The Story of the Flood

Gilgamesh asks how he became immortal. Utnapishtim tells him a secret of the gods. Long ago, the gods tired of the noise of human beings and sent a flood. Ea, forbidden to warn any mortal, whispered through the wall of Utnapishtim's reed hut: build a ship, take aboard the seed of every living thing. The rains came; they lasted seven days; the ship grounded on Mount Nimush. Utnapishtim sent a dove and a swallow; both returned. A raven did not. He made a sacrifice. Enlil arrived in fury and was talked down by Ea. The compromise: Utnapishtim and his wife made immortal, once — no council to be assembled again.

Then the test. If Gilgamesh wants immortality, let him defeat sleep — six days and seven nights. He sits down to begin and is asleep within the first hour. Utnapishtim tells his wife to bake one loaf for each day he sleeps. Gilgamesh wakes after a week to find seven loaves at his elbow — the first dry as dust, the seventh still warm. He has failed.

As Gilgamesh prepares to leave, Utnapishtim's wife persuades her husband to give him one consolation. A plant grows on the floor of the freshwater sea — thorny, restoring youth to any man who eats it. Gilgamesh ties stones to his feet, dives, surfaces with it. On the way home he stops at a pool to bathe and lays the plant on the bank. A serpent takes it, sheds its skin, slips back into the water with the renewal he had paid for. He weeps. He returns to Uruk with Urshanabi and shows him the walls. Examine the brickwork, he says, the foundations laid by the seven sages. One league the city; one league the gardens; one league the temple grounds. Look at what was built. The poem ends there.