50 Fun Facts About Gilgamesh

Gilgamesh was king of which ancient Mesopotamian city?

Uruk, one of the world's first true cities, is also where writing is first recorded: clay tablets from before 3000 BCE that logged goods moving in and out of storehouses rather than stories.

The Epic of Gilgamesh was pressed into clay tablets in which script?

Cuneiform tablets of the epic survived by accident: when Nineveh was sacked and burned in 612 BCE, the fire baked the clay hard and the ruined palace buried the library.

At the shepherds' camp, what does the newly tamed Enkidu drink seven jugs of?

Beer, with bread, is the first human food Enkidu is given; after seven jugs his face shines with joy, his shaggy body is groomed and oiled and, the poem says, he becomes human.

Who is Shamhat, the woman who tames the wild man in Tablet one?

A temple prostitute, Shamhat is cursed by the dying Enkidu for luring him out of the wild, until a god reminds him that she fed him, clothed him and led him to Gilgamesh, and he blesses her instead.

Whose livelihood does the wild Enkidu ruin, setting off the plan to tame him?

A trapper's pits and snares are what Enkidu keeps wrecking, filling in the one and ripping out the other to free the animals, until the man's father sends him to Gilgamesh for help.

What form did Gilgamesh's oppression of the young women of his city take?

Raping brides on their wedding night is the abuse that makes his people beg the gods for relief; their answer is Enkidu, who first meets Gilgamesh by barring his way into a bridal chamber.

Who is Gilgamesh's mother, the goddess who interprets his dreams?

Ninsun, whose name means lady of the wild cows, prays on her rooftop for her son's safety and then adopts Enkidu as her own before the two set out for the Cedar Forest.

Which monstrous demigod guards the Cedar Forest?

Humbaba, once cornered, begs for his life and offers to serve Gilgamesh and cut the cedars for him; Gilgamesh wavers, and it is Enkidu who insists on the kill.

Which god, Gilgamesh's protector, sends the winds that pin down the Cedar Forest's guardian?

Shamash, the sun god, steps in because Gilgamesh's mother had burned incense on her roof and begged him to watch over her son; at the height of the fight his storm winds hold the guardian fast.

Which goddess does Gilgamesh reject, citing her mistreatment of past lovers such as Dumuzi?

Ishtar offers Gilgamesh marriage and a chariot of lapis lazuli and gold, but he answers by listing her ruined lovers one by one, among them a shepherd she turned into a wolf.

What does the spurned goddess threaten if Anu withholds the Bull of Heaven?

Raise the dead to devour the living: faced with that, Anu hands over the Bull, but only once she swears she has stored enough grain to see the people through the seven years of famine it will bring.

After the Bull of Heaven is killed, what does Enkidu hurl at the goddess?

One of its hindquarters, flung in her face with a taunt: if he could only catch her, Enkidu shouts, he would do the same to her and drape the Bull's guts over her arms.

How do the gods sentence Enkidu to death?

A fatal illness is the gods' verdict after the heroes kill the Bull of Heaven and the forest's guardian: one of the two must die, they choose Enkidu, and he wastes away in bed day after day.

Whom does Gilgamesh set out to find after Enkidu's death, hoping to learn the secret of eternal life?

Utnapishtim, called the Faraway, survived the great flood and was made immortal, but he tells Gilgamesh the gift was a one-off: no assembly of gods will ever gather to grant it again.

What kind of creatures guard the tunnel of the sun at the twin peaks of Mount Mashu?

Two scorpion monsters, a male and his mate, guard the gate: he warns that no mortal has ever made the journey, but in the end they let him into the dark.

What is the occupation of Siduri, who urges Gilgamesh to be content with life's simple pleasures?

An alewife with a tavern by the sea, Siduri takes the ragged, skin-clad Gilgamesh for a dangerous stranger and bars her door, so he has to explain who he is.

What does Gilgamesh smash in a rage when he meets the ferryman Urshanabi?

