Epic of Gilgamesh
A stone tablet containing part of the Epic of Gilgamesh
Based on a summary of the Epic (available online here), the contents of the eleven clay tablets are:
- Introducing Gilgamesh of Uruk, the greatest king on earth, two-thirds god and one-third human, the strongest super-human who ever existed. But his people complain that he is too harsh, so the sky-god Anu creates the wild-man Enkidu. Enkidu is tamed by the temple prostitute Shamhat.
- Enkidu fights Gilgamesh but loses, they become friends. Gilgamesh proposes the adventure of the cedar forest.
- Preparation for the adventure of the cedar forest; many give support, including the sun-god Shamash.
- Journey of Gilgamesh and Enkidu to the cedar forest.
- Gilgamesh and Enkidu, with help from Shamash, kill Humbaba, the demon guardian of the trees, then cut down the trees which they float as a raft back to Uruk.
- Gilgamesh rejects the sexual advances of the goddess Ishtar. Ishtar gets her father, the sky-god Anu, to send the "Bull of Heaven" to avenge Gilgamesh and his city. Gilgamesh and Enkidu kill the bull.
- The gods decide that somebody has to be punished for killing Humbaba and the Bull of Heaven, and it is Enkidu. Enkidu becomes ill and describes hell as he is dying.
- Lament of Gilgamesh for Enkidu.
- Gilgamesh fears death, decides to seek eternal life by making a perilous journey to visit Utnapishtim and his wife, the only immortal humans, alive since before the Great Flood.
- Completion of the journey, by punting across the Waters of Death with Urshanabi, the ferryman.
- Gilgamesh meets Utnapishtim, who tells him about the great flood and gives him two chances for immortality. Gilgamesh blunders both chances and returns to Uruk, where the sight of its massive walls provoke Gilgamesh to praise this enduring work of mortal men.
Although the epic itself was lost for millennia, Hittite versions of it existed. Some people think that it has had an indirect impact on Western literature through the Biblical story of Noah and the flood, a suspected retelling of a portion of the Gilgamesh epic, but they are different in many points.
The Epic of Gilgamesh is more widely known today. The first modern translation of the epic was in the 1870s by George Smith. More recent translations include one undertaken with the assistance of the American novelist John Gardner, and published in 1984.
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2 Sumerian legends of Gilgamesh |
According to the Gilgamesh Epic, an assembly of gods resolved to destroy mankind by means of a flood. Though that decision was to be kept secret, the god Ea (in the Sumerian account "Enki") warned his favorite, Utnapishtim, about it.
The older Babylonian Atrahasis Epic states that Enlil felt disturbed in his sleep due to noise made by humans. He turned for help to the divine assembly of "great gods" who then sent a famine for some six years, but without bringing the desired quietness. When the gods decided to send a flood, Ea disclosed the plan to Atrahasis, who built a survival vessel according to divinely given measurement.
The Biblical Flood account is altogether different. In it is stated a truly just cause for the Flood:
"Jehovah saw that the badness of man was abundant in the earth and every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only bad all the time. And the earth came to be ruined in the sight of the true God and the earth became filled with violence. So God saw the earth and, look! it was ruined, because all flesh had ruined its way on the earth. After that God said to Noah: 'The end of all flesh has come before me, because the earth is full of violence as a result of them; and here I am bringing them to ruin together with the earth.'"-Gen. 6:5, 11-13.
As to perishing in the Flood or surviving it, the Bible relates that people died because they 'took note' of neither the work being done by Noah and his family on the ark for survival nor what Noah said as "a preacher of righteousness." (Matt. 24:39; 2 Pet. 2:5) If they had heeded Noah's warning words and example, they would have survived.
Too, in the Bible there is no command that Noah keep secret the fact that God was going to bring a global flood. However, the Mesopotamian legend indicates that the god Ea went so far as to suggest that Utnapishtim should deceive his contemporaries so as to keep them in the dark with regard to the coming catastrophe.
The Bible describes a vessel about 133.5 meters long, with a length-to-height ratio of 10 to 1 and a length-to-width ratio of 6 to 1. (Genesis 6:15) The Bible does not specify the exact length of time Noah spent building the ark, the account allows for construction that took 50 or 60 years. (Genesis 5:32; 7:6)
The epic of Gilgamesh, on the other hand, describes a massive, ungainly cube some 60 meters long on each side that was built in only seven days.
Translations for several legends of Gilgamesh in the Sumerian language can be found in Black, J.A., Cunningham, G., Fluckiger-Hawker, E, Robson, E., and Zólyomi, G., The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (http://www-etcsl.orient.ox.ac.uk/), Oxford 1998-.
Some versions of the texts date from as early as the third dynasty of Ur, 2100-2000 BC.
The differences from the Biblical account
The cause of the Deluge
The shape of the ark
Sumerian legends of Gilgamesh
The earlier Akkadian version of the epic is known as Surpassing all other kings and dates back to the first half of the second millennium B.C. The "standard" version, He who saw the deep, was composed by Sin-liqe-unninni sometime between 1300 B.C. and 1000 B.C.