The Epic of Gilgamesh
Date: 16/Oct/2026
Length: 57 pages.
First reading of the course. Short, still took me a while though.
As expected, it was weird. The text will most likely be as weird for much of this course, I guess.
What is Gilgamesh
The Epic of Gilgamesh1 (I will refer to this as merely Gilgamesh, the text, or the story to make it short) is an epic that tells the story of Gilgamesh, the god-king of Uruk. It is one of the world’s oldest surviving works of literature.
There are 12 Tablets, the last one won’t be discussed as it wasn’t included in the version I was provided. Think of Tablets as Chapters of the story.
Tablets
The general, simplified plot of each tablet is as follows (how I read it):
- Tablet 1: Gilgamesh was a god-king, a tyrant of Uruk, too strong, too physically powerful, murdering boys and raping girls? -> The people of Uruk ask the gods for help. The Gods create a guy who is as strong as Gilgamesh called Enkidu, who lives in the wild. Gilgamesh then has dreams of Enkidu.
- Tablet 2: Gilgamesh then sends a prostitute to have sex with Enkidu and lead him to Uruk. Enkidu and Gilgamesh fight, tie. Both became friends. Both decide to embark on a journey to kill Humbaba, a giant who terrifies the people.
- Tablet 3: The elders pray for Gilgamesh and Enkidu before their journey.
- Tablet 4: The journey to find Humbaba.
- Tablet 5: Kill Humbaba, then both prepare a raft to go somewhere.
- Tablet 6: Ishtar, a goddess, develops a crush on Gilgamesh and asks him to become her sex slave. Gilgamesh refuses. Ishtar gets mad, sends the Bull of Heaven to kill both of them. Bull is then vanquished by Enkidu. Everyone party.
- Tablet 7: Enkidu starts cursing people out of nowhere, then gets sick and dies.
- Tablet 8: Gilgamesh griefs for Enkidu.
- Tablet 9: Gilgamesh gets sad, scared he might die too, travels to the edge of the world trying to find the guy who made himself immortal (Utanapishtim). Gets in a tunnel guarded by some scorpion monsters, gets out alive.
- Tablet 10: Gets to the edge of the world, meets a tavernkeeper, who tells him to find a guy who has a stone that could help them pass the deadly sea to find the immortal guy. Gilgamesh finds the guy and breaks the stone for no reason like a retard. Both build a ship instead. Meet the immortal guy.
- Tablet 11: Immortal guy tells the story, says the gods turned him immortal and banished him to the edge of the world. Tells Gilgamesh not to sleep for a week, but Gilgamesh sleeps anyway. Woke up, got told to go home. Immortal dude tells him to get a plant that turns one young. Gets the plant, plant gets stolen and eaten by a snake, goes home crying. Then shows the guy who had the stone Uruk in all of its glory.
The meat of the matter
Instead of reading the prof’s assigned translation (Benjamin Foster’s), I initially tried Stephen Mitchell’s, as according to popular opinion, it’s a lot more beginner friendly and easier to read. But as the author himself has noted, he filled in a lot of stuff with his own interpretation.
And it turns out Foster’s version isn’t that difficult anyway (I expected it to be some weird arcane English like some of the texts in ENG-22062), so I switched back to Foster’s version.
I might still refer back to Mitchell’s version to help clarify some wacky stuff though.
What giants?
There’s that one saying right? “Standing on the shoulders of giants”3.
Modern writers have these “formulas” they can follow.
At writing school they probably teach you that, like a bunch of tricks and formulas and structures that are proven to be very much effective, in terms of optimizing readers’ engagement and retention (Like ‘show, don’t tell’4, Chekhov’s gun5, cliffhangers6, the 3-act structure7, …). The writer(s) of Gilgamesh probably didn’t have that.
It is especially apparent when we compare the Humbaba fight with pretty much any narrative media in the modern age.
Take anime for example, right?
For any fight we’d probably have these character backstories, showing the villain’s motives, like how tragic their backstories are, how their actions are completely understandable and reasonable from their perspective, all that jazz, to make the audience build sympathy with the characters.
Or we’d have these twists and turns, like just as the hero was about to win, the villain pulls an ace up their sleeve and turns the tide of the fight. It builds tension.
Or maybe the fight would be shown in epic detail, like the hero with this awesome sword that grants them power, or the villain with their extremely refined dark arcane magic, and both characters do these divine fighting techniques, ending with the villain finally lying on the ground, defeated, giving one last compliment to the hero, accepting their defeat.
But the Humbaba fight?
“He struck the ground to confront him.
At their heels the earth split apart,
As they circled, the ranges of Lebanon were sundered!
The white clouds turned black,
Death rained down like fog upon them.
Shamash raised the great winds against Humbaba,
South wind, north wind, east wind, west wind, moaning wind,
Blasting wind, lashing wind, contrary wind, dust storm,
Demon wind, freezing wind, storm wind, whirlwind:
The thirteen winds blotted out Humbaba’s face,
He could not charge forward, he could not retreat.
Then Gilgamesh’s weapons defeated Humbaba.”
— Tablet V, 34-45
No buildup, no tension, no backstory. Basically the good guys pull up, then Bam! defeat the bad guy. The entire fight lasted a paragraph.
Imagine a creative writing major submits a story written like this, would they have gotten an F?
But I guess these things are often relative, are they not? We often rank experiences relative to our other experiences, rather than giving them a definitive, objective score.
If you had done heroin, then the strongest coffee would probably feel like plain water to you. If you were deployed to war, then bar fights would probably no different than children’s brawls to you.
