The World's Oldest Story About Fearing Death: An Easy Guide to the Epic of Gilgamesh

Here is the Epic of Gilgamesh summarised for beginners. Gilgamesh, the proud king of the city of Uruk in ancient Mesopotamia, is oppressing his people, so the gods create a wild man, Enkidu, to be his equal. The two fight, become close friends, kill the monster Humbaba in the Cedar Forest and slay the Bull of Heaven sent by the goddess Ishtar. As punishment the gods make Enkidu fall ill and die. Terrified of his own death, Gilgamesh travels to the edge of the world to find Utnapishtim, the man who survived a great flood and was given eternal life, only to learn that immortality is not meant for humans. He returns to Uruk empty-handed but wiser. This guide explains where the story comes from, how it unfolds tablet by tablet, who its characters are, what it says about friendship and death, and why a poem written in cuneiform still speaks to readers today.

What it is, and why "oldest" comes with a footnote

The Epic of Gilgamesh is an epic from ancient Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what is now Iraq, and it is regarded as the world's oldest surviving example of narrative literature. But it was not written all at once. Its history begins with five separate Sumerian poems about Gilgamesh, some of which may date to around 2100 BCE. These stories were later combined into a single epic in Akkadian. The first surviving version of that combined epic, called the Old Babylonian version, dates to the 18th century BCE and opens with the words "Surpassing All Other Kings"; only a few of its tablets survive.

The version most people read today is the later Standard Babylonian version, compiled by a scholar-scribe named Sîn-lēqi-unninni sometime between the 13th and 10th centuries BCE. It opens "He Who Saw the Deep" and is spread across twelve clay tablets, of which about two-thirds have been recovered. So when someone asks who wrote Gilgamesh, the honest answer is: many people over more than a thousand years, with one named editor near the end. Sîn-lēqi-unninni is credited with bringing the theme of mortality to the foreground, turning the hero from an adventurer into a wise man.

Was Gilgamesh a real king?

Possibly. Gilgamesh may have been a historical king of the Sumerian city-state of Uruk who was worshipped as a god after his death. If so, he probably ruled sometime in the Early Dynastic Period, roughly 2900 to 2350 BC, and he became a major figure in Sumerian legend around 2100 BC. There is also some indirect evidence. Artefacts from around 2600 BCE linked to Enmebaragesi of Kish, who appears in the legends as the father of one of Gilgamesh's enemies, have lent credibility to the idea that Gilgamesh really existed. The epic itself, of course, turns him into a figure of legend: two-thirds god and one-third human.

How it was rediscovered

For more than two thousand years the story was forgotten. In the early 1850s, archaeologists including Austen Henry Layard and Hormuzd Rassam found about 15,000 fragments of cuneiform tablets in the ruined library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal at Nineveh. In 1872 a British Museum researcher, George Smith, read translated fragments to the Society of Biblical Archaeology, and he published fuller translations in 1875 and 1876. His audience was astonished above all by the flood story, which closely resembled Noah's.

The work of recovery has not stopped. In 1998 a scholar found, in a British Museum storeroom, a fragment believed to hold the epic's opening lines, unexamined for more than a century. Since 2015 a project using machine learning has matched further pieces of tablets, and new passages were added to English translations published in 2020 and 2021. Even today the epic remains incomplete, with gaps that translators fill from older versions.

The story in brief

A tyrant and his equal. Gilgamesh is exhausting and abusing the people of Uruk, who cry to the gods for help. The gods answer by creating Enkidu, enormously strong and covered in hair, who lives among wild animals. A trapper complains about him, and the temple woman Shamhat is sent to tame him. Afterwards his animal companions flee from him, and he learns to eat bread, drink beer and live among shepherds. Hearing how Gilgamesh mistreats brides, Enkidu goes to Uruk and blocks his way. They wrestle fiercely; Enkidu admits Gilgamesh is stronger, and the two become friends.

The Cedar Forest. Gilgamesh proposes a journey to the Cedar Forest to kill its guardian Humbaba and win lasting fame. On the way he has terrifying dreams that Enkidu insists are good omens. With help from the sun god Shamash, who sends thirteen winds to bind Humbaba, they capture the monster. Humbaba begs for his life and Gilgamesh feels pity, but Enkidu urges him to kill it to secure his reputation forever, and they do.

