Epic of Gilgamesh: The World's Oldest Great Work of Literature

The Epic of Gilgamesh is a Mesopotamian poem about Gilgamesh, a legendary king of Uruk, his friendship with the wild man Enkidu, and his failed quest to escape death. It grew from Sumerian poems composed around 2100 BC into a long Akkadian epic, the most famous version of which was compiled around 1200 BC. Lost for two thousand years and rediscovered on clay tablets from Nineveh in the 19th century, it is widely regarded as the oldest great work of world literature.

Gilgamesh, king of Uruk

Gilgamesh was remembered as a ruler of Uruk, the great city of southern Mesopotamia. The Sumerian King List names him as the fifth king of Uruk’s first dynasty and credits him with a reign of 126 years, a clearly legendary figure. If he was a historical ruler, he probably lived sometime between about 2800 and 2500 BC.

No inscription from Gilgamesh’s own time survives. However, later tradition linked him with real kings such as Enmebaragesi of Kish, whose existence is confirmed by inscriptions. By the late third millennium BC Gilgamesh was worshipped as a god of the underworld, and the kings of the Third Dynasty of Ur, notably Shulgi, called him their divine brother.

From Sumerian poems to an epic

The oldest Gilgamesh stories are five separate poems in Sumerian. They are known by modern titles: Gilgamesh and Huwawa, Gilgamesh and the Bull of Heaven, Gilgamesh and Aga, the Death of Gilgamesh, and Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the Netherworld. They were probably composed around 2100 BC, under the Third Dynasty of Ur, though most surviving copies were written by trainee scribes about three centuries later.

During the Old Babylonian period, around 1800 BC, a poet or poets combined these episodes into a single story in Akkadian, the Semitic language of Babylon. This version, known from its opening words as “Surpassing all other kings”, survives only in fragments.

Over the following centuries the story spread far beyond Mesopotamia. Fragments have been found at Hattusa, the Hittite capital in Anatolia, including translations into Hittite and Hurrian, as well as at Emar and Ugarit in Syria and at Megiddo in the Levant.

The Standard Babylonian version

The best-known form is the Standard Babylonian version, compiled roughly between 1300 and 1000 BC. Babylonian tradition credited it to Sin-leqi-unninni, a scholar-priest of Uruk. It begins with the words “He who saw the Deep”, which became the poem’s ancient title.

This version fills twelve clay tablets. The first eleven tell a continuous story; the twelfth is an Akkadian translation of part of the Sumerian poem about Enkidu in the Netherworld, attached as a kind of appendix. The most complete copies come from Nineveh, many from the Library of Ashurbanipal, and date from the 7th century BC.

The story and the Flood

The epic opens by praising the walls of Uruk and its king, who is two-thirds god and one-third human. Gilgamesh is powerful but oppressive, and the people pray for relief. The gods create Enkidu, a wild man who lives with animals. Through his encounter with Shamhat, a temple woman, Enkidu becomes civilised and comes to Uruk, where he wrestles Gilgamesh. The two become inseparable friends.

Together they travel to the Cedar Forest and kill its guardian, Humbaba (called Huwawa in Sumerian), and cut down its cedars. When the goddess Ishtar proposes marriage to Gilgamesh, he insults her by listing the fates of her previous lovers. In revenge she sends the Bull of Heaven against Uruk, and the heroes kill it.

The gods decide that one of the friends must die for these deeds, and Enkidu falls ill and dies. Gilgamesh’s grief is the emotional centre of the poem. Terrified of death, he wanders to the ends of the earth to find Utnapishtim, the one man granted eternal life.

On Tablet XI, Utnapishtim tells how the gods decided to destroy humanity with a great flood. The god Ea secretly warned him to build a boat and bring aboard his family, craftsmen and animals. After a storm of six days and seven nights, the boat came to rest on Mount Nimush, and Utnapishtim sent out a dove, a swallow and a raven to look for dry land. Afterwards the gods made him and his wife immortal.

This episode was adapted from an older Babylonian poem, the Epic of Atrahasis, which tells the flood story in a fuller form. Utnapishtim then sets Gilgamesh tests he fails, and tells him of a plant that restores youth. Gilgamesh obtains it from the bottom of the sea, but a snake steals it while he bathes. He returns to Uruk and, in the poem’s final lines, shows its great walls to the boatman who brought him back, echoing the opening.

