The Epic of Gilgamesh — themes & analysis

The relationship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu is the first sustained portrait of male friendship in world literature. The gods make Enkidu specifically as a counterweight — strong enough to match Gilgamesh, who has been working his subjects into the ground because no one in the city is his equal. The verb the poem uses is exact: a counterpart. A second self.

They meet by fighting. Enkidu blocks Gilgamesh in a doorway and the king cannot pass. They wrestle through the streets of Uruk until walls shake. Then they stop, look at each other, and embrace. The poem does not explain the turn. It treats it as obvious. From that day forward they sleep beside each other, eat together, plan together, go to the Cedar Forest together. Gilgamesh, who has had everything, suddenly has the one thing he could not buy.

Enkidu's role is not to follow. He is the brake on Gilgamesh's recklessness, the voice in council that says wait, the partner who pulls his friend back when his friend would otherwise destroy himself. He fails sometimes — at the Cedar Forest he is the one who urges Gilgamesh on when Humbaba begs for mercy — and this failure costs him. The friendship is not idealized. It is real. They quarrel. They forgive each other. They love each other in ways the poem will not name and does not need to.

When Enkidu dies, the second half of the epic is set in motion. There is no consolation in it. Gilgamesh does not become wiser; he becomes wilder. He refuses to bury the body. He sits with it until a worm crawls from its nostril. Then he runs from the city, wearing animal skins, walking until he reaches the edge of the world. The poem trusts the reader to feel that what he has lost is not survivable. Four thousand years later it is still the clearest single account of what happens when the one person who knew you is gone.

Where to follow it: Tablet I (Gilgamesh dreams of Enkidu), Tablet II (the wrestling match, the embrace), Tablet VII (Enkidu sickens), Tablet VIII (the funeral, the refusal to let go).

Gilgamesh is two-thirds god and one-third mortal. The fraction is exact and it is the whole problem. The two-thirds is what makes him stronger than other men, what lets him build walls and kill demons, what gives him the long restless will that drives the poem. The one-third is what kills him in the end. The poem is the first piece of literature in which a man understands this and refuses, for a long time, to accept it.

Until Enkidu dies, Gilgamesh knows about death the way young men know about it — abstractly, statistically, not yet. Enkidu's death is the first thing that takes the abstraction off. He sits with the body until decay sets in. He says it plainly: what my brother is now, that I will be. From that line the rest of the poem follows. He does not just grieve. He sets out across the world to find a way around it.

He fails. The whole point of his journey is the failure. He crosses deserts and the waters of death; he meets the one man who has been granted immortality; he learns that grant was a one-time event and will not be repeated. As a consolation prize he is told about a plant on the sea floor that restores youth; he dives for it, finds it, and on the way home leaves it on the bank to bathe. A snake eats it and sheds its skin. He weeps on the riverbank. The poem refuses every easy out.

What is left at the end is unsentimental and almost modern. There is no immortality. There is the city you built. The walls outlast the man. Gilgamesh comes home empty-handed and the poem ends with him pointing out the brickwork to the boatman who brought him home. Read it carefully and the consolation is real but small. The unanswered question is older.

Where to follow it: Tablet VII (Enkidu's death), Tablet IX (the journey begins), Tablet X (Siduri at the tavern), Tablet XI (the snake eats the plant).

Enkidu begins outside the city. He is created on the steppe by the goddess Aruru — fashioned from clay, set down among the wild herds. He runs with gazelles, drinks at the watering holes with them, knows nothing of bread, clothes, beer, or any of the things human beings have invented to separate themselves from animals. A trapper finds him by accident, recognizes his strength, and runs to Uruk in fear.

What follows is one of the strangest and most carefully drawn scenes in early literature. The trapper is sent back with the temple woman Shamhat. She waits at the watering hole. When Enkidu comes down to drink she uncovers herself; he stays with her seven days and seven nights; afterward, when he tries to run with his herd again, the gazelles run from him. They sense the change. He has, in the poem's exact phrase, become like a man. Shamhat brings him bread and beer. He eats and drinks. She cuts his hair, anoints him with oil, gives him clothes. He goes with her into the city.

