50 free Gilgamesh trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Gilgamesh trivia quiz covers the king of Uruk whose story was pressed into clay more than a thousand years before Homer. The easy questions cover the hero's city, his divine fraction, his wild companion, the forest guardian they kill, the goddess he insults and the flood survivor he goes looking for. From there the quiz moves through the twelve tablets of the Standard Babylonian version: Shamhat and the trapper, the dreams interpreted by Ninsun, the thirteen winds of Shamash, the Bull of Heaven's hindquarter, the scorpion guardians of Mount Mashu, the alewife Siduri, the ferryman's stone things and the plant stolen by a snake. The hard end covers the scholarship: the Sumerian poems where he is called Bilgames, the incipits Surpassing All Other Kings and He Who Saw the Deep, the scribe Sin-leqi-unninni, Hormuzd Rassam and the library at Nineveh, George Smith's 1872 reading that shook Victorian Britain, the Genesis parallels, the Dream Tablet's return to Iraq and the case for a real king behind the legend. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entries for the Epic of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh and George Smith before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our mythology, ancient Mesopotamia and Greek mythology quizzes are natural next stops.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Gilgamesh was king of which ancient Mesopotamian city?
Uruk
He is listed among its kings on the Sumerian King List and credited with building its walls.
Q 02According to the epic, what fraction of Gilgamesh was divine?
Two-thirds
His mother was a goddess; his people still cried out to the gods about his oppression.
Q 03Where does the wild man created as Gilgamesh's equal live before he is tamed?
In the wilderness with a herd of animals
He is covered in hair and almost invincibly strong; the trapper whose snares he wrecks reports him to the sun god.
Q 04Who is Shamhat, the woman who tames the wild man in Tablet one?
A temple prostitute
After six days and seven nights with her his herd flees, and she consoles him that he now has knowledge like the gods.
Q 05Whose livelihood does the wild man ruin, prompting the first report of him to the sun god?
A trapper's
He kept destroying the man's traps; the trapper later gets cursed and then blessed by the dying wild man.
Q 06What form did Gilgamesh's oppression of the young women of his city take?
Raping brides on their wedding night
The wild man, hearing of it from a stranger, marches to the city to intervene at a wedding, and the two wrestle.
Q 07Who is Gilgamesh's mother, the goddess who interprets his dreams?
Ninsun
She adopts Enkidu as her son before the two heroes set out for the Cedar Forest.
Q 08Which monstrous demigod guards the Cedar Forest?
Humbaba
He offers to serve Gilgamesh as a slave and cut the trees for him, and Gilgamesh pities him before Enkidu urges the kill.
Q 09How many winds does the sun god Shamash send to bind the forest guardian?
Thirteen
The heroes float home down the Euphrates on a raft with the giant tree.
Q 10Which goddess does Gilgamesh reject, citing her mistreatment of past lovers such as Dumuzi?
Ishtar
She goes straight to her father Anu and demands the Bull of Heaven.
Q 11What does the spurned goddess threaten to do if her father Anu refuses her the Bull of Heaven?
Raise the dead to devour the living
Anu warns the bull will bring seven years of famine, so she stocks seven years of provisions.
Q 12After the Bull of Heaven is killed, what does Enkidu hurl at the goddess?
One of its hindquarters
That insult, on top of the killings, is why the gods sentence him to die.
Q 13How do the gods sentence Enkidu to death?
A fatal illness
He dreams of the Netherworld, a house of dust whose inhabitants eat clay and wear feathers.
Q 21How does Gilgamesh reach the rejuvenating plant at the bottom of the sea?
He binds stones to his feet
He plans to test it on an old man back home before eating it himself.
Q 22What steals the plant of youth while Gilgamesh bathes?
A serpent
It sheds its skin as it slithers away, which was the ancient explanation of why snakes renew themselves.
Q 23What sight, on his return home, prompts Gilgamesh to praise an enduring work to the ferryman?
The city's massive walls
The lines that open Tablet one are repeated at the end of Tablet eleven, giving the epic circularity.
Q 14Whom does Gilgamesh set out to find after Enkidu's death, hoping to learn the secret of eternal life?
Utnapishtim
He is called the Faraway; he and his wife survived the great flood and were made immortal.
Q 15What kind of creatures guard the tunnel of the sun at the twin peaks of Mount Mashu?
Two scorpion monsters
They appear to be a married couple, and no man had ever entered the tunnel before.
Q 16What is the occupation of Siduri, who urges Gilgamesh to be content with life's simple pleasures?
An alewife
Several scholars think the author of Ecclesiastes borrowed her advice directly.
Q 17What does Gilgamesh smash in a rage when he meets the ferryman Urshanabi?
The stone charms needed to cross the deadly waters
He then has to cut 120 trees into punting poles because the waters are deadly to touch.
Q 18How many trees does the ferryman tell Gilgamesh to cut into punting poles?
120
In the Old Babylonian version the ferryman asks for 300 oars instead.
Q 19What test does the flood survivor set Gilgamesh to show he cannot conquer even sleep, let alone death?
Stay awake for six days and seven nights
He fails at once, and a loaf is baked each day he sleeps so he cannot deny it.
Q 20Which three birds does the flood survivor release from his boat as the waters recede?
A dove, a swallow and a raven
When the raven fails to return he opens the ark; his boat had lodged on Mount Nimush.
Q 24How many tablets make up the Standard Babylonian version of the epic?
Twelve
The last is really a translation of an older Sumerian poem and has been called an inorganic appendage.
Q 25Which scribe is credited with editing the Standard Babylonian version between roughly 1300 and 1000 BCE?
Sin-leqi-unninni
He is credited with pushing mortality to the foreground, turning an adventurer into a wise man.
Q 26What are the opening words, or incipit, of the Standard Babylonian version?
He who saw the deep
The older Old Babylonian version opens instead with Surpassing all other kings.
Q 27In which language was the combined epic written?
Akkadian
Five earlier Sumerian poems, with slightly different names for the hero, supplied the raw material.
Q 28In the earlier Sumerian poems, what is Enkidu's relationship to Gilgamesh?
His servant
Only in the later epic do the two become companions of equal standing.
Q 29How is Gilgamesh's name written in the earliest Sumerian poems?
Bilgames
Victorian scholars first called him Izdubar before the cuneiform signs of his name could be read properly.
Q 30In which royal library at Nineveh were the best copies of the epic found?
Ashurbanipal's
About 15,000 tablet fragments came out of it, dug up by Layard, his assistant and W. K. Loftus.