The Stone Ones, whose nature scholars still argue over, let the ferryman cross safely; without them Gilgamesh must cut a stack of punting poles and drop each after one push, so his hand never touches the deadly water.

Sworn to secrecy about the gods' coming flood, which god leaks the plan by speaking to a reed wall?

Ea keeps the letter of his oath by telling the wall of a reed house, not the man behind it, to tear the house down and build a boat; Enlil is furious to find that anyone survived.

What test does the flood survivor set the death-fearing Gilgamesh?

Stay awake for six days and seven nights: he dozes off at once, and the survivor's wife bakes a loaf for each day he sleeps, so a row of stale bread is waiting when he wakes and denies it.

Which bird does the flood survivor release last, the one that never returns to the boat?

A raven, sent out after a dove and a swallow had both circled back: it found food on dry ground and stayed away, the sign that it was safe to leave the boat stranded on Mount Nimush.

How does Gilgamesh reach the rejuvenating plant at the bottom of the sea?

He binds stones to his feet so they drag him to the seabed, then cuts them loose once he holds the thorny plant; cautious for once, he plans to test it on an old man before eating it himself.

What steals the plant of youth while Gilgamesh bathes?

A serpent, drawn by the plant's scent, carries it off and sheds its skin as it goes: the poem's account of why snakes seem to grow young again while people cannot.

What sight, on his return home, prompts Gilgamesh to praise an enduring work to the ferryman?

The city's massive walls: Gilgamesh tells the ferryman to climb them and inspect the fired brickwork, in the very lines that open the poem, so the epic ends where it began.

How many tablets make up the Standard Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh?

Twelve, though the last is an odd fit: a close translation of an older Sumerian poem, tacked on even though Enkidu, dead since Tablet VII, is alive in it again.

Which scribe is credited with compiling the Standard Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh?

Sin-leqi-unninni, whose name is a prayer to the moon god, did more than copy: he is credited with recasting the older tales as a story about facing death, turning an adventurer into a wise man.

What are the opening words of the Standard Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh?

He who saw the deep: the hero's real prize is not eternal life but hidden knowledge from before the Flood, which the prologue says he brought home and carved in stone. Older translations read 'he who saw everything'.

The earliest Gilgamesh poems are Sumerian, but in which language was the epic itself composed?

Akkadian, the language of Babylon and Assyria, carried the story well beyond its homeland: pieces of the epic have been dug up as far away as the Hittite capital in Anatolia.

In the earlier Sumerian poems, what is Enkidu's relationship to Gilgamesh?

His servant: in the Sumerian poems Enkidu serves his master, and it is the later epic that remakes him as a wild man created by the gods to be the king's equal.

How is Gilgamesh's name written in the earliest Sumerian poems?

Bilgames is how most scholars read the Sumerian spelling; when the tablets were first deciphered in Victorian London the hero's name was misread altogether, and for years he was known as Izdubar.

In which king's library at Nineveh were the best copies of the Gilgamesh epic found?

Ashurbanipal's library was vast because the Assyrian king, trained as a scribe himself, wrote to temples and scholars demanding their tablets and sent scribes out to copy whatever he lacked.

Hormuzd Rassam, whose 1850s digs at Nineveh turned up Gilgamesh tablets, was a native of which nearby city?

Mosul, close by Nineveh's ruins, was Hormuzd Rassam's home town; sent to Ethiopia as a British envoy in the 1860s, he was imprisoned there for two years until an army marched in and freed him.

What does Enkidu say Gilgamesh's terrifying dreams on the road to the Cedar Forest mean?

Victory is coming, Enkidu insists: a falling mountain, a wild bull and a storm of lightning and fire are all read as good omens for the fight ahead.

Which newspaper paid George Smith to go to Nineveh in 1873 and hunt for missing Gilgamesh flood fragments?

The Daily Telegraph paid for the dig and got its money's worth: within days of starting at Nineveh, Smith found a fragment he believed filled the gap.

Which biblical story is said to follow a Gilgamesh episode 'point by point'?