Themes and meaning

At its heart the epic is about mortality. Gilgamesh begins as a king who seeks fame through great deeds, believing that a lasting name can overcome death. Enkidu’s death shatters this confidence and turns his ambition into a desperate search for physical immortality.

The poem’s answer is subtle. In the Old Babylonian version, a tavern-keeper named Shiduri advises Gilgamesh to enjoy food, clean clothes, his family and the life he has, since the gods reserved eternal life for themselves. The Standard Babylonian version ends instead with the walls of Uruk, suggesting that a king’s lasting achievement is the city and the community he leaves behind.

The epic also explores the boundary between nature and civilisation, through Enkidu’s transformation from a wild man into a citizen, and the relationship between humans and gods, who appear powerful but often capricious.

Since its rediscovery, the epic has been translated into dozens of languages. Its friendship between two heroes has invited comparisons with Achilles and Patroclus in Homer’s Iliad, and some scholars argue that Mesopotamian literature influenced early Greek poetry, though the routes are debated.

Modern writers, composers and artists have adapted the story, and it is now a standard text in courses on world literature. For many readers it offers the first encounter with the voice of ancient Mesopotamia.

Rediscovery: George Smith and the Flood Tablet

The epic was forgotten after the end of cuneiform writing in the first centuries AD. Its rediscovery began between 1849 and the mid-1850s, when Austen Henry Layard and Hormuzd Rassam excavated thousands of tablets at Nineveh and sent them to the British Museum.

George Smith, a self-taught former banknote engraver who worked at the museum on the tablets, recognised in 1872 that one of them described a flood and a boat landing on a mountain, followed by the sending out of a bird. The parallel with the biblical story of Noah caused a sensation. According to a later account by a museum colleague, Smith was so excited that he began to undress, though this anecdote is second-hand.

On 3 December 1872, Smith presented his findings to the Society of Biblical Archaeology in London. The Daily Telegraph then paid for him to travel to Nineveh to search for missing pieces, and in 1873 he found a fragment that filled part of a gap in the flood story. Smith died in 1876 near Aleppo during a later expedition, aged 36.

Pieces of the epic are still being found. Andrew George’s critical edition of 2003 brought together all known manuscripts. In 2015 the Sulaymaniyah Museum in Iraqi Kurdistan published a newly acquired tablet adding about 20 previously unknown lines to Tablet V, describing the noisy, lush Cedar Forest.

The epic also became part of debates over looted antiquities. A small tablet with part of the story, known as the Gilgamesh Dream Tablet, was seized by United States authorities after it had been illegally exported and sold, and it was returned to Iraq in 2021.

Myths and facts

Myth: the Bible copied the Gilgamesh flood story word for word. The Genesis account shares many motifs but differs in its theology, characters and details. Scholars generally see a shared Mesopotamian tradition, with Atrahasis and Gilgamesh as older forms.

Myth: the Epic of Gilgamesh is one fixed text. It existed in several languages and versions over more than a thousand years, and much remains fragmentary.

Fact: it is not the oldest written literature. Shorter Sumerian texts are older, as is writing itself, which began with the invention of cuneiform. But Gilgamesh is the oldest long narrative poem to survive in substantial form.

Timeline

• c. 2800–2500 BC: A possible historical King Gilgamesh rules Uruk.
• c. 2100 BC: Sumerian Gilgamesh poems are probably composed under the Third Dynasty of Ur.
• c. 1800 BC: Old Babylonian Akkadian epic, “Surpassing all other kings”.
• c. 1300–1000 BC: Standard Babylonian version attributed to Sin-leqi-unninni.
• 7th century BC: Copies made for the library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh.
• 1850s: Layard and Rassam excavate tablets at Nineveh.
• 3 December 1872: George Smith announces the Flood story in London.
• 2003: Andrew George publishes the critical edition of the Babylonian epic.
• 2021: The Gilgamesh Dream Tablet is returned to Iraq.

Why it matters

The Epic of Gilgamesh asks questions that remain universal: what friendship means, how to face grief, and how to live knowing that death cannot be avoided. Its rediscovery transformed the study of the ancient world and of the Bible, and it now stands at the beginning of the story of world literature.