The Epic of Gilgamesh — chapter by chapter
All 12 tablets summarized — the oldest story still being read.
The poem is twelve clay tablets long. Tablets I–II introduce Gilgamesh and Enkidu and bring them together. Tablets III–VI are the heroic adventures — the Cedar Forest, Humbaba, the Bull of Heaven. Tablets VII–VIII are Enkidu's death and the grief that breaks the king. Tablets IX–XI are the long quest for immortality and its failure, ending with the flood story Utnapishtim tells from the far side of the waters of death. Tablet XII is an Akkadian addition, translated from an older Sumerian poem about Enkidu and the Netherworld; many modern editions print it as an appendix.
Tablets I–II · The meeting
A tyrant king, a wild man on the steppe, and the woman who brings them together.
Tablet 1
The prologue praises the walls of Uruk and the king who built them. Then the problem: Gilgamesh is two-thirds god, too strong for his city; he works his subjects to exhaustion and takes brides on their wedding nights. The people pray for relief. The gods agree to act — not by punishing him but by making a counterpart. Aruru pinches off a piece of clay and throws it into the wilderness; Enkidu is born there, raised among gazelles. A trapper finds him at a watering hole and runs to Uruk for help.
Appears: Gilgamesh · Enkidu · Shamhat · Aruru · Ninsun
Tablet 2
Shamhat waits at the watering hole; Enkidu stays with her seven days and seven nights, and the herd no longer recognizes him. She teaches him bread and beer, cuts his hair, dresses him, leads him to Uruk. A wedding is in progress and Gilgamesh is on his way to take the bride. Enkidu plants himself in the doorway. They wrestle through the streets until Gilgamesh, the stronger, throws him down. They look at each other on the floor of the broken doorway and they embrace. From that day they are inseparable.
Appears: Enkidu · Shamhat · Gilgamesh · Ninsun
Tablets III–VI · The adventures
The Cedar Forest, the demon Humbaba, the Bull of Heaven.
Tablet 3
Gilgamesh, restless after Uruk has settled, proposes a journey to the Cedar Forest to kill the demon Humbaba and cut sacred timber. The fame, he says, will outlast them. Enkidu, who has been in those mountains as a wild creature, tries to talk him out of it; the elders try; he ignores them all. His mother Ninsun climbs the temple roof, prays to Shamash, and formally adopts Enkidu as a second son. The smiths forge bronze axes that weigh two hundred and fifty pounds each. The two heroes shoulder them and walk west.
Appears: Gilgamesh · Enkidu · Ninsun · Shamash
Tablet 4
What should be a six-week march the two heroes cover in three days. Each night Gilgamesh has a terrifying dream — a falling mountain, a wild bull, a thunderstorm, a winged demon with a lion's face, fire from heaven. Each morning Enkidu, who has the gift of reading dreams, calmly reinterprets each one as a sign of coming victory. The dreams get worse; the interpretations steadier. They reach the edge of the Cedar Forest at evening and stand looking at it. Then they raise their axes and walk in.
Appears: Gilgamesh · Enkidu · Shamash
Tablet 5
They cut a single cedar. Humbaba hears the axe and charges down through the trees in fury — his face a coil of intestines, his breath fire. The two heroes are nearly broken on the first assault. Then Shamash sends the thirteen winds that pin Humbaba in place. He pleads for his life, offers them every cedar in the forest. Gilgamesh wavers; Enkidu argues against mercy; Gilgamesh strikes. Humbaba's dying curse follows them home along the river. They cut down the great cedars and float them on a raft down the Euphrates back toward Uruk.
Appears: Gilgamesh · Enkidu · Humbaba · Shamash · Enlil
Tablet 6
The two heroes return to Uruk in triumph. Ishtar, goddess of love and war, sees Gilgamesh from her temple and proposes marriage on the spot. He refuses her at length, in one of the great speeches of the ancient world, listing what she has done to the men and animals before him. Ishtar climbs to her father Anu in fury and demands the Bull of Heaven against the city. Enkidu and Gilgamesh kill the bull. Enkidu, in pure insolence, hurls the bull's thigh at Ishtar on the wall. The gods will not let this stand.
