Unfortunately time has not left Gilgamesh untouched. Some parts are missing, and some parts are inobvious. For example, the tablets say that Gilgamesh "takes sons from their fathers and daughters from their mothers". Usually this is translated to mean that he takes sons away to be soldiers and had "first rights" with the daughters of his people on their marriage day (jus primae noctis). Now, there is a good argument for that interpretation, one which I agree with, but nonetheless that interpretation isn't obvious from the text, it's just the most widely accepted interpretation. The same goes for most of the epic, the ambiguities are everywhere, because the language is largely unknown to us, and the context is largely unknown to us. But I will review the work as if the most reasonable interpretations of its language by the scholars and translaters were accurate. There is little other choice if I want to review it.

A note on the translations used for this review: John Gardner, one of my favorite novelists, did one, along with John Maier. It is a line-by-line translation of the Sin Lequ Unninni (Akkadian) version, with a lot of very helpful notes, and is a very wonderfully poetic translation. This is the one I'd recommend, as no other translation I've seen does as good a job of presenting everything important about the epic. It's also the source of the italicised lines in this review. There are also several free online versions, this one is my favorite, if only because it reminds me of the excellent Dr. Suess, although it takes many artistic liberties with the text, and the broken lines and missing tablets aren't even indicated; that's the version I'd recommend to the first-time, young, or less serious reader. You could also try the original Sumerian Gilgamesh stories, found here, and although those older versions aren't quite as dramatic and have a quite different plot.

Gilgamesh is, as far as is known, the oldest surviving story in earth literature. It is around 4000 years old, although the version I'm reviewing is an Akkadian retelling which is a mere 3000 years old. And what is this first story humanity has seen fit to preserve in perpetuity about? Understandably and impressively, the quest for immortality. From the beginning, humanity's first and most strongest desire has been to live forever. Four thousand years later, we're still fighting for it. From the day of his birth Gilgamesh was called by name.

The plot is strange but tight. I will divide it in four parts. In the first part, tablets 1 to 5, opens with a praise of the walls of the city Gilgamesh built. Gilgamesh worries the gods, so an equal in strength, Enkidu, is made from clay to diminish their worries. Enkidu lives in the wild and is discovered by a hunter-man. Enkidu is civilized by a temple prostitue. Enkidu meets Gilgamesh and they become friends. They decide to kill the demon Humbaba, and after much build up they do so. A work that will not be diminished by death.

In the second part, tablets 6 and 7, immediately after returning the goddess Ishtar asks Gilgamesh to become her lover, and he refuses, cursing her (quoted at the end of this review). Ishtar then complains to her father Anu and demands that he send down a bull as punishment (Ishtar threatens to opening the gates of the netherworld when he is reluctant). Enkidu and Gilgamesh slay the bull, and Enkidu throws the thigh of the bull in her face. The gods then decide that one of the two of them has to die, and Enlil (the most powerful god) arbitrarily chooses Enkidu. Shamash tries to defend him, but is overruled. I will make the dead rise, and they will devour the living, and the dead will increase beyond the number of the living.

In the third part, tablets 7 to 11, Gilgamesh realizes that he too will die and finds this unacceptable, and begins a long journey to reach Utnapishtim, the only human known to have defeated death (it was granted to him as a reward from the gods for saving humanity from Enlil's flood). Gilgamesh travels through the gateway of the scorpion-men, and through darkness, and over the waters of death, and finds Utnapishtim. Utnapishtim tells Gilgamesh the story of the flood, in a flashback sequence. Gilgamesh is bathed and clothed by Utnapishtim, and told of a plant which makes one young again (although not, presumably, immortal), which Gilgamesh retrieves. As Gilgamesh is returning home with it to distribute to the elders of his city, a snake steals it. Gilgamesh reaches his city and asks Urshanabi (the boatman of Utnapishtim who accompanied him on his journey back) to look at the wonderful city Gilgamesh built, in the same lines that open tablet 1. Me! Will I too not die like Enkidu? Sorrow has come into my belly. I fear death; I roam over the hills.

The final part, table 12, is an epilogue and doesn't fit well with the plot of the rest of the story (for example, Enkidu is alive again, and shortly dies, but in a different manner than he did in tablet 6). It is more of a religious text detailing the afterlife or netherworld, as Enkidu's ghost tells Gilgamesh what he found there. It is interesting for what the early ideas on the afterlife were: that you will suffer terribly if you had no or only a few sons, if you died a strange death, and (especially) if no one living remembers and loves you. It feels more like an appendix to the story rather than a conclusion. The left-overs of the pot, the scraps of bread thrown into the gutter, what no dog will eat, he eats.

This story has been usually misunderstood. Some have gone so far as to say that the book *celebrates* mortality, and that it is ironic that the epic opens with a praising of his works when his works do not exist anymore. On the contrary. It's true that the story is a failed quest for immortality, it is a tragedy. But there is no implication that immortality is impossible for mortals, just that it is very difficult, and that even the strongest mortals might fail in its pursuit. In fact two mortals in the book have achieved it already. In fact the superiority of the gods fails several times in the book as Gilgamesh and Enkidu succeed in going against their wishes. The very names of the characters are life-affirming! Utnapishtim means "he who found life" and Gilgamesh is called "he who seeks life". So waste no time with life-hating claims that this epic celebrates human mortality or death. The house where one who goes in never comes out again.