The Bull of Heaven and the death of Enkidu. The goddess Ishtar proposes to Gilgamesh, and he rejects her by listing how badly she treated her previous lovers. Furious, she sends the Bull of Heaven against Uruk; the friends kill it and insult her. The gods decide that one of the heroes must die for killing Humbaba and the Bull, and Enkidu is struck with a fatal illness. Gilgamesh calls on mountains, rivers, animals and all of Uruk to mourn his friend, and he tears his hair and clothes in grief.

The journey to the end of the world. Now afraid of his own death, Gilgamesh wanders the wilderness in animal skins and sets out to find Utnapishtim, "the Faraway". He passes the scorpion-people guarding the sun's tunnel at Mount Mashu and meets Siduri, a woman who keeps a tavern, who tries to talk him out of his quest and urges him to be content with life's simple pleasures. The ferryman Urshanabi carries him across the deadly Waters of Death.

The flood and the lost plant. Utnapishtim tells how the gods sent a great flood, and how the god Enki secretly told him to build a boat and load it with his family, craftsmen and animals. After a six-day storm the boat came to rest on a mountain, and he released a dove, a swallow and a raven to find dry land; afterwards the gods granted him and his wife eternal life. But that gift was unique. To prove the point, Utnapishtim challenges Gilgamesh to stay awake for six days and seven nights, and Gilgamesh immediately falls asleep: the man who wants to defeat death cannot even defeat sleep. As a parting gift he learns of a plant on the sea floor that restores youth. He ties stones to his feet, retrieves it, and then, while he is bathing, a snake steals it and sheds its skin as it goes. Gilgamesh weeps, returns to Uruk, and proudly shows the ferryman the city's great walls. A twelfth tablet, probably added later, tells a separate story in which Enkidu describes the underworld.

The main characters

Gilgamesh begins as a brilliant but cruel ruler and ends as a man who has accepted his limits. Enkidu is his opposite and mirror: a creature of the wilderness who becomes civilised, the friend who teaches Gilgamesh what it means to love someone and to lose them. Shamhat is the woman who brings Enkidu into human society; Shamash, the sun god, protects the heroes; Ishtar is the dangerous goddess whose anger leads to Enkidu's death. Siduri and Utnapishtim are the two figures who, in different ways, tell Gilgamesh that he cannot have what he is looking for.

What the story is about

At its heart, the epic is about mortality. Utnapishtim's message is that when the gods created humans they gave them death as their share and kept life for themselves. Gilgamesh's two great journeys mirror each other: the first seeks fame, a way of living on through one's name; the second seeks literal immortality and fails. What remains is the city he built. The poem begins and ends by praising Uruk's walls, suggesting that human works and human memory are the only kind of permanence we get.

It is also one of the first great stories of friendship. The bond between Gilgamesh and Enkidu changes both men, and Enkidu's death, not any threat to Gilgamesh himself, is what breaks the king open. The theme of civilisation versus wilderness runs through Enkidu's story as well: he gains knowledge and companionship by leaving the wild, but loses his innocence, and on his deathbed he briefly curses the people who changed him before forgiving them.

Its long shadow

Scholars have pointed out many parallels with the Hebrew Bible. The flood story in Genesis follows the Gilgamesh flood "point by point and in the same order", according to the Assyriologist Andrew George, and few doubt that it derives from a Mesopotamian account; others suggest both drew on a shared tradition. The taming of Enkidu has long been compared with Adam and Eve, and a snake stealing the plant of life appears in both traditions. Many scholars also see influence on Homer: one has described the poem as combining the power and tragedy of the Iliad with the wanderings and marvels of the Odyssey. Later legends of Alexander the Great searching for the water of life borrowed from Gilgamesh's quest, and in modern times Hayao Miyazaki's 1997 film Princess Mononoke was partly based on the Cedar Forest episode.

To start reading, choose a modern translation that marks the gaps in the tablets clearly, so you can see where the clay is broken. Read tablets 1 and 2 for the friendship, 6 to 8 for Enkidu's death, and 10 and 11 for the journey, the flood and the snake.

Learn with Gilgamesh: English words and phrases

Word or phrase	Meaning	Example
to make a name for oneself	to become well known through achievement	She made a name for herself as a chef.
a kindred spirit	someone who thinks and feels like you	I found a kindred spirit in my roommate.
the quest for immortality	the search to live forever	Science fiction loves the quest for immortality.
to shed one's skin	to leave an old identity behind	After the move, he felt he'd shed his skin.
set in stone	fixed and impossible to change	The schedule isn't set in stone.

Try this: Write three sentences about a friend who changed you, using "a kindred spirit" and "to make a name for oneself".