The Ancient Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh: A Legacy of Literature and Culture

There was no Sumerian “epic”

Scholars do not speak of a single Sumerian Gilgamesh epic. What survives in Sumerian is a set of separate poems, each telling one episode, with no known attempt to join them into one continuous story. The unified epic came later, in Akkadian, when Babylonian poets drew on the older tales, reshaped them and added new material. The phrase “Sumerian epic” in the title is therefore best understood as shorthand for this earlier body of poetry.

Gilgamesh himself is listed in the Sumerian King List as a king of Uruk, reigning in a legendary-looking span of years. Many scholars think a real ruler of Uruk in the Early Dynastic period may lie behind the figure, perhaps in the 26th or 27th century BCE, but no inscription from his own lifetime is firmly identified, so this is a hypothesis and not an established fact. The poems were composed centuries later. Some may have been shaped in the Ur III period, at the end of the third millennium BCE, though most surviving copies come from scribal schools of the Old Babylonian period, roughly the 18th century BCE.

The five poems

The usual list is as follows. The titles are modern conventions, taken from the content of each poem.

1. Gilgamesh and Aga (or Gilgamesh and Aga of Kish). Aga, king of Kish, sends envoys to Uruk demanding submission. Gilgamesh consults the elders, who counsel obedience, then the younger men, who support resistance. Aga besieges Uruk, but the matter ends without a battle: Gilgamesh spares Aga, recalling an earlier kindness. This is the only poem of the five that is political rather than mythological, and its world of rival rulers reflects the Sumerian city-state kingship of the period, which fits the scholarly view that Gilgamesh may have been a real city ruler.
2. Gilgamesh and Huwawa. Gilgamesh decides to travel to the cedar mountain to kill the guardian Huwawa (the later Humbaba) and gain a name. Two versions, usually called A and B, differ in detail. He is accompanied by fifty volunteers, and Enkidu appears as his servant. Huwawa surrenders his terrifying radiances one by one and is then killed, an act the gods are reported to resent.
3. Gilgamesh and the Bull of Heaven. The bull is linked to the goddess Inanna and threatens Uruk. The surviving text is fragmentary, and only part of the plot can be reconstructed.
4. Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the Netherworld. A tree planted by Inanna, in this story infested with creatures, is cleared by Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh makes objects from its wood, which fall into the underworld. Enkidu goes down to retrieve them, ignores instructions and is held there; Gilgamesh pleads to the gods, and Enkidu’s spirit rises to describe the condition of the dead.
5. The Death of Gilgamesh. The king is told that, although he is great, he cannot escape death. The poem, which is damaged in places, describes his burial and the offerings made for him, and presents him as a figure of standing among the dead.

How the Sumerian poems differ from the later epic

The differences are as informative as the similarities.

• Enkidu is a servant. The Sumerian poems call him Gilgamesh’s servant, not a friend or equal. The idea of Enkidu created by the gods as a rival, and of the men becoming companions, appears only in the Akkadian epic.
• No wild man, no Shamhat. The Akkadian story of Enkidu’s life on the steppe is not known from the Sumerian poems.
• No quest for immortality. The journey to Utnapishtim and the flood story, which form the second half of the Babylonian epic, have no direct counterpart in the five poems. The flood tradition does exist in Sumerian, but in other compositions.
• Different emphasis. In Sumerian, Gilgamesh is a heroic king in tales of action; in the later epic he is a man changed by loss. The poems are shorter and more episodic.
• Humbaba’s fate and the Bull. The episodes exist in both traditions, but details, motives and tone vary.

The Akkadian poets also reached back directly to the Sumerian material. The earliest connected Akkadian versions are from the Old Babylonian period, and the standard twelve-tablet version came later still. Its twelfth tablet is in fact a translation of the second half of the poem about the netherworld, attached to the end, and it does not follow naturally from the eleventh tablet, which is one reason scholars regard the text as built from earlier pieces.

Written down in cuneiform

The Sumerian poems survive on clay tablets in cuneiform writing, many from schools where apprentice scribes copied literature to learn the language. Sumerian remained a language of scholarship and religion long after people stopped speaking it, and some tablets are copy exercises, which is partly why many copies survive. Questions of how widely the poems were known in oral form, and how far the written versions reflect older spoken ones, are debated. The institutions of Sumerian literacy gave the tradition a long life.

Influence on later literature

The influence of the epic is real in some respects and speculative in others. A few points are well supported:

• Within Mesopotamia and its neighbours. The Akkadian epic was copied for over a thousand years, and fragments in Akkadian have been found at Hattusa and at Megiddo in the Levant, showing that it travelled. Versions in Hittite and Hurrian are known from the Hittite kingdom.
• Rediscovery. When the flood tablet of the epic was announced in 1872, it provoked a major public response, because it echoed the biblical account. The question of how the flood stories are related remains a subject of scholarly discussion, and most specialists see a shared older tradition and not a straight copy.
• Modern literature. Since the 20th century, translations and retellings have made Gilgamesh part of world literature, studied and adapted by modern writers, and the poem is often called one of the oldest surviving works of literature. That description needs care, since earlier written works exist, but few are as sustained.

More speculative are claims of direct influence on Greek epic. Some scholars have noted resemblances between Gilgamesh and Enkidu and Achilles and Patroclus in the Iliad, or between the Cedar Forest quest and Greek heroic journeys. These parallels are interesting, but whether they reflect actual contact, shared Near Eastern themes or coincidence is debated, and a direct line cannot be proved.

Why the distinction matters

Treating the Sumerian poems as an “epic” hides a real piece of literary history: a king’s cycle of tales was gradually turned into a meditation on human limits. The Sumerian poems are valuable in their own right, and reading them beside the Babylonian version shows how a tradition was remade. Modern editions, especially those with parallel translations, are the best way to see this for oneself.