Not a purely Sumerian story
The title calls this a Sumerian epic, but the best-known version of the story is not Sumerian. The Epic of Gilgamesh as most people now read it is a Babylonian poem in Akkadian, assembled over many centuries from older material. The oldest layer is a group of separate Sumerian poems about Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, written down around the end of the third millennium BCE and in the following centuries. Enkidu appears in some of them, but there he is Gilgamesh’s servant rather than his equal. The Akkadian epic, by contrast, makes him a full companion and gives him a story of his own. Those developments are why Enkidu is the central character here.
A wild man made from clay
The Babylonian epic opens with Gilgamesh as a strong, restless king who oppresses his people in the city of Uruk, whose great wall he is said to have built. The people pray, and the gods ask the goddess Aruru to create a rival who can match him. She pinches off clay, and Enkidu is born on the steppe. He is covered in hair, lives among the gazelles, drinks at the watering places and frees animals from traps.
A trapper who finds his traps broken tells Gilgamesh, who sends a temple woman named Shamhat to the steppe. She spends six days and seven nights with Enkidu. When he returns to the animals, they flee from him; he has gained understanding, but has lost his old ease with them. Shamhat tells him of Uruk and its king, and he decides to go there. Modern readers often take this episode as an account of how a person is drawn into settled, urban life, though ancient audiences may have heard it differently, and scholars do not agree on a single interpretation.
From fight to friendship
Enkidu arrives in Uruk as the king is about to enter a house to claim a bride. He blocks the door, and the two men wrestle in the street. Gilgamesh’s anger eventually subsides and the fight ends, and they embrace and become friends. Gilgamesh’s mother Ninsun, a goddess, adopts Enkidu as a son. The bond that begins here carries the entire epic. It also reshapes Gilgamesh, whose energy, once turned on his own city, now goes into a shared project.
The Cedar Forest
Gilgamesh proposes an expedition to the Cedar Forest to kill its guardian, Humbaba (known in Sumerian as Huwawa), and to cut the cedars, so that he can leave a lasting name. Enkidu, who knows the forest, warns against it. The elders of Uruk and Ninsun also fear the journey, and Ninsun prays to the sun god Shamash on their behalf.
They travel through mountains, and Gilgamesh has troubling dreams that Enkidu interprets favourably. At the forest they find Humbaba. With the help of Shamash, who sends winds, they overpower him. Humbaba begs for his life, and the epic makes this a moment of tension: Gilgamesh hesitates, but Enkidu urges him to finish it, and Humbaba dies with a curse on both of them. They cut down the cedars and bring back a great tree.
In the older Sumerian poem on the same theme, the story is simpler and the tone different: Gilgamesh and Huwawa are the main figures, and Gilgamesh gains the monster’s “auras” by trickery. The Akkadian poem deepens the human cost.
Ishtar and the Bull of Heaven
Back in Uruk, the goddess Ishtar proposes marriage to Gilgamesh. He refuses her and lists the fates of her former lovers, which are not happy ones. Enraged, Ishtar goes to her father Anu and demands the Bull of Heaven, threatening to cause chaos if refused. The bull is sent, and it brings drought and death to Uruk. Gilgamesh and Enkidu kill it, and Enkidu throws a piece of the carcass at Ishtar. The scene is the closest the epic comes to open defiance of the gods. A Sumerian poem on the same subject exists, but is shorter and is not preserved in the same detail.
The gods’ verdict and Enkidu’s death
The gods hold a council. Because the two heroes have killed Humbaba and the bull, one of them must die, and Enlil insists that it be Enkidu. Shamash objects, but the verdict stands. Enkidu falls ill. In his fever he curses the trapper and Shamhat, as the people who drew him from the wild. Shamash reproaches him, pointing out that Shamhat gave him food, clothing and a friend. Enkidu relents and blesses her instead.
He then describes a dream of the underworld, the “house of dust”, where kings and priests sit like birds in feathers and Ereshkigal rules. After twelve days of illness, he dies. The description is bleak, and for many readers it is the emotional centre of the poem. It also explains what follows: Gilgamesh’s grief, and his terror of his own death, begin at Enkidu’s bedside. That second half of the story, the quest for immortality, is told in a separate article on the emotional core of the Babylonian epic.
What Enkidu represents
Scholars read Enkidu in several ways. He is a double of Gilgamesh, a counterweight to the king’s pride, a figure of the wild world absorbed by the city, and the vehicle through which the poem introduces mortality. None of these readings excludes the others, and the text itself does not tell us which is intended.
Enkidu also shows how a story developed. In the Sumerian poems, he is a minor figure; in the Akkadian version, the friend whose death changes the hero. The shift suggests that later poets, working within the tradition of Babylonian scribal scholarship, were interested less in a king’s feats than in what loss does to a person. If you wish to compare the sources, the poems themselves are collected and translated in several modern editions, among them Andrew George’s translation, which is widely used. The twelve tablets are preserved mostly in the fragments from Ashurbanipal’s collection of cuneiform writing and from other cities, and the Epic of Gilgamesh gradually took its familiar shape as it was copied.