The poem does not call this a fall. It does not call it salvation. It is gift and loss together. Enkidu gains language, friendship, the city, Gilgamesh; he loses the herds, the wild speed, the thing he was when no one had a name for him. On his deathbed he curses Shamhat for taking him out of the wilderness, then — corrected by the sun god Shamash, who reminds him of bread, beer, kingship, friendship — blesses her. Both responses are in the text. The poem keeps both.

What underlies the question is the city of Uruk itself. The walls Gilgamesh shows the boatman at the end — the kiln-fired bricks, the foundations laid by the seven sages — are the achievement and the cost. Civilization keeps the wild out and shuts the wild in. The poem is the first to ask in what sense that trade is good. It does not answer. It shows the trade.

Where to follow it: Tablet I (Enkidu among the gazelles), Tablet II (Shamhat brings him to Uruk), Tablet VII (Enkidu curses, then blesses Shamhat).

The poem opens with a king who is too strong for his city. Gilgamesh has no equal in Uruk; nothing checks him; he wears his subjects out with games and labor and takes brides on their wedding nights. The people pray to the gods for relief. The gods answer not by punishing him but by making Enkidu — a counterweight, a friend, a partner who can match him.

This is the poem's first answer to the problem of power. Tyranny is not solved by being deposed. It is solved by the tyrant having someone he respects. Once Enkidu arrives, the brides are no longer taken; the city is no longer ground down. The two of them go off to fight monsters together. What Gilgamesh has now is somewhere to put the energy that was previously breaking the city.

When Enkidu dies, the kingship is what Gilgamesh runs from. He leaves Uruk to its officials and walks into the wilderness wearing animal skins. Across the long quest of tablets IX through XI he is no longer functioning as a king. He is functioning as a grieving man. The poem does not chastise him for this; it walks the journey with him. But it makes the absence felt. A city without its king is something the poem keeps glancing at.

What he comes home with is not immortality. It is something quieter. He shows the ferryman Urshanabi the walls. Examine the foundation, he says; inspect the brickwork; one league is the city, one league its gardens, one league the temple grounds. The man who left Uruk had no patience for any of this. The man who returns has learned that what he built is what he gets to keep. The kingship, by the end, is something he is willing to do.

Where to follow it: Tablet I (the tyrant), Tablet II (Enkidu blocks the bridegroom), Tablet XI (return to Uruk, walls shown).

On the eleventh tablet Utnapishtim tells Gilgamesh how he became immortal. The story is the centerpiece of the epic and one of the most famous passages in any ancient literature. The gods, irritated by the noise of human beings, decided to wipe them all out. Ea, god of wisdom, warned Utnapishtim by whispering through the wall of his reed hut. Build a ship, take aboard the seed of every living thing, seal yourself in. The rains came. They lasted seven days. The gods themselves cowered like dogs in a corner of the sky.

On the seventh day the storm broke. Utnapishtim opened a hatch. He saw water in every direction. The ship grounded on Mount Nimush. He sent out a dove; it returned. He sent out a swallow; it returned. He sent out a raven; it did not return. He climbed out and made a sacrifice. The hungry gods, who had not eaten in seven days, swarmed around the smoke "like flies." Enlil arrived and was furious that anyone had survived. Ea defended his action. The council compromised. Utnapishtim and his wife were made immortal — once, only, as a single dispensation — and removed beyond the waters of death.

When this passage was first translated by George Smith of the British Museum in 1872 it caused a public sensation. The Victorian audience, which had assumed Genesis was the original flood, was confronted with a Mesopotamian flood at least a thousand years older. The Bible, it turned out, was working with material that had been in circulation in the ancient Near East for millennia. The dove and the raven, the sacrifice on the mountain, the rainbow as a sign — all of it had a precedent.

Inside the poem the function is different. The flood story is the proof, told by the only survivor, that immortality was a one-time grant. No council of the gods will be assembled again. Gilgamesh has come to the right man. He has also come to the wrong question. Utnapishtim does not console him. He gives him the news as it stands. The mythology that founded a religion is, inside this poem, the explanation for why the hero will not get what he came for.

Where to follow it: Tablet XI (the flood narrative).