Gilgamesh was probably a real king before he became literature's first hero
The hero of the world's most famous ancient epic hunts for immortality and comes home empty-handed. But Gilgamesh may not be pure invention. Historians think a king of that name ruled the Sumerian city of Uruk nearly five thousand years ago, and one legend says his people diverted the Euphrates to bury him.
Most historians accept that Gilgamesh was a real ruler of Uruk, probably early in the Early Dynastic Period. The scholar Stephanie Dalley places his lifetime somewhere between 2800 and 2500 BC. He appears in the Sumerian King List, is linked with a known ruler, Enmebaragesi of Kish, and a later text called the Tummal Inscription credits him with building Uruk's walls. Fragments found at Tell Haddad tell how, when he died, workers turned aside the river so he could be buried beneath its bed. After death he was worshipped as a god, and his fame peaked under the Third Dynasty of Ur.
His name came to English from the Akkadian Gilgāmeš, itself derived from the Sumerian Bilgames, and is usually translated as the kinsman is a hero. Five Sumerian poems about him survive. In one he helps the goddess Inanna clear creatures from her huluppu tree; in another he rebels against his overlord Aga of Kish; others describe his victories over the giant Huwawa and the Bull of Heaven, and a damaged fifth recounts his funeral.
Centuries later a Babylonian scribe, Sîn-lēqi-unninni, wove these stories into the standard Akkadian epic. Here Gilgamesh is a demigod who befriends the wild man Enkidu. After Gilgamesh spurns the goddess Ishtar, she sends the Bull of Heaven against them; the gods later strike Enkidu down with disease. Terrified of dying, Gilgamesh seeks out Utnapishtim, survivor of the Great Flood, fails his trials and returns to Uruk accepting that he cannot live forever.
The epic was rediscovered in 1849 in the Library of Ashurbanipal. When translations appeared in the early 1870s, parallels with the Hebrew Bible caused a stir. Most scholars think it influenced the Iliad and the Odyssey, and a Greek writer, Aelian, later told a tale of the infant Gilgamesh being thrown from a tower and caught in mid-air by an eagle.
Source: Gilgamesh
