Your Book Review: The Epic Of Gilgamesh

[This is one of the finalists in the 2026 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]Introduction: He Who Saw the DeepI’ve been thinking, lately, about the first epic story ever written. If you know anything about the Epic of Gilgamesh, you know that it’s old. This is part of why I find it so interesting, but not the only part.The best comparison I can think of is the pyramids, which are just a little older. The Great Pyramid of Giza was built in the 2500s BC, around the same time as Stonehenge1 , twenty-five centuries before Cleopatra lived. It predates candles, concrete, and coins; it was centuries old when the first empire rose and when the woolly mammoth went extinct.Around 100 BC, Antipater of Sidon wrote a list of the seven most impressive sights (‘Seven wonders’) of the world - the pyramids were by far the oldest of the group at the time, and now, two thousand years later, all the others on the list have long since been destroyed. This should remind us that the pyramids don’t just stretch far back in time - they stretch forward as well. They are piles of stone. They may be the product of the greatest minds of their age striving to put more stone in a more orderly pile than anyone had before, but still, they are piles of stone, basically artificial rock formations. They will still be there in a hundred thousand years, probably a million. They are so old they brush up against the beginning of civilisation, and yet, we are seeing them today in their youth.The Epic of Gilgamesh was written down (in its earliest form) around 2100 BC in Mesopotamia - another cradle of civilisation, less well-known than ancient Egypt but every bit as extraordinary. Like the pyramids, Gilgamesh wasn’t exactly the first of anything; we have writing, and even written literature, that predates it. But also like the pyramids, in its time, it was completely unmatched in scale. Nothing else had the same length, the same literary gravity, the same reach. For centuries it stood alone in its class while empires rose and fell around it.Its longevity isn’t because it was made of durable rock, and it’s not because a stray copy happens to have been found in modernity. This piece of writing lasted because it was considered of such cultural importance, and copied and imitated so extensively, that we can’t help but find parts of it, wherever we find writing from this period. The Egyptians built the pyramids to last, and the Mesopotamians put the same care into immortalising this story. It’s their gift to us, crafted not from atoms, but from bits.That’s what I am in awe of whenever I read this book: the age, the scale, the importance. Like a rock formation, it was here long before I was, and will be here long after I’m dead.Prologue: UrukThe Epic of Gilgamesh is organised into eleven Tablets (there’s a twelfth but it’s not really part of the story and seems to have been tacked on by tradition). Tablet 1 begins with an introduction to our hero, Gilgamesh2 :(If you’d like to hear it in the original Akkadian while you read, the internet can provide.)He who saw the Deep, the country’s foundation[who] knew the [proper ways, was] wise in all matters![He] explored everywhere the seats of [power,][he knew] of everything the sum of wisdom.He saw what was secret, discovered what was hidden,he brought back a tale of before the Deluge.Gilgamesh’s greatness is linked immediately to the city of Uruk, where he rules as King:He built the rampart of Uruk-the-Sheepfold,of holy Eanna, the sacred storehouse.[...] Climb Uruk’s wall and walk back and forth!Survey the foundations, examine the brickwork!Were its bricks not fired in an oven?Did the Seven Sages not lay its foundations?[A square mile is] city, [a square mile] date-grove, a square mile is clay-pit, half a square mile the temple of Ishtar: [three square miles] and a half is Uruk’s expanse.The city of Uruk is prominent in this story, and that’s no coincidence. Mesopotamians associated it with ancient wealth and glory. They were right to venerate it: Uruk is the site of an epoch-defining shift in human history.Some historical context. The Epic of Gilgamesh comes from Mesopotamia, a stretch of land between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers, roughly corresponding to modern day Iraq and Syria (and part of the Fertile Crescent). It’s tempting to think of this region as a dry desert, but six to ten thousand years ago it was much wetter, and an ideal environment for agriculture. From the end of the last ice age in 9700 BC, up to about 500 BC, there was nowhere else on Earth where the transition from hunter-gathers to settled societies went so fast. This is where farmable strains of wheat, barley, lentils, peas and flax were first bred; where goats, sheep, cattle, pigs, and cats were domesticated; and where the wheel was invented.In Mesopotamia, technological progress met with a critical mass of population density to create the world’s first city: Uruk3 . Uruk is so old it predates the literal Ur-City. In 3000 BC it might have had a population of eighty thousand, an unparalleled mass of people for the era. Uruk was the first place in the world to develop a state society: taxes, centralised authority, institutional control over land and labour, professional bureaucracy - the works.As part of this development, Uruk’s administrative elites pioneered key developments in the practices of accounting and contracts. These systems began as verification systems for contracts and aide-mémoires for city bureaucrats, grew increasingly sophisticated and complex, and culminated, around 2500 BC, in - blessing of blessings for historians - a writing system.But Uruk’s greatest legacy may be that it spurred the development of similar cities elsewhere. By about 3000 BC, Uruk’s singular dominance was beginning to fade, making Mesopotamia a patchwork of territories governed by multiple prominent city-states, with names like Ur, Lagash, Kish, and Nippur. They were loosely linked by language, culture, and religion (similar to classical Greek city-states like Athens and Sparta, though much earlier). This region was called Sumer, and residents were Sumerians.During this time - somewhere in murky proto-history, perhaps 2700 BC - a king named Gilgamesh ruled the city of Uruk. (At least, probably - there’s some chance he is fictional4 .) We can assume that some kind of oral history grew up around Gilgamesh in the centuries after he lived. Around 2000 BC (at least 500 years after he died), administrative and religious texts began to mention him being given offerings and being invoked in rituals, functioning as a sort of minor deity. Eventually Gilgamesh and the stories about him were written down, formed into a single narrative, and became the ancient world’s first true piece of literature.Tablets 1-2: Gilgamesh and EnkiduGilgamesh is a bad king.At least, he starts out that way. We are told he acts “like a wild bull lording it”, that he holds constant contests to exhaust the men of his city, and “lets [no] girl go free to [her bridegroom]” - meaning he exercises his right to have sex with newly-married women, before their husbands do.His people plea to the goddess Aruru to deliver them from Gilgamesh’s tyranny. She decides to help them, with an unorthodox method: she will create a new man to be Gilgamesh’s equal, distracting him from harassing his subjects.The goddess Aruru, she washed her hands,took a pinch of clay, threw it down in the wild.In the wild she created Enkidu, the hero,offspring of silence, knit strong by Ninurta.All his body is matted with hair,he bears long tresses like those of a woman:the locks of his hair grow thickly as barley,he knows not a people, nor even a country.Hairy, unkempt Enkidu is initially wild like an animal, running with herds and gra