11.8 — Mesopotamia: Gilgamesh, the First Story Written Down

It is the oldest surviving work of literature.

The Sumerian poems about Gilgamesh go back to around 2100 BCE. The standard Akkadian version, on twelve clay tablets, is from around 1200 BCE. The best-preserved copy came from the library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh and was excavated in the 1850s.

And it is about a man who cannot accept that he will die.

The king

Gilgamesh is king of Uruk, a real city in southern Mesopotamia, and he was probably a real king around 2700 BCE.

And he is a bad one.

The poem opens with the citizens complaining. He takes what he wants, he exhausts the young men, and he takes women from their families. He is stronger than anybody and there is no check on him.

So the gods make one.

Enkidu

A wild man, made from clay, living with the animals, eating grass, drinking at the waterhole with the herds.

He fills in the hunters' traps and protects the animals.

**And the way he is brought into the human world is one of the strangest passages in ancient literature: a woman, Shamhat, is sent to him, and they spend six days and seven nights together, and afterwards the animals will not come near him.

He has become human, and the price is that the wilderness rejects him.

She teaches him to eat bread, to drink beer, to wash and to wear clothes.

Then he comes to Uruk to confront Gilgamesh, who is about to take a bride on her wedding night.

They fight, enormously, and wreck a doorway, and Gilgamesh wins narrowly.

And then they embrace and become inseparable.

The king's cruelty ends because somebody finally matched him.

The friendship

And this is what the poem is actually about, and it is the oldest depiction of friendship in literature.

They do everything together. The text is warm about it in a way ancient literature usually is not — they hold hands, they kiss, Gilgamesh loves him "like a wife," and when Enkidu is dying Gilgamesh covers his face like a bride's.

Together they go to the Cedar Forest and kill its guardian, Humbaba, and cut down the great cedars.

And Humbaba begs for his life, and Enkidu tells Gilgamesh to finish it.

Then Gilgamesh refuses the goddess Ishtar — insultingly, listing what happened to her previous lovers — and she sends the Bull of Heaven, and they kill that too.

And the gods decide that one of them must die for it.

The death

Enkidu sickens and dies slowly, over twelve days.

And the poem does not spare it. He curses the hunter and the woman who brought him into human life, then takes it back and blesses her instead. He describes a dream of the underworld — a house where the dead sit in darkness, dressed like birds, eating dust. He is frightened and he says so.

Gilgamesh will not let the body be buried.

**He stays with it, weeping, for six days and seven nights, until — and the text says this plainly — a maggot fell out of its nose.

Then he buries him.

What Gilgamesh does next

And this is the part that makes the poem permanent.

He does not grieve and recover.

He is seized by terror — not of Enkidu's death but of his own — and he says so directly: I am afraid of death, and I roam the wilderness. Shall I not die too? Am I not like Enkidu?

And he goes looking for a way not to.

He leaves the city, abandons the kingship, wears skins, and travels enormous distances to find Utnapishtim, the one man who was granted immortality.

On the way he meets a tavern keeper, Siduri, who gives him the advice the poem's older version treats as the answer:

The life you seek you will never find. When the gods created mankind, they allotted death to humanity and kept life for themselves. Fill your belly. Make merry day and night. Let your clothes be clean, your head washed, and bathe in water. Look at the child who holds your hand, and let your wife delight in your embrace. This is the work of mankind.

He does not listen.

The flood

He reaches Utnapishtim, who tells him how he became immortal, and the story is one of the most consequential passages ever recovered.

The gods decided to destroy humanity with a flood — because, in the fuller Mesopotamian version, people had become too numerous and too noisy.

One god warned Utnapishtim, who built a boat to specified dimensions, sealed it with pitch, and took his family, craftsmen and animals aboard.

The flood came, and it was so terrible the gods themselves were frightened and cowered.

It rained for days. The boat came to rest on a mountain. He released a dove, which returned. Then a swallow, which returned. Then a raven, which did not.

And he offered a sacrifice, and the gods gathered around it.

When this was published in 1872 it caused an enormous public reaction, because the Genesis flood narrative is clearly related to it and this version is considerably older. The scholarly position now is that both draw on a common Mesopotamian tradition — and Volume VIII covers what that means for reading the Hebrew Bible.

And Utnapishtim's point is that his immortality was a unique event that cannot be repeated.

The two failures

He is given a test: stay awake for six days and seven nights.

He falls asleep immediately, and sleeps for a week, and is only convinced by a row of loaves baked one per day, each staler than the last.

A man who cannot stay awake for a week is asking to defeat death.

Then he is told of a plant at the bottom of the sea that restores youth.

He ties stones to his feet, sinks, and gets it.

And on the way home he stops to bathe in a pool, and a snake takes the plant and slides away, shedding its skin.

That is why snakes shed their skin and humans do not.

The ending

He comes home with nothing.

And the poem ends with him showing the walls of Uruk to the boatman who brought him — the same lines with which the poem opened.

Go up on the wall of Uruk and walk about. Examine the foundation, inspect the brickwork. Is it not fired brick? Did not seven sages lay its foundations?

The city he abandoned. The work he did as a king. The thing that will outlast him.

And that is the answer: not immortality, but the wall, and the friend, and the child holding your hand, and clean clothes, and bathing in water.

Which is Siduri's advice, arrived at the hard way, after crossing the world to be told it twice.

Why this is the story to know

Four thousand years old, and there is nothing in it that needs translating.

**A man is cruel because nothing checks him. Somebody matches him and becomes his friend and he stops being cruel. The friend dies. He cannot accept it. He refuses to bury the body until it visibly decays. He becomes terrified of his own death and abandons everything to escape it. He fails, twice, in humiliating ways. And he comes home and looks at what he built.

Every single element of that is available to a reader today without any adjustment at all.

And the specific finding — that the fear of death arrives not when you contemplate mortality but when somebody you love dies — is exactly right and it is the oldest recorded observation in literature.

What to carry from this page

The fear of your own death arrives through somebody else's. Not through philosophy. Four thousand years and this has not changed.

Siduri's advice is the answer and he had to cross the world to accept it. Clean clothes, food, the child holding your hand. You will also not accept it when you first hear it.

A man who cannot stay awake for a week wants to live forever. The test is not cruel; it is diagnostic.

And the poem ends where it began, with a wall. What you built and what you were to people is the whole of what is available, and the oldest story anybody wrote down had already worked that out.

Next: 11.9 — east, to a world made when a giant broke an egg, and to a monkey who could not be contained.