Like the Iliad, a knowledge of the gods the people of that time and place took for granted is necessary to understand the story. The Gardner-Maier translation did an excellent job in that regard. As in most polytheistic literature, and as Maier says in his notes, the gods are the phenomena they name. The gods color the work. Direct perception of the gods was therefore easy, for example all one had to do was look at the sun to see Shamash. There is just something about polytheistic religious literature that is much more dramatic and powerful than monotheistic religious writing, likely because drama demands conflict, and with only one god there is little in the way of conflict possible. Bitheistic (such as ancient Iranian) religious literature also has powerful drama, I have heard. The sky god Anu, the storm god Enlil, and the word god Ea have widened his mind.

The style is ancient, which means, repetetive. Whole lines repeat over and over, and there are curiousities such as the hunter-man's father telling him to go ask Gilgamesh what to do with Enkidu and then telling him, word for word, what Gilgamesh will later advise. The style is also romanticist, which means, exaggerating goodness and power. Enikdu and Gilgamesh run the distance of three and a half months journey in three days, Enkidu has sex with the temple prostitute for seven days and seven nights, and so on. There are frequent image variants on the theme, which shows the aesthetic sophistication of Sin-Leqi-Unninni; for instance that the flood story with its near-ending of mankind's lifespan should be in an immortality story is not coincidental, nor is Utnapishtim's using of the decay of bread to measure Gilgamesh's time asleep. I crossed uncrossable mountains, I travelled all the seas, no real sleep has calmed my face.

The morality and culture of Gilgamesh are refreshingly free of slave morality. Power is a virtue, great physical strength and great mental intellgence are co-requisites, sexual attraction is divine, sex itself is a civilizing process -- all direct opposites of the now dominat moralities. It shows impiety as heroic: when offered to be a lover of Ishtar Gilgamesh insults her, and then slays the bull she has sent as punishment, Enkidu throws a portion of that dead bull in her face. And, person's fate after death has nothing to do with how evil or how good or pious or impious he was in life, contra the afterlife ideas of slave moralists. I will cry out in Uruk: 'I, I alone, am powerful. I am the one who changes fates.'

In Utnapishtim's tale of how he avoided the flood, he (on the advice of the god Ea) tricked his community into building him a boat for Utnapishtim and his family, telling them that it will be used for his banishment and that the rest of them will receive riches falling from the sky after he leaves, when in fact he knows that they will all be killed in the flood but needs their assistance to build the boat so he and his family can survive (although he also brings aboard the children of the craftsmen who helped him build it) -- but there is no indication in the story that Utnapishtim or anyone else in the world of Gilgamesh sees that deception as immoral, in fact he's rewarded with eternal life for it. And unlike in the story of Noah's flood, the decision to kill humanity wasn't made because of the sinfulness of humanity, it was arbitrary, humanity was innocent. All of humanity was turned to clay.

Maier's notes make the mistake of interpreting Gilgamesh's plan to give his people the plant of immortality as altruistic, as transcending "mere egoism"; and elsewhere interprets Gilgamesh's journey as a journey from egoism to altruism, but that is ridiculous! It only makes good sense for him to share immortality with them: they were his people, and it'd be valuable to Gilgamesh for his subjects to be immortal, it'd enhance the power of the city that he ruled. How would it be egoistic to lose the chance of ruling a city of immortals? If I were Gilgamesh however I would have immediately eaten a small part of the plant, just in case I lost it on the way back -- as he did, to that villainous snake. For whom has the blood of my heart dried up?

The obvious theme of Gilgamesh is immortality, but there is an important sub-theme of friendship. It is friendship that causes Gilgamesh to desire immortality, he didn't desire it until he lost a friend. Its themes of friendship -- friendly competition, cooperating together in actions small and great, mourning at seperation, and so on, are all excellent. The first half of the work heavily revolves around their friendship, just as strongly as the second half of the work revolves around Gilgamesh's quest to defeat death. The idea that friendship causes one to be more engaged in life and value it more is the abstraction the total work embodies. Six days and seven nights I wept over him until a worm fell out of his nose.

By the way, his works likely do still stand. Gilgamesh was probably a real king, with real walls. He may even have sought after immortality, with some follower making legend of it. How much closer did his quest, and this epic, bring immortality to humanity? We are now on the verge of reaching it. If our great world-machine of scientists and technologists is allowed to continue on largely unmolested by state and religion and the "celebrators" of death, expectancies are that which that snake stole will soon be recovered, almost certainly within a hundred years and maybe within fifty. But how much longer would it have taken without this first epic of civilization? A thousand years? Ten-thousand years? Never? Shouting together we will rise up like a kettledrum.

Gilgamesh's insults to Ishtar:

You're a cooking fire that goes out in the cold,
a back door that keeps out neither wind nor storm,
a palace that crushes the brave ones defending it,
a well whose lid collapses,
pitch that defiles the one carrying it,
a waterskin that soaks the one who lifts it,
limestone that crumbes in the stone wall,
a battering ram that shatters in the land of the enemy,
a shoe that bites the owner's foot!