Gilgamesh Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
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
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.
Q 02The Epic of Gilgamesh was pressed into clay tablets in which script?
Cuneiform
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.
Q 03At the shepherds' camp, what does the newly tamed Enkidu drink seven jugs of?
Beer
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.
Q 04Who is Shamhat, the woman who tames the wild man in Tablet one?
A temple prostitute
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.
Q 05Whose livelihood does the wild Enkidu ruin, setting off the plan to tame him?
A trapper's
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.
Q 06What form did Gilgamesh's oppression of the young women of his city take?
Raping brides on their wedding night
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.
Q 07Who is Gilgamesh's mother, the goddess who interprets his dreams?
Ninsun
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.
Q 08Which monstrous demigod guards the Cedar Forest?
Humbaba
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.
Q 09Which god, Gilgamesh's protector, sends the winds that pin down the Cedar Forest's guardian?
Shamash
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.
Q 10Which goddess does Gilgamesh reject, citing her mistreatment of past lovers such as Dumuzi?
Ishtar
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.
Q 11What does the spurned goddess threaten if Anu withholds the Bull of Heaven?
Raise the dead to devour the living
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.
Q 12After the Bull of Heaven is killed, what does Enkidu hurl at the goddess?
One of its hindquarters
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.
Q 13How do the gods sentence Enkidu to death?
Q 21How does Gilgamesh reach the rejuvenating plant at the bottom of the sea?
He binds stones to his feet
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.
Q 22What steals the plant of youth while Gilgamesh bathes?
A serpent
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.
Q 23What sight, on his return home, prompts Gilgamesh to praise an enduring work to the ferryman?
The city's massive walls
A fatal illness
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.
Q 14Whom does Gilgamesh set out to find after Enkidu's death, hoping to learn the secret of eternal life?
Utnapishtim
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.
Q 15What kind of creatures guard the tunnel of the sun at the twin peaks of Mount Mashu?
Two scorpion monsters
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.
Q 16What is the occupation of Siduri, who urges Gilgamesh to be content with life's simple pleasures?
An alewife
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.
Q 17What does Gilgamesh smash in a rage when he meets the ferryman Urshanabi?
The Stone Ones
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.
Q 18Sworn to secrecy about the gods' coming flood, which god leaks the plan by speaking to a reed wall?
Ea
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.
Q 19What test does the flood survivor set the death-fearing Gilgamesh?
Stay awake for six days and seven nights
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.
Q 20Which bird does the flood survivor release last, the one that never returns to the boat?
A raven
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.
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.
Q 24How many tablets make up the Standard Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh?
Twelve
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.
Q 25Which scribe is credited with compiling the Standard Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh?
Sin-leqi-unninni
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.
Q 26What are the opening words of the Standard Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh?
He who saw the deep
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'.
Q 27The earliest Gilgamesh poems are Sumerian, but in which language was the epic itself composed?
Akkadian
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.
Q 28In the earlier Sumerian poems, what is Enkidu's relationship to Gilgamesh?
His servant
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.
Q 29How is Gilgamesh's name written in the earliest Sumerian poems?
Bilgames
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.
Q 30In which king's library at Nineveh were the best copies of the Gilgamesh epic found?
Ashurbanipal's
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.