Surprised by Gilgamesh

My Encounter with the 4,000 Year Old Epic of Gilgamesh

Photo by Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin on Wikimedia Commons

I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into when I started book 1 of my Immortal Books reading list on March 1, 2023. My carefully curated chronological list placed The Epic of Gilgamesh at the start. At 4,000 years old, it had made its way across Mesopotamia, died out with cuneiform around the year 0, and was rediscovered in the mid-1800s.

The propaganda of primitive pre-historic mankind clouded my expectations of this work. I was convinced I was about to embark on a slightly enhanced version of See Spot Run and instead, I was confronted with a complex tale with deep significance.

I was absolutely amazed and delighted.

Gilgamesh truly became epic for me when I came across the deluge / flood story. I had heard that other cultures contained a flood story but I’d never read one myself. What surprised me the most were the similarities to the story of Noah’s Ark in the Genesis account. And yet here was a work composed 1,000+ years before Genesis.

That led me down a side trail of inquiry into potential connection points. Did the Biblical writers simply copy from Gilgamesh? Was there indeed some worldwide flood that was so life-altering that cultures around the world wrote about it? Or was it just a natural fear of ancient life that necessitated proximity to water sources susceptible to flooding?

This led to one of the biggest shifts in my thinking so far for this reading project. Without having given it much thought, I assumed the Bible was the first thing. Perhaps the first three words of “In the beginning…” led me in that direction. In my mind, the Bible sprang up from nothing. But what Gilgamesh made me consider was that the Biblical writers were providing an alternative worldview to existing, well-known stories.

This may seem incredibly obvious to you, but this was a startling discovery for me. It caused me to consider the Biblical account in a fresh and exciting light. One of the reasons I had started the reading project was to learn about the Bible’s impact on subsequent literature. Now, I began looking at the impact of other literature on the Bible. What else would I read where I’d find mention or connection points to the Bible?

I’m still reading through many pre-Biblical texts on my way through The Immortal Books. I’ve seen potential connection points between Enheduana and Akhenaten and the Book of Psalms. I’ve seen New Testament mentions of the Greek gods after encountering them in Homer, Hesiod, and the tragedy writers. And I see a connection I have yet to fully understand in the names of Mesopotamian gods Ishtar (Esther) and Mordecai (Marduk).

What else will I discover?

Versions & other Gilgamesh Books

If you are interested in reading more about Gilgamesh, here are some great places to start:

Stephen Mitchell

This was my first encounter with Gilgamesh. It’s a great place to start. It’s delightfully readable, removes the lacuna (missing text), and removes much of the repetition that can appear odd when read. It’s a version, not a translation (Mitchell utilized existing English translations to weave this narrative).

Andrew George

This is the Gilgamesh gold standard and a more scholarly work. The introduction is fantastic and this should be your main source for the story.

Sophus Helle

This 2021 translation contains an extremely helpful introduction and set of 5 essays. Reading Helle’s translation also led me to Enheduana, a work that pre-dates Gilgamesh.

Gilgamesh Among Us by Theodore Ziolkowsk

This provides a look at recent cultural references to Gilgamesh (operas, movies, stories, etc.).

Gilgamesh’s Snake by Ghareeb Iskander

A poem by an Iraqi man who ties modern Iraq to Gilgamesh’s Uruk.

Ea’s Duplicity in the Gilgamesh Flood Story by Martin Worthington

After reading the Epic of Gilgamesh, I became fascinated with the Flood story contained within the epic that has so many similarities to the Noah Flood story found in the Hebrew Bible. The Gilgamesh Flood story would have been written earlier. Did that mean the writer(s) of Genesis copied the story? It got me asking a lot of questions. This book partly delves into that question at the very end but also looks at the god Ea’s message to Uta-Napisti in Gilgamesh to determine if it had a dual meaning, i.e. if it was duplicitous. In that case, some would hear it as a coming blessing and others as a dire warning. The author, Martin Worthington, looks at other Babylonian texts to see if those works contain puns, duplicity, and gods who lie to analyze if the Mesopotamian audience would have picked up on the dual message. This book is a deep dive into just 9 lines of The Epic of Gilgamesh, but an analysis that helps in considering the Epic of Gilgamesh, and specifically the Flood story in more detail. My nerdy self loved it.