Darmok”, has Picard tell the story to an alien at the point of death.

How to read it

Buy a modern version if you can. Andrew George’s Penguin (1999) is the one to have: it marks gaps honestly, and adds the Old Babylonian and Sumerian material. His two-volume Oxford edition (2003) is the scholarly reference.
Other good choices. Benjamin Foster’s Norton edition (second edition 2019) has useful contexts. Stephanie Dalley’s Myths from Mesopotamia (Oxford, revised 2000) sets it beside Atra-Hasis. Sophus Helle (Yale, 2021) has a strong essay on the poem’s form.
Know what the popular ones do. N. K. Sandars (1960) is smooth continuous prose that hides the gaps and predates much of the evidence. Stephen Mitchell (2004) is a poet’s version, and one reviewer objected to its commentary on the Iraq War.
Reading free, find Thompson’s 1928 translation. Start with Tablet VII and Tablet X, and read his notes. His spellings are Gilgamish, Erech and Uta-Napishtim.

Homer, The Iliad (c. 750–650 BC). Another hero undone by the death of his closest friend, and the obvious comparison.
Homer, The Odyssey (c. 700 BC). The other half of the comparison, with a hero offered immortality who, unlike Gilgamesh, turns it down.
Anonymous, Genesis 6–9. Read it directly after Tablet XI and compare what each flood is for.
David Damrosch, The Buried Book (2007). The story of how the poem was lost and found, with Smith at the centre.
Michael Schmidt, Gilgamesh: The Life of a Poem (2019). A poet and publisher on the translations and what they did to the poem.