Appears: Gilgamesh · Enkidu · Ishtar · Anu · The Bull of Heaven
Tablets VII–VIII · The death
Enkidu sickens, dies, is mourned past the point of decency.
Tablet 7
Enkidu dreams of a council of the gods, furious about the cedars and the Bull of Heaven; one of the heroes must pay. Enlil insists, against Shamash's protest, that it be Enkidu. He wakes and tells Gilgamesh. Within days he sickens. The illness lasts twelve days. He curses Shamhat for civilizing him, then — corrected by Shamash — blesses her instead. He tells Gilgamesh his last dream: the House of Dust, where the kings of the earth sit silent in feathers, eating clay. He turns his face to the wall and dies.
Appears: Enkidu · Gilgamesh · Shamash · Enlil · Shamhat
Tablet 8
Gilgamesh will not let Enkidu be buried. He sits with the body for six days and seven nights, calling the wild things to mourn with him — the gazelles, the bears, the leopards, the cedar of the forest. He covers Enkidu's face like a bride's. He lays out treasure for the journey to the underworld. On the seventh day a worm comes from Enkidu's nostril. The realization is exact and final: this is what my brother is now; this is what I will be. He throws off his royal robes, puts on a lion's skin, and runs out of Uruk.
Appears: Gilgamesh · Enkidu
Tablets IX–XI · The quest
The road to the immortal, the flood, the plant of youth, the snake.
Tablet 9
Gilgamesh wanders the wilderness in a lion's skin, eating what he can kill, looking for the only human who escaped death — Utnapishtim, who survived the flood. He reaches the twin mountains of Mashu, where the sun rises and sets, guarded by scorpion-men whose glance is death. They let him through. He enters the tunnel beneath the mountains and walks for twelve hours in pitch dark, through which the sun races each night. At the twelfth hour he sees a glimmer. He emerges into a garden where the trees bear jewels for fruit — carnelian apples, lapis grapes, agate pomegranates.
Appears: Gilgamesh · Shamash
Tablet 10
In the garden of jewels Gilgamesh meets Siduri, the divine barmaid at the world's edge. She bolts the door at first; when she lets him in she delivers the speech the poem is remembered for: eat, dress in fresh clothes, let your wife rejoice in your embrace, look at the small child who holds your hand. He refuses to be turned back. He smashes Urshanabi's magical stones in fury, then crosses the waters of death by cutting fresh poles. On the far side stands Utnapishtim — just an old man looking out at the sea.
Appears: Gilgamesh · Siduri · Urshanabi · Utnapishtim
Tablet 11
Utnapishtim tells Gilgamesh the flood story — the most famous passage in the poem, identified in 1872 as the source of the Genesis flood. Then he sets a test: stay awake for seven days. Gilgamesh fails in the first hour; his wife's seven loaves of bread prove it. As consolation Utnapishtim names a plant on the sea floor that restores youth. Gilgamesh dives and finds it. On the way home he sets it on a riverbank to bathe; a snake takes it and sheds its skin. He returns to Uruk empty-handed and shows the ferryman the walls of his city.
Appears: Gilgamesh · Utnapishtim · Utnapishtim's wife · Urshanabi · Ea
Tablet XII · Appendix
A Sumerian poem about the underworld, attached later.
Tablet 12
A later appendix, partially translated from an older Sumerian poem. Enkidu is alive again with no explanation. Gilgamesh's pukku and mikku — a drum and drumstick, the philology is unsettled — have fallen through a crack into the netherworld. Enkidu volunteers to retrieve them. Gilgamesh warns him of the rules of the underworld; Enkidu breaks every one and is held there. Through Ea's intercession his ghost returns briefly through a hole in the earth and tells Gilgamesh, soul by soul, which dead are at peace and which are not.
Appears: Gilgamesh · Enkidu · Enlil · Ea · Ereshkigal
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