100 Fun Facts About Gilgamesh

Gilgamesh was king of which ancient Mesopotamian city?

Uruk, one of the world's first true cities, is also where writing is first recorded: clay tablets from before 3000 BCE that logged goods moving in and out of storehouses rather than stories.

The Epic of Gilgamesh was pressed into clay tablets in which script?

Cuneiform tablets of the epic survived by accident: when Nineveh was sacked and burned in 612 BCE, the fire baked the clay hard and the ruined palace buried the library.

At the shepherds' camp, what does the newly tamed Enkidu drink seven jugs of?

Beer, with bread, is the first human food Enkidu is given; after seven jugs his face shines with joy, his shaggy body is groomed and oiled and, the poem says, he becomes human.

Who is Shamhat, the woman who tames the wild man in Tablet one?

A temple prostitute, Shamhat is cursed by the dying Enkidu for luring him out of the wild, until a god reminds him that she fed him, clothed him and led him to Gilgamesh, and he blesses her instead.

Whose livelihood does the wild Enkidu ruin, setting off the plan to tame him?

A trapper's pits and snares are what Enkidu keeps wrecking, filling in the one and ripping out the other to free the animals, until the man's father sends him to Gilgamesh for help.

What form did Gilgamesh's oppression of the young women of his city take?

Raping brides on their wedding night is the abuse that makes his people beg the gods for relief; their answer is Enkidu, who first meets Gilgamesh by barring his way into a bridal chamber.

Who is Gilgamesh's mother, the goddess who interprets his dreams?

Ninsun, whose name means lady of the wild cows, prays on her rooftop for her son's safety and then adopts Enkidu as her own before the two set out for the Cedar Forest.

Which monstrous demigod guards the Cedar Forest?

Humbaba, once cornered, begs for his life and offers to serve Gilgamesh and cut the cedars for him; Gilgamesh wavers, and it is Enkidu who insists on the kill.

Which god, Gilgamesh's protector, sends the winds that pin down the Cedar Forest's guardian?

Shamash, the sun god, steps in because Gilgamesh's mother had burned incense on her roof and begged him to watch over her son; at the height of the fight his storm winds hold the guardian fast.

Which goddess does Gilgamesh reject, citing her mistreatment of past lovers such as Dumuzi?

Ishtar offers Gilgamesh marriage and a chariot of lapis lazuli and gold, but he answers by listing her ruined lovers one by one, among them a shepherd she turned into a wolf.

What does the spurned goddess threaten if Anu withholds the Bull of Heaven?

Raise the dead to devour the living: faced with that, Anu hands over the Bull, but only once she swears she has stored enough grain to see the people through the seven years of famine it will bring.

After the Bull of Heaven is killed, what does Enkidu hurl at the goddess?

One of its hindquarters, flung in her face with a taunt: if he could only catch her, Enkidu shouts, he would do the same to her and drape the Bull's guts over her arms.

How do the gods sentence Enkidu to death?

A fatal illness is the gods' verdict after the heroes kill the Bull of Heaven and the forest's guardian: one of the two must die, they choose Enkidu, and he wastes away in bed day after day.

Whom does Gilgamesh set out to find after Enkidu's death, hoping to learn the secret of eternal life?

Utnapishtim, called the Faraway, survived the great flood and was made immortal, but he tells Gilgamesh the gift was a one-off: no assembly of gods will ever gather to grant it again.

What kind of creatures guard the tunnel of the sun at the twin peaks of Mount Mashu?

Two scorpion monsters, a male and his mate, guard the gate: he warns that no mortal has ever made the journey, but in the end they let him into the dark.

What is the occupation of Siduri, who urges Gilgamesh to be content with life's simple pleasures?

An alewife with a tavern by the sea, Siduri takes the ragged, skin-clad Gilgamesh for a dangerous stranger and bars her door, so he has to explain who he is.

What does Gilgamesh smash in a rage when he meets the ferryman Urshanabi?

The Stone Ones, whose nature scholars still argue over, let the ferryman cross safely; without them Gilgamesh must cut a stack of punting poles and drop each after one push, so his hand never touches the deadly water.

Sworn to secrecy about the gods' coming flood, which god leaks the plan by speaking to a reed wall?

Ea keeps the letter of his oath by telling the wall of a reed house, not the man behind it, to tear the house down and build a boat; Enlil is furious to find that anyone survived.

What test does the flood survivor set the death-fearing Gilgamesh?

Stay awake for six days and seven nights: he dozes off at once, and the survivor's wife bakes a loaf for each day he sleeps, so a row of stale bread is waiting when he wakes and denies it.