Noah and the ark in Genesis shares the divine warning, the sealed boat, the mountain landing and the birds sent out; when the match was first read out in London in 1872, the prime minister was in the audience.

Which company bought the illegally imported Gilgamesh Dream Tablet in 2014 for the Museum of the Bible?

Hobby Lobby bought it in a private sale from a London auction house that passed along a forged ownership history; federal agents seized the tablet from the museum in 2019, and the company agreed to give it up.

To which country was the Gilgamesh Dream Tablet returned in September 2021?

Iraq got the tablet back in September 2021; an American dealer had bought it in London in 2003, caked in dirt and unreadable, and posted it to the United States without declaring it.

A real King Gilgamesh probably ruled between 2800 and 2500 BCE, the era when which of these was built?

Egypt's first pyramids went up in those same centuries, and a real Gilgamesh looks likely because inscriptions survive naming Enmebaragesi, the father of one of his enemies in the legends.

In the Sumerian poem Gilgamesh and Aga, Gilgamesh revolts against his overlord from which city?

Kish demands that Gilgamesh's people dig its wells, and he refuses; when its king Aga is captured in the siege that follows, Gilgamesh recalls an old kindness and lets him go home free.

In his grief, Gilgamesh refuses to let Enkidu be buried until what happens?

A maggot falls from his nose as Enkidu lies unburied, and only then does Gilgamesh accept that his friend is gone; the sight leaves him so afraid of his own death that he takes to the wilderness.

What role do ancient prayers give Gilgamesh after his death?

Judge of the dead in the Underworld is the rank the Sumerian poem of his death gives him, so the king who failed to escape dying ends up ruling on everyone else who does.

What does the grieving Gilgamesh order his craftsmen to make after Enkidu dies?

A statue of his friend is what he demands from the smiths and jewellers; he also lays out grave gifts from his treasury so that the gods below will give Enkidu a kind welcome.

In Aelian's Roman-era tale, why does Gilgamesh's grandfather keep his daughter under guard?

An oracle warned of her son: the Chaldaeans foretold he would take the throne, and Aelian jokes that the king played Acrisius, who locked up Danaë for the same reason; it failed here too, for the girl bore a son anyway.

Beyond the dark tunnel under Mount Mashu, Gilgamesh walks into a garden whose trees bear what?

Jewels hang there in place of fruit and leaves, carnelian and lapis lazuli among them; Gilgamesh reaches the garden only by racing the length of the sun's own tunnel in total darkness.

Enkidu, before he is tamed, eats grass and drinks at the waterhole alongside which animals?

Gazelles are his herd until his days with Shamhat: when he goes back to them they bolt at the sight of him, and he finds his legs can no longer keep up.

In a Sumerian poem, Gilgamesh clears creatures out of which goddess's huluppu tree?

Inanna had been tending the tree to make herself a throne and a bed from its wood, and wept when it was infested; Gilgamesh, her brother in this poem, fells it so the furniture can be made.

In Enkidu's dying dream, how are the inhabitants of the Netherworld's 'house of dust' clothed?

In bird feathers, like Enkidu himself in the dream: a dark figure pins him down, turns his arms into wings and leads him to a lightless house where clay is the only food.

What does Enkidu make from the tallest cedar he and Gilgamesh cut down?

A temple door, rafted downriver as a gift to the gods; on his deathbed Enkidu curses it, saying that had he known how he would be repaid he would have taken an axe to it.

According to fragments found at Mê-Turan, where was Gilgamesh entombed?

Under a riverbed: in the Sumerian poem of his death the Euphrates is turned from its course, the tomb is built in the dry channel, and the water is then let back over it.

In Aelian's account, how was the infant Gilgamesh saved after guards threw him from a tower?

The bird set him down in an orchard, where the gardener raised him.

On his journey to the edge of the world, Gilgamesh kills which animals and wears their skins?

Lions terrify him at first: he prays to the moon god for protection, then wakes from a dream, falls on the pride with axe and dagger and takes their pelts for clothing.