Full TitleThe Epic of Gilgamesh
AuthorThe ancient authors of the stories that compose the poem are anonymous. The latest and most complete version yet found, composed no later than around 600 b.c., was signed by a Babylonian author and editor who called himself Sin-Leqi-Unninni.
Type of WorkEpic poem
GenreHeroic quest; heroic epic
LanguageSumerian; Akkadian; Hurrian; Hittite. All these languages were written in cuneiform script.
Time and Place WrittenBetween 2700 b.c. and around 600 b.c. in Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq)
Date of First PublicationTablet XI of Gilgamesh was first translated into English and published in 1872. The first comprehensive scholarly translation to be published in English was R. Campbell Thompson’s in 1930.
PublisherThe Clarendon Press, Oxford
NarratorMost of the epic is related by an objective, unnamed narrator.
Point of ViewThird person. After Enkidu appears in Tablet I, most of the story is told from Gilgamesh’s point of view. Utnapishtim narrates the flood story in Tablet XI.
ToneThe narrator never explicitly criticizes Gilgamesh, who is always described in the most heroic terms, but his portrayal of him often includes irony. In the first half of the story, Gilgamesh is heedless of death to the point of rashness, while in the second, he is obsessed by it to the point of paralysis. Gilgamesh’s anticlimactic meeting with Utnapishtim, for example, is quietly ironic, in that everyone involved, including Utnapishtim and his wife, knows more than Gilgamesh does.
TensePast
Setting (Time)2700 b.c.
Setting (Place)Mesopotamia
ProtagonistGilgamesh, king of Uruk
Major ConflictGilgamesh struggles to avoid death.
Rising ActionIn the first half of the poem, Gilgamesh bonds with his friend Enkidu and sets out to make a great name for himself. In doing so, he incurs the wrath of the gods.
ClimaxEnkidu dies.
Falling ActionBereft by the loss of his friend, Gilgamesh becomes obsessed with his own mortality. He sets out on a quest to find Utnapishtim, the Mesopotamian Noah who received eternal life from the gods, in the hope that he will tell him how he too can avoid death.
ThemesLove as a motivating force; the inevitability of death; the gods are dangerous
MotifsSeductions; doubling and twinship; baptism
SymbolsReligious symbols; doorways; journeys
ForeshadowingThe most important instances of foreshadowing are explicit, because they come in the form of premonitory dreams. Gilgamesh dreams about a meteor, which his mother tells him represents the companion he will soon have. Few things, however, are as ephemeral as a falling star, and already we have a hint of Enkidu’s eventual fate. Enkidu interprets dreams during their journey to the forbidden forest. In one a mountain falls on them, which Enkidu says represents the defeat of Humbaba. It also suggests Enkidu’s journey to the underworld and Gilgamesh’s passage through the twin-peaked mountain. In another dream, a bull attacks them. Enkidu says the bull is Humbaba, but it may also be the Bull of Heaven they fight later.