For the people of ancient Mesopotamia, this was probably the best they had. They didn’t have smartphones and social media overloading them with dopamine. They didn’t have these thousands of critically acclaimed shows to choose from. This was probably one of the most entertaining things they could get their hands on.
They had no shoulders of giants to stand on because they were the giants.
And the Oscar goes to…
“Hurry, confront him, do not let him go off into the forest,
Do not let him enter the thicket!
He has not donned all of his seven fearsome glories,
One he has on, six he has left off!”
— Tablet 4, 161-164
Humbaba has 7 of these things that give him power-ups. And conveniently, right before Gilgamesh was about to jump him, he left 6 of them at home.
If this were a modern anime or something, the audience would’ve complained about the lazy writing or screamed plot hole.
“Gilgamesh made ready to speak, saying to Enkidu:
My friend, Humbaba’s features have grown more grotesque,
We strode up like heroes to vanquish him.”
— Tablet 5, 21-23
It might’ve been a translation problem, but this line sounds like it was written by a child. Does not feel like it belongs to an epic at all.
The next few lines don’t make sense in the context of the story either.
“Enkidu made ready to speak, saying to Gilgamesh:
Why, my friend, do you raise such unworthy objections?
How you pule! You make me ill.”
— Tablet 5, 24-26
Enkidu responded to Gilgamesh as if Gilgamesh had done something cowardly here, which he hadn’t.
Shamash raised the great winds against Humbaba,
South wind, north wind, east wind, west wind, moaning wind,
Blasting wind, lashing wind, contrary wind, dust storm,
Demon wind, freezing wind, storm wind, whirlwind:
The thirdteen winds blotted out Humbaba’s face,
— Tablet 5, 39-43
This one was especially hilarious to me. This is the equivalent of the 7-page Muda.
[Gilgamesh approaches the scorpion monsters who guard the gateway to the sun’s passage through the mountains]
For this text in particular, I found it to be a lot more engaging if I imagine it as a videogame scenario of sorts, because it makes so much more sense that way, as opposed to taking it as something that can hold up on its own in the literary sense.
The sentence above in particular sounds pretty much like it came from an RPG8, or something from a DnD campaign9.
And not just this particular sentence, the entire epic sounds like a DnD campaign. Isn’t Unapishtim very much like an endgame NPC/Shopkeeper?
The prose sounds very much like a conversation between a DnD DM and the players too:
“When he arrived at the twin peaks called Mashum,
Which daily watch over the rising and setting of the sun,
Whose peaks thrust upward to the vault of heaven,
Whose flanks reach downward to hell,
Where scorpion monsters guard its gateway,
Whose appearance is dreadful, whose venom is death,
Their fear-inspiring radiance spreads over the mountains,
They watch over the sun at its rising and setting,
When Gilgamesh saw their fearsomeness and terror,
He covered his face.
He took hold of himself and approached them.”
— Tablet 9, 20-30
“When he had gone one double hour,
Dense was the darkness, no light was there,
It would not let him look behind him.
When he had gone two double hours,
Dense was the darkness, no light was there,
It would not let him look behind him.
When he had gone three double hours,
Dense was the darkness, no light was there,
It would not let him look behind him.
When he had gone four double hours,
Dense was the darkness, no light was there,
It would not let him look behind him.
When he had gone five double hours,
Dense was the darkness, no light was there,
It would not let him look behind him.
When he had gone six double hours,
Dense was the darkness, no light was there,
It would not let him look behind him.
When he had gone seven double hours,
Dense was the darkness, there was no light,
It would not let him look behind him.
— Tablet 9, 45-65
Another example of unconventional writing style by modern standards.
Who even wrote this one? Who even wrote Gilgamesh? I guess it must’ve been written by multiple people throughout generations right? Because this one sounds like it was written by a child.
Would’ve been so funny if it was written collectively by dozens of people, each of them has their little quirks, idiosyncrasies, then throughout generations one version with all of their weird quirks and prose survives. Wonder what work is actually like that.
“When you reach the waters of death, what will you do?
Yet, Gilgamesh, there is Ur-Shanabi, Utanapishtim’s boatman,
He has the Stone Charms with him as he trims pine trees in the forest”
— Tablet 10, 102-104
[Gilgamesh advances and without preamble attacks Ur-Shanabi and smashes the Stone Charms]
After hearing that he needed the boatman’s Stone Charms to cross the deadly sea, he goes straight to the boatman and instantly destroys the Stone Charms for no reason like an absolute retard.
I genuinely have zero clue what the purpose of this is. What is the purpose of reducing 40 IQ points from Gilgamesh in the context of the story? It does not advance the story in any way or achieve anything.
“Do we build a house forever?
Do we make a home forever?
Do brothers divide an inheritance forever?
Do disputes prevail in the land forever?
Do rivers rise in flood forever?”
— Tablet 10, 232-236
Utanapishtim, explains to Gilgamesh immortality is impossible. While being immortal himself.
“The boat you shall build,
Let her dimensions be measured out:
Let her width and length be equal,”
— Tablet 11, 28-30
What even is the purpose of having a square boat here? This violates Chekhov’s Gun.
“I will have an old man eat some and so test the plant.
His name shall be “Old Man Has Become Young-Again-Man.”
— Tablet 11, 301-302
Bravo, Vince. I can’t believe this isn’t satire.
-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_of_Gilgamesh ↩
-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ode_on_a_Grecian_Urn#Poem ↩
-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_giants ↩
-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Show%2C_don’t_tell ↩
-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chekhov%27s_gun ↩
-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliffhanger ↩
-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-act_structure ↩
-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Role-playing_game ↩
-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons_%26_Dragons ↩