Gilgamesh: The King Who Chased Eternity

Long before Homer, before the pyramids finished settling into the desert, scribes in Mesopotamia were already writing down the story of a restless king named Gilgamesh. The literary trail begins with five Sumerian poems about Bilgames, king of Uruk, some possibly dating back to the Third Dynasty of Ur around 2100 BCE. These were separate tales, not yet a single epic, but they carried the seeds of everything that followed.

By the 18th century BCE, an Old Babylonian poet had woven these threads into a unified Akkadian epic, known by its opening line, Shutur eli sharri — 'Surpassing All Other Kings.' Only fragments of this version survive. Sometime between the 13th and 10th centuries BCE, a scholar named Sin-leqi-unninni compiled the definitive Standard Babylonian version, opening with the line Sha naqba imuru — 'He Who Saw the Deep(s)', literally 'He Who Sees the Unknown.' About two-thirds of its twelve tablets have been recovered, some of the finest copies pulled from the ruined library of the 7th-century BCE Assyrian king Ashurbanipal.

The story itself unfolds in two movements. First comes Gilgamesh's clash and friendship with Enkidu, a wild man created by the gods to check the king's oppressive rule. After Enkidu is civilized through his encounter with Shamhat, he travels to Uruk and challenges Gilgamesh to a test of strength. Gilgamesh wins the contest — nonetheless, the two become friends. Together they journey six days to the Cedar Forest, slay its guardian Humbaba, and fell the sacred cedar. When Gilgamesh spurns the goddess Ishtar, she unleashes the Bull of Heaven; the two friends kill it too, sealing their fate. The gods, angered, strike Enkidu down with a fatal illness.

Grief transforms the second half of the epic. Devastated by Enkidu's death, Gilgamesh sets out on a perilous quest for eternal life, eventually reaching Utnapishtim, the flood survivor, who tells him plainly: life is not his to find, for the gods reserved death as man's portion and kept life for themselves. It is one of the oldest recorded meditations on mortality in human literature.

The epic vanished from living memory for thousands of years until the 1850s, when Austen Henry Layard, Hormuzd Rassam, and W. K. Loftus unearthed some 15,000 cuneiform fragments in Ashurbanipal's library at Nineveh. It took the British Museum's George Smith to bring it back to light: in 1872 he read translated fragments before the Society of Biblical Archaeology, and in 1875 and 1876 he published fuller translations, the latter appearing as The Chaldaean Account of Genesis. Gilgamesh was briefly reintroduced to the modern world under the mistaken name 'Izdubar,' before scholars could correctly sound out the cuneiform.