Tablet 1
He who saw the deep
The poem opens with a prologue praising the walls of Uruk and the king who built them. Then the problem: Gilgamesh is two-thirds god and one-third mortal, and no one in the city can match him. He works his subjects to exhaustion and takes brides on their wedding nights. The people pray for relief; the gods agree to act. The mother goddess Aruru pinches off a piece of clay, throws it into the wilderness, and creates Enkidu — a wild man covered in hair, raised on the steppe among gazelles. A trapper sees him at a watering hole and runs to Uruk in fear. Gilgamesh sends back the temple woman Shamhat. She waits at the watering hole.
Tablet 2
The taming of Enkidu
Shamhat waits at the watering hole. Enkidu comes down with the herd; she uncovers herself; he stays with her seven days and seven nights. When he tries to run with the gazelles again they flee from him — they sense the change. He has, in the poem's exact phrase, become like a man. Shamhat teaches him bread and beer; he drinks seven jugs and laughs. She cuts his hair, anoints him with oil, dresses him, leads him to Uruk. A wedding is in progress; Gilgamesh is on his way to take the bride. Enkidu blocks him in the doorway. They fight through the streets until Gilgamesh, the stronger, throws him down. They embrace.
Tablet 3
Preparations
Gilgamesh, restless again, proposes a journey: into the Cedar Forest, far to the west, 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: Humbaba's roar is a flood, his breath fire, his face a coil of intestines. The elders also try and fail; Gilgamesh ignores them all. He goes to his mother Ninsun, who climbs to the temple roof and prays to Shamash for her son's protection, then formally adopts Enkidu as a second son. The smiths forge bronze axes that weigh two hundred and fifty pounds each. They set out.
Tablet 4
Journey to the Cedar Forest
The two heroes cover what should be a six-week march in three days. Each night, on the way, Gilgamesh has a terrifying dream — a falling mountain, a wild bull splitting the earth, a thunderstorm that turns the ground black, a winged demon with a lion's face, fire from heaven turning the air to ash. 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 — the green wall of it, the sound of birds, the smell of resin. Then they raise their axes and walk in.
Tablet 5
The battle with Humbaba
They cut a single cedar. Humbaba hears the axe and charges down through the trees in fury — his face the coil of intestines, his roar a flood, his breath fire, his sweat poison. The two heroes are nearly broken on the first assault. Then Shamash sends the thirteen winds that pin Humbaba in place; he cannot move. Gilgamesh raises his axe. Humbaba pleads for his life and offers them all the cedars in the forest. Gilgamesh wavers. Enkidu — newly civilized, perhaps overcompensating — argues against mercy: kill him quickly, before Enlil hears, before the gods can intervene. Gilgamesh strikes. They float the great cedars down the Euphrates back toward Uruk.
Tablet 6
The rejection of Ishtar
Back in Uruk, Gilgamesh washes off the dust of the Cedar Forest. Ishtar, goddess of love and war, sees him 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, lover by lover, what she has done to the men and animals before him: the shepherd turned to a wolf, the gardener turned to a frog, her own husband Tammuz mourned every year. Ishtar, humiliated, climbs to her father Anu and demands the Bull of Heaven. The two heroes kill it; Enkidu hurls its thigh at Ishtar on the wall. The city celebrates. The gods do not.
Tablet 7
The death of Enkidu
In his sleep Enkidu sees a council of the gods. They are angry: cedars cut, Humbaba killed, the Bull of Heaven slain. One of the heroes must pay. Enlil insists, against Shamash's protest, that it be Enkidu. He wakes and tells Gilgamesh the dream. Within days he is sick. The illness lasts twelve days. In his fever he curses Shamhat for civilizing him. Shamash gently corrects him — without Shamhat there would have been no bread, no beer, no friendship, no Gilgamesh. Enkidu calls back the curse and blesses her. Then he tells his last dream: the House of Dust, where the kings of the earth sit silent in feathers, eating clay. He dies.
Tablet 8
The funeral of Enkidu
Gilgamesh will not bury Enkidu. He sits with the body for six days and seven nights, holding it, speaking to it, refusing to let it be carried out. He calls every wild thing of the steppe — the gazelles, the bears, the leopards, the cedar of the forest — to mourn with him. 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 crawls from Enkidu's nostril. The realization breaks over him: this is what my brother is now; this is what I will be. He throws off his royal clothes, puts on the skin of a lion, and runs from the city.
Tablet 9
The search for everlasting life
Gilgamesh wanders the wilderness in a lion's skin, eating what he can kill. He has heard there is one human who never died — Utnapishtim, who survived the flood — and he is going to find him. He reaches the twin mountains of Mashu, where the sun rises and sets, guarded by scorpion-men whose glance is death. They examine him, recognize his two-thirds divinity, and 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 ahead. He comes out into a garden where the trees bear jewels for fruit — carnelian, lapis, agate.
Tablet 10
The tavern at the edge of the world
In the garden of jewels Gilgamesh meets Siduri, the divine barmaid who keeps a tavern 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 your fill, 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. She names the only man who can carry him further: Urshanabi, Utnapishtim's ferryman. Gilgamesh smashes the magical stones in fury; they cross the waters of death by cutting fresh poles. On the far side stands Utnapishtim — not a giant, just an old man looking out at the sea.
Tablet 11
The story of the flood
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 six days and seven nights. Gilgamesh is asleep within the first hour. His wife bakes a loaf of bread for each day, lined up to prove it. As consolation she persuades her husband to tell Gilgamesh about a plant on the sea floor that restores youth. He dives and finds it. On the way home he sets it on a riverbank and a serpent takes it and sheds its skin. He returns to Uruk empty-handed and shows the boatman the walls.
Tablet 12
Enkidu and the Netherworld
Tablet XII is a separate, older poem about Enkidu and the underworld, partially translated from an older Sumerian poem and attached to the standard version as an appendix. Enkidu is alive again here, with no explanation. Gilgamesh's pukku and mikku — a drum and drumstick, or hoop and stick; the philology is unsettled — fall through a crack in the floor 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 spirit returns briefly through a hole in the ground. Gilgamesh asks him about the dead. Enkidu answers, soul by soul.