What is the Epic of Gilgamesh?

The story in brief

The standard version is spread across twelve clay tablets. Its plot runs roughly as follows:

1. Gilgamesh, part god and part man, rules Uruk as a proud, harsh king.
2. The gods create Enkidu, a wild man, to challenge him. After a fight, they become best friends.
3. Together they defeat the forest monster Humbaba and kill the Bull of Heaven.
4. As punishment, the gods cause Enkidu to die.
5. Grief-stricken and afraid of death, Gilgamesh travels to find Utnapishtim, the only human granted eternal life.
6. Utnapishtim tells him about a great flood. Gilgamesh finds a plant of youth, but a snake steals it.
7. He returns home, accepting that he is mortal and finding meaning in the city walls he built.

The flood story

Utnapishtim’s tale closely resembles the story of Noah’s Ark: a god warns him to build a boat, he saves his family and animals, and after the flood he sends out birds to look for dry land. Scholars think both stories draw on older Mesopotamian flood traditions.

How it was rediscovered

In the 1850s, archaeologists found thousands of tablets at the ruins of Nineveh, in the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal. In 1872, George Smith, working at the British Museum, translated the flood tablet. He was reportedly so excited that he began undressing in the reading room.

New fragments are still being found, and the story isn’t complete.

Why it still matters

• Themes of friendship, grief, fame and mortality remain universal.
• It shows that literature existed long before Homer’s Iliad or the Bible.

The tablets were written in the first writing system, Sumerian cuneiform. For Greek myths, see who defeated the Minotaur.