The Epic of Gilgamesh

What It Is

A poem in Akkadian, pressed into clay in cuneiform, from the flat country between the Tigris and the Euphrates. The oldest material behind it goes back to Sumerian poems of around 2100 BC. The version most people read, the standard Babylonian text, was shaped around 1200 BC by a scholar-priest named Sin-leqi-unninni, the earliest author in world literature whose name we know.

Then it vanished. The tablets lay in the buried library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal until British excavators shipped them to London in the 1850s, and nobody could read a word of them until 1872. No tradition handed this poem down to us. It was dug up.

It is also still incomplete. The clay is broken in places, and an honest translation leaves the holes where they are. The language is plain. The world it describes is not.

Why It Matters

Gilgamesh is a thousand years older than Homer and older than any book of the Bible. Age alone would make it a curiosity. What makes it worth your evening is that it is direct about friendship, fame, dying and what a single human life is worth, and four thousand years of writing have not improved much on how it handles them.

Its rediscovery was one of the intellectual shocks of the nineteenth century. When the tablets were first read in London, what they contained set off an argument that ran through Victorian Britain and unsettled how Europe understood its own inheritance.

It also puts a date on the human condition. The fear of death and the hunger for a name that outlasts you were fully formed four thousand years ago, in a city of mud brick. Rilke, reading it in 1916, called it the epic of the fear of death.

Before You Read

Easy in language, disorienting in world. Set aside two or three hours and take it in one or two sittings. It was built to be taken whole.

Make peace with the gaps before you start. Brackets, ellipses and blank lines mark where the clay is broken. Read straight past them and let the silences work on you; plenty of readers end up finding them the strongest thing in the book.

Expect repetition. Lines, speeches and whole scenes come back with small variations, which is what oral poetry does. Read a page aloud and you will hear why.

Which Translation to Read

• Andrew George (Penguin Classics) — recommended. The leading living authority on the poem. His volume, published in 1999 and revised in 2003, gives you the standard Babylonian epic, the older Sumerian poems and the surviving fragments, with every gap marked honestly and the best introduction and notes in print. The cost: that honesty cuts both ways. The broken passages can feel like walking through a ruin, and you are handed several versions of the material rather than one seamless text. View on Amazon →
• Benjamin Foster (Norton Critical Edition, second edition, 2019). A rhythmically alert translation, packaged with related Near Eastern texts and strong critical essays. Take it to study the poem, not to read it. The cost: the apparatus dominates. It feels like a classroom book because it is one.
• Sophus Helle (Yale University Press, 2021). The best to say out loud, built on sound and pattern rather than archaism, and followed by five fine essays. The cost: Helle is freer with the Akkadian than George or Foster, and some of the beauty is his.

Take George for the poem as it actually survives, Helle to be moved, Foster to study. One warning: Stephen Mitchell's popular version (Free Press, 2004) is not translated from Akkadian and quietly fills in the missing lines. It reads well. It is not the thing itself.

The Folio Society issued Gilgamesh in 2010 using George's translation, illustrated by Francis Mosley: a rare case where the finest collectible and the best reading text are the same words.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read George's introduction afterwards. It walks through the poem tablet by tablet, so it will hand you the whole thing before you have had it.

Read some of it aloud; it was made for a voice in a room. Pay attention to the repetitions and to what changes inside them. At a gap, imagine what is missing rather than looking it up.

The commonest first-timer mistake is to treat Gilgamesh as an exhibit and tick off its status as the oldest this and the first that. The second is to read a smoothed-out modern version and assume the job is done. Read George, give it two hours, then read it again the same week. Very few great books can be reread immediately. This one can.