What is the Epic of Gilgamesh? The oldest great story

The Epic of Gilgamesh is a long poem from ancient Mesopotamia, in what is now Iraq, and the oldest great work of literature that survives. It tells of Gilgamesh, a proud king of the city of Uruk, who gains a friend, Enkidu, loses him to death, and travels to the end of the world to find a way to live forever. He fails, and comes home knowing what a mortal can and can't have.

In short

• Poems about Gilgamesh were first written in Sumerian around 2100 BC; the fullest version, in Akkadian on 12 clay tablets, was edited between about 1300 and 1000 BC.
• Its story turns on friendship, grief and death: the hero's search for immortality ends with a snake stealing the plant that would have made him young.
• Its flood story, found by George Smith in 1872, runs so close to Noah's in Genesis that most scholars think both draw on one Mesopotamian tradition.

Who was Gilgamesh?

Gilgamesh was probably a real king of Uruk, a city in southern Mesopotamia, who would have ruled around 2700 BC; his name appears in the Sumerian King List, and Enmebaragesi of Kish, named in the legends as the father of one of his enemies, is known from objects of about 2600 BC. Nothing beyond that is known of the man. In the poem he is two-thirds god and one-third human, the son of the goddess Ninsun, the builder of Uruk's great walls, and at first a tyrant who exhausts the young men of his city and claims its brides.

The text was written in cuneiform, wedge-shaped signs pressed into wet clay with a reed. That is why it survived: baked or sun-dried clay lasts in the ground for thousands of years, where papyrus and parchment rot.

What happens in the Epic of Gilgamesh?

The best-known version, the Standard Babylonian, fills 12 tablets of up to about 300 lines each. About two-thirds of it can now be read, with gaps filled from older copies. Here is the story, tablet by tablet.

Tablet	What happens
I	The people of Uruk cry to the gods about their king. The gods make Enkidu, a wild man who lives with animals. A temple woman, Shamhat, brings him into human life.
II	Enkidu blocks Gilgamesh at a wedding; they wrestle, and become friends. Gilgamesh proposes killing Humbaba, guardian of the Cedar Forest, for fame.
III–V	The pair travel to the forest, where Gilgamesh has frightening dreams. They capture Humbaba, who begs for his life; on Enkidu's urging they kill him and fell the cedars.
VI	The goddess Ishtar asks Gilgamesh to marry her. He refuses, listing what happened to her past lovers. She sends the Bull of Heaven; the heroes kill it, and Enkidu insults her.
VII–VIII	The gods decide one of them must die. Enkidu falls ill and dies after 12 days. Gilgamesh mourns him and holds a great funeral.
IX–X	Terrified of his own death, Gilgamesh wanders the wild in animal skins, passes through the dark tunnel of the sun, and crosses the Waters of Death to find Utnapishtim, the one man the gods made immortal.
XI	Utnapishtim tells of the flood. He challenges Gilgamesh to stay awake for a week; Gilgamesh sleeps. He is told of a plant that restores youth, dives for it, and loses it to a snake. He returns to Uruk and shows the ferryman its walls.
XII	A separate older story, translated and added on: Enkidu, alive again, goes down to the underworld and returns as a ghost to describe it.

The turn of the whole poem is Enkidu's death. Before it, Gilgamesh wants a name that will outlast him; after it, he wants not to die at all. The tavern keeper Siduri, in the Old Babylonian version, gives him the advice he won't take yet: fill your belly, enjoy each day, hold the child who holds your hand. The poem ends where it began, with the walls of Uruk, and the suggestion that what lasts is what people build and pass on.

How did the epic come together over 2,000 years?

The epic wasn't written by one author at one time. It grew, and the copies that survive span about two millennia.

