Epic
The Epic of Gilgamesh
ša naqba īmuru
Anonymous · -1200
Synopsis
Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, unequalled in strength, tyrannises his people, who complain to the gods; they create Enkidu to stand up to him, a wild man living among the beasts, whom a courtesan initiates into the life of men. After fighting each other, the two men become friends, kill Humbaba, the guardian of the cedar forest, then the Bull of Heaven. But Enkidu dies, and the king, seized by the fear of dying, sets off to the end of the world to question Utnapishtim, the survivor of the flood, about the secret of immortality.
Context
Ša naqba īmuru, “He who saw everything”, is the incipit of the standard version in twelve tablets, which Mesopotamian tradition attributed to the exorcist priest Sîn-lēqi-unninni; it is placed in the Kassite period, around 1300-1200 BCE, or between the thirteenth and the tenth century. The best copies, from the seventh century, came out of the ruins of Ashurbanipal's library at Nineveh, excavated in the early 1850s. In 1872, George Smith published the first extracts, the flood passage, whose parallels with the Bible caused a sensation. The twelfth tablet, translated from an older Sumerian story, is thought to be an addition.
Who it is for
For a first reading of Gilgamesh, preferably in a translation that signals the gaps in the tablets, a third of the text of which is still missing.
Prizes and reception
Counted among the oldest known epic works, and among the first to deal with friendship, mourning and the fear of dying.