The First Hero: Gilgamesh

“Friends hold a mirror up to each other; though that mirror they can see each other in ways that would not otherwise be accessible to them, and it is this mirroring that helps them improve themselves as persons.” – Aristotle

In an era when action heroes and comic book superheroes captivate the imaginations of young audiences, the best classic book to offer young men might be The Epic of Gilgamesh. The oldest known story in written form, the epic’s oral tradition may well reach back five thousand years, predating Homer by four millennia. Yet, the story of a semi-divine – but mortal – hero and his friend has the same appeal as Marvel’s Thor or DC’s Wonder Woman, both of whom derive from mythic roots. The epic opens by declaring of Gilgamesh,

“This was the man to whom all things were known; this was the king who knew the countries of the world. He was wise, he saw mysteries and knew secret things, he brought us a tale of the days before the flood. He went on a long journey, was weary, worn-out with labor, returning he rested, he engraved on a stone the whole story.”

Gilgamesh possesses the broad knowledge that characterizes Iron Man and the understanding of mysteries like those delved into by Indiana Jones. He even records his own story as audiences see Bilbo Baggins doing in the Peter Jackson films based on Tolkien’s sub-created mythologies.

In more than one way, Gilgamesh is the archetype of boys’ aspirations. First, Gilgamesh is handsome and courageous, gifts given him by Shamash, the sun god, and Adad, a weather god somewhat equivalent to Zeus the Thunderer. The king of Uruk is also a builder credited with erecting “walls, a great rampart, and the temple of the blessed Eanna for the god of the firmament Anu, and for Ishtar the goddess of love.” So, in addition to reflecting a boy’s dreams, Gilgamesh also speaks to manly concerns for civic defense and for religion, hardly ever found in contemporary fare written especially for boys.

The boisterous king’s companion, Enkidu, is also archetypally appealing. He, too, is a warrior. While Gilgamesh is a man of the city, Enkidu is a man of the wilderness. The epic describes him as having “joy of the water with the herds of wild game.” In this, he is like many boys, loving sport and the outdoors. Ninsun, mother of Gilgamesh, describe Enkidu as “a strong comrade, the one who brings help to his friend in his need.” Indeed, friendship is a central theme of the epic. Because Ninsun says Gilgamesh was drawn to Enkidu – by her design – “as though to a woman,” some critics today declare Gilgamesh and Enkidu to be the first homosexual characters in literature even as they have attempted to characterize David and Jonathan in the Bible and Achilles and Patroclus in the Iliad in the same manner. Elsewhere, official voices declare martial prowess, nation-building, and even sport to be evidence of toxic masculinity. In contrast, both Gilgamesh and Enkidu are sketched as fully masculine characters. In part, Enkidu is sent to “tame” Gilgamesh who has at first expressed his masculinity as an oppressor of his people. Following a physically contentious first encounter, they bond and begin a questing adventure.

Gilgamesh and Enkidu are both mortal. Like all mortals, they are subject to excess and bad judgment. Before he meets Enkidu, Gilgamesh makes war for the sake of making war, and he takes the women of the city as his own. When the people of Uruk pray for deliverance, the gods create Enkidu to be Gilgamesh’s equal and provide for him a companion to channel his warrior spirit. The details of their encounter parallel those of the first meetings of Arthur and Launcelot or of Robin Hood and Little John. Like these other legendary heroes, they engage in full-on brawl, shaking the very walls of Uruk. From their initial combative encounter, the two bond as Enkidu comes to speak as Gilgamesh’s conscience but never abandons his friend in a time of need. When Gilgamesh faces the fact of his own immortality, he must learn the heaviest fact of life that all men face.

Like Bilbo Baggins, Gilgamesh is a man on a quest, though perhaps not the quest he thinks he pursues. Like Bilbo, who thinks he is on a quest to recover the lost treasure of the dwarves, Gilgamesh sets for himself two great quests, one to battle a giant to gain fame, the other to discover the secret of immortality in order to avoid that fate. In fact, like Mr. Baggins, Gilgamesh quests for self-knowledge. In his first adventure, he gains a full understanding of friendship and the fulfillment it brings to life. In the second, he seeks to discover the secret of the only immortal human, the Akkadian counterpart of Noah, but instead he discovers the limitations of his humanity and comes to accept them. In a time when young men and women are told that they can become “whatever they dream,” Gilgamesh offers a dose of the reality of limitations without quashing aspiration or adventure.

Though The Epic of Gilgamesh is a work of the Sumerian civilization recovered from the library of Assurbanipal in the nineteenth century by Austen Henry Layard, it has come to be a work of the Western canon because of both the interest and the influence on scholarship it has exercised. The history of the discovery and translation of the epic is something of an adventure in itself. An abbreviated version of that history appears in the worthwhile introduction to the N. K. Sanders translation, the prose version my students read for most of the years I taught the work. After the initial discovery of a number of broken tablets that relate the tale in cuneiform, the hard work of deciphering the ancient script began. After Henry Rawlinson accomplished that feat, the quest to recover the full text of the epic began, driven largely by the desire to find a complete account of the Flood story told near the end of the epic.

When my high school juniors and seniors read The Epic of Gilgamesh, they found it fascinating. They were not put off by the repetition common to most works that arise from an oral tradition as does this epic as well as do the foundations of Homer’s two great poems. Though the Babylonian pantheon was unfamiliar, they were curious about the correspondences between the Greco-Roman gods and those appearing in Gilgamesh and explored both the similarities and the differences. Later, when we read the story of Noah in Genesis, they drew contrasts between the starkly different motives for sending the Flood, the passengers on the ark, and the ultimate outcome for the protagonists, Noah and Utnapishtim.

While the work is rather short compared to the Odyssey or the Iliad, it held their interest and sparked curiosity about archaeology as well. In fact, they engaged in a project of “recovering” and translating a “lost story” put together by my colleague and me. They had to write proposals for a grant to finance their expedition and then had to negotiate with “local authorities” (teachers who volunteered) to gain access to fragments of the story. Finally, they had to translate the fragments and assemble a recension. They had fun, learned a bit about archaeology, and got creative with their presentations.

A quick online search will provide at least a dozen prose and verse translations of The Epic of Gilgamesh available today, usually in paperback. Adaptations have been published as well, but they are not a substitute for the original. If you know a young person – but, especially, a boy – who likes adventure or mythology, a copy could make a great gift.