When	Version
About 2100 BC	Five separate poems in Sumerian about Gilgamesh, including Gilgamesh and Huwawa, the forest adventure
About 1800 BC	The Old Babylonian version in Akkadian, the first to join the episodes into one story; it opened "Surpassing all other kings"
About 1300–1000 BC	The Standard Babylonian version, credited to a scholar-priest named Sin-leqi-unninni; it opens "He who saw the deep" and puts mortality at the center
7th century BC	Copies kept in the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal at Nineveh
1849–1853	Austen Henry Layard and Hormuzd Rassam dig thousands of tablet fragments from Nineveh, which go to the British Museum
1872	George Smith reads the flood tablet and presents it to the Society of Biblical Archaeology on 3 December
Since 2015	New pieces keep being placed, many through computer matching of fragments in the Electronic Babylonian Library's Fragmentarium

Sin-leqi-unninni is one of the first named editors in literature, though "author" would overstate it: as the World History Encyclopedia puts it, he worked from older material but made something new of it. When Smith first published the story, the hero's name couldn't yet be read correctly, and he called him Izdubar.

How close is the flood story to Noah's?

Very close, and in the same order. Smith's discovery caused a sensation because readers in 1872 had thought Genesis the oldest account of the flood. By a story later told at the British Museum, he was so excited on realizing what he was reading that he began taking off his clothes.

	Gilgamesh, Tablet XI	Genesis 6–9
Who survives	Utnapishtim, his family, craftsmen and animals	Noah, his family and animals
Who warns him	The god Ea (Enki), against the other gods' decision	God, who decided on the flood
The boat	Sealed with pitch, built to exact measurements	Sealed with pitch, built to exact measurements
How long	Six days and seven nights of storm	40 days of rain, waters lasting months
Where it lands	Mount Nimush	The mountains of Ararat
The birds	A dove and a swallow return; a raven doesn't	A raven goes to and fro; a dove returns, then brings an olive leaf, then doesn't return
Afterward	A sacrifice; the gods smell the sweet savor	A sacrifice; God smells the pleasing odor

The differences matter as much as the likenesses. In Gilgamesh, many gods quarrel, regret the flood and give no clear reason for it; in Genesis one God sends it for human wickedness and makes a covenant afterward. An older Babylonian poem, Atrahasis, tells almost the same flood story, and a Sumerian one gives the hero a third name, Ziusudra. Most scholars conclude that Genesis and Gilgamesh draw on a shared Mesopotamian flood tradition, retold in different ways, rather than one simply copying the other. Some scholars hold that the writers of Genesis knew a Mesopotamian version and reworked it; others stress a common source, retold independently.

Why does it still matter?

It is the earliest long story that survives about the questions every literature returns to: what friendship is worth, how to grieve, and how to live knowing you will die. It also shows literature as a chain. Episodes travel from Sumerian to Akkadian to Hittite and Hurrian translations, and scholars see echoes of it in Greek epic, which is why it is often read beside the Odyssey, another tale of a hero at the edge of the world who chooses home over immortality. Its shape, a call to adventure, trials, a descent and a return changed, fits the hero's journey that later critics would describe.

And its survival is a story in itself. Tablets dug up in the 19th century were read for the first time in the 20th and 21st, and the poem is still growing as fragments are joined. Few works of art have been lost so completely and found again in pieces.

Check yourself

• Without looking back: why does Gilgamesh set out to find Utnapishtim, and why does he fail?
• How did one poem come to exist in versions written more than a thousand years apart?
• Name two ways the flood in Gilgamesh resembles the flood in Genesis, and one way it differs.

Sources

• The Eternal Life of Gilgamesh: Literary Immortality — World History Encyclopedia, Joshua J. Mark, 2026
• Epic of Gilgamesh — Wikipedia
• Gilgamesh and Huwawa, version A — Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature, University of Oxford
• An Old Babylonian Version of the Gilgamesh Epic — Morris Jastrow and Albert T. Clay, 1920, Project Gutenberg
• Genesis 8 — Sefaria
• Electronic Babylonian Library — Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich