Gilgamesh, in Babylonian legend, king of Uruk. He is the hero of the Gilgamesh epic, a work of some 3,000 lines, written on 12 tablets c.2000 B.C. and discovered among the ruins at Nineveh. The epic was lost when the the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal was destroyed in 612 B.C. The library's remains were excavated by British archaeologists in the mid-19th cent., the tablets were discovered, and the epic's cuneiform text was translated by British scholars. It tells of the adventures of the warlike and imperious Gilgamesh and his friend Enkidu. When Enkidu suddenly sickened and died, Gilgamesh became obsessed by a fear of death. His ancestor Ut-napishtim (who with his wife had been the only survivor of a great flood) told him of a plant that gave eternal life. After obtaining the plant, however, Gilgamesh left it unguarded and a serpent carried it off. The hero then turned to the ghost of Enkidu for consoling knowledge of the afterlife, only to be told by his friend that a gloomy future awaited the dead.

Hero of the ancient Akkadian-language Epic of Gilgamesh. The great literary work of ancient Mesopotamia, the epic is known from 12 incomplete tablets discovered at Nineveh in the library of Ashurbanipal. Gaps in the narrative have been filled in with fragments found elsewhere. The character Gilgamesh is probably based on the Gilgamesh who ruled Uruk in the 3rd millennium BC. The epic presents Gilgamesh as a great warrior and builder, who rejects the marriage proposal of the goddess Ishtar. With the aid of his friend and companion Enkidu, he kills the divine bull that Ishtar sends to destroy him. Enkidu's death prompts Gilgamesh to seek Utnapishtim, survivor of the legendary flood, to learn how to escape death. He obtains a youth-renewing plant only to have it stolen. The epic ends with the return of the spirit of Enkidu, who gives a dismal report on the underworld.

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Gilgamesh was the son of Lugalbanda and the fifth king of Uruk (Early Dynastic II, first dynasty of Uruk), ruling circa 2600 BC, according to the Sumerian king list. He became the central character in the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the best known works of early literature, which says that his mother was Ninsun (whom some call Rimat Ninsun), a goddess. Gilgamesh is described as two-thirds god and one-third human.

According to the Tummal Inscription, Gilgamesh, and eventually his son Urlugal, rebuilt the sanctuary of the goddess Ninlil, located in Tummal, a sacred quarter in her city Nippur. In Mesopotamian mythology, Gilgamesh is credited with having been a demigod of superhuman strength who built a great city wall to defend his people from external threats.

Cuneiform references

In the Epic of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh is said to have ordered the building of the legendary walls of Uruk. An alternative version has Gilgamesh, towards the end of the story, boasting to Urshanabi, the ferryman, that the city's walls were built by the Seven Sages. In historical times, Sargon of Akkad claimed to have destroyed these walls to prove his military power.

Fragments of an epic text found in Me-Turan (modern Tell Haddad) relate that Gilgamesh was buried under the waters of a river at the end of his life. The people of Uruk diverted the flow of the Euphrates River crossing Uruk for the purpose of burying the dead king within the riverbed. In April 2003, a German expedition discovered what is thought to be the entire city of Uruk—including the former bed of the Euphrates, the last resting place of its King Gilgamesh.

Despite the lack of direct evidence, most scholars do not object to consideration of Gilgamesh as a historical figure, particularly after inscriptions were found confirming the historical existence of other figures associated with him: kings Enmebaragesi and Aga of Kish. If Gilgamesh was a historical king, he probably reigned in about the 26th century BC. Some of the earliest Sumerian texts spell his name as Bilgames. Initial difficulties in reading cuneiform resulted in Gilgamesh making his re-entrance into world culture in 1891 as "Izdubar".

In most texts, Gilgamesh is written with the determinative for divine beings (DINGIR) - but there is no evidence for a contemporary cult, and the Sumerian Gilgamesh myths suggest the deification was a later development (unlike the case of the Akkadian god kings). With this deification, however, would have come an accretion of stories about him, some potentially derived from the real lives of other historical figures, in particular Gudea, the Second Dynasty ruler of Lagash (2144–2124 BC).

Whether based on a historical prototype or not, Gilgamesh became a legendary protagonist in the Epic of Gilgamesh. The name Gilgamesh appears once in Greek, as "Gilgamos" (Γιλγαμος). The story is a variant of the Perseus myth: The King of Babylon determines by oracle that his grandson Gilgamos will kill him, and throws him out of a high tower. An eagle breaks his fall, and the infant is found and raised by a gardener.

See also

• Epic of Gilgamesh
• History of Sumer
• Uruk
• Sumerian king list
• Mesopotamian mythology
• Gilgamesh flood myth
• Adaptations of the Epic of Gilgamesh

Notes

References

• Damrosch, David (2007). The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh. Henry Holt and Co.. ISBN 0-805-08029-5.
• George, Andrew [1999], The Epic of Gilgamesh: the Babylonian Epic Poem and Other Texts in Akkadian and Sumerian, Harmondsworth: Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 1999 (published in Penguin Classics 2000, reprinted with minor revisions, 2003. ISBN 0-14-044919-1
• George, Andrew, The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic - Introduction, Critical Edition and Cuneiform Texts, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2 volumes, 2003.
• Foster, Benjamin R., trans. & edit. (2001). The Epic of Gilgamesh. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0-393-97516-9.
• Hammond, D. & Jablow, A. [1987], "Gilgamesh and the Sundance Kid: the Myth of Male Friendship", in Brod, H. (ed.), The Making of Masculinities: The New Men's Studies, Boston, 1987, pp.241-258.
• Kovacs, Maureen Gallery, transl. with intro. (1985,1989). The Epic of Gilgamesh. Stanford University Press: Stanford, California. ISBN 0-8047-1711-7. Glossary, Appendices, Appendix (Chapter XII=Tablet XII). A line-by-line translation (Chapters I-XI).
• Jackson, Danny (1997). The Epic of Gilgamesh. Wauconda, IL: Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers. ISBN 0-86516-352-9.
• Mitchell, Stephen (2004). Gilgamesh: A New English Version. New York: Free Press. ISBN 0-7432-6164-X.
• Oberhuber, K., ed. (1977). Das Gilgamesch-Epos. Darmstadt: Wege der Forschung.
• Parpola, Simo, with Mikko Luuko, and Kalle Fabritius (1997). The Standard Babylonian, Epic of Gilgamesh. The Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project. ISBN 951-45-7760-4 (Volume 1).

External links

Original cuneiform text

• Original cuneiform text of the XI tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh (standard Babylonian version)

Text translations

• Sumerian texts: ETCSL
• Gilgamesh and Humbaba, version A (the adventure of the cedar forest)
• Gilgamesh and Humbaba, version B
• Gilgamesh and the Bull of Heaven
• Gilgamesh and Aga
• Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the nether world
• The death of Gilgamesh
• The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (http://www-etcsl.orient.ox.ac.uk/), Oxford 1998-.
• http://www.wsu.edu/~dee/MESO/GILG.HTM
• The Epic of Gilgamesh: A Spiritual Biography
• Comparison of The Epic of Gilgamesh to the Genesis flood

Translations for several legends of Gilgamesh in the Sumerian language have been written by:

• Black, J.A.,
• Cunningham, G.,
• Fluckiger-Hawker, E,
• Stephen Mitchell
• Stripped Books: Stephen Mitchell on Gilgamesh - a comic-book adaptation of a talk by Stephen Mitchell about the epic poem.
• Mitchell's translation was also adapted as a radio play for Radio 3 by Jeremy Howe, first broadcast on Sunday 11 June 2006 from 19:30-21:30
• Robson, E.,
• Zólyomi, G.,

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