Which bird does the flood survivor release last, the one that never returns to the boat?

A raven, sent out after a dove and a swallow had both circled back: it found food on dry ground and stayed away, the sign that it was safe to leave the boat stranded on Mount Nimush.

How does Gilgamesh reach the rejuvenating plant at the bottom of the sea?

He binds stones to his feet so they drag him to the seabed, then cuts them loose once he holds the thorny plant; cautious for once, he plans to test it on an old man before eating it himself.

What steals the plant of youth while Gilgamesh bathes?

A serpent, drawn by the plant's scent, carries it off and sheds its skin as it goes: the poem's account of why snakes seem to grow young again while people cannot.

What sight, on his return home, prompts Gilgamesh to praise an enduring work to the ferryman?

The city's massive walls: Gilgamesh tells the ferryman to climb them and inspect the fired brickwork, in the very lines that open the poem, so the epic ends where it began.

How many tablets make up the Standard Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh?

Twelve, though the last is an odd fit: a close translation of an older Sumerian poem, tacked on even though Enkidu, dead since Tablet VII, is alive in it again.

Which scribe is credited with compiling the Standard Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh?

Sin-leqi-unninni, whose name is a prayer to the moon god, did more than copy: he is credited with recasting the older tales as a story about facing death, turning an adventurer into a wise man.

What are the opening words of the Standard Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh?

He who saw the deep: the hero's real prize is not eternal life but hidden knowledge from before the Flood, which the prologue says he brought home and carved in stone. Older translations read 'he who saw everything'.

The earliest Gilgamesh poems are Sumerian, but in which language was the epic itself composed?

Akkadian, the language of Babylon and Assyria, carried the story well beyond its homeland: pieces of the epic have been dug up as far away as the Hittite capital in Anatolia.

In the earlier Sumerian poems, what is Enkidu's relationship to Gilgamesh?

His servant: in the Sumerian poems Enkidu serves his master, and it is the later epic that remakes him as a wild man created by the gods to be the king's equal.

How is Gilgamesh's name written in the earliest Sumerian poems?

Bilgames is how most scholars read the Sumerian spelling; when the tablets were first deciphered in Victorian London the hero's name was misread altogether, and for years he was known as Izdubar.

In which king's library at Nineveh were the best copies of the Gilgamesh epic found?

Ashurbanipal's library was vast because the Assyrian king, trained as a scribe himself, wrote to temples and scholars demanding their tablets and sent scribes out to copy whatever he lacked.

Hormuzd Rassam, whose 1850s digs at Nineveh turned up Gilgamesh tablets, was a native of which nearby city?

Mosul, close by Nineveh's ruins, was Hormuzd Rassam's home town; sent to Ethiopia as a British envoy in the 1860s, he was imprisoned there for two years until an army marched in and freed him.

What does Enkidu say Gilgamesh's terrifying dreams on the road to the Cedar Forest mean?

Victory is coming, Enkidu insists: a falling mountain, a wild bull and a storm of lightning and fire are all read as good omens for the fight ahead.

Which newspaper paid George Smith to go to Nineveh in 1873 and hunt for missing Gilgamesh flood fragments?

The Daily Telegraph paid for the dig and got its money's worth: within days of starting at Nineveh, Smith found a fragment he believed filled the gap.

Which biblical story is said to follow a Gilgamesh episode 'point by point'?

Noah and the ark in Genesis shares the divine warning, the sealed boat, the mountain landing and the birds sent out; when the match was first read out in London in 1872, the prime minister was in the audience.

Which company bought the illegally imported Gilgamesh Dream Tablet in 2014 for the Museum of the Bible?

Hobby Lobby bought it in a private sale from a London auction house that passed along a forged ownership history; federal agents seized the tablet from the museum in 2019, and the company agreed to give it up.

To which country was the Gilgamesh Dream Tablet returned in September 2021?

Iraq got the tablet back in September 2021; an American dealer had bought it in London in 2003, caked in dirt and unreadable, and posted it to the United States without declaring it.

A real King Gilgamesh probably ruled between 2800 and 2500 BCE, the era when which of these was built?

Egypt's first pyramids went up in those same centuries, and a real Gilgamesh looks likely because inscriptions survive naming Enmebaragesi, the father of one of his enemies in the legends.

In the Sumerian poem Gilgamesh and Aga, Gilgamesh revolts against his overlord from which city?

Kish demands that Gilgamesh's people dig its wells, and he refuses; when its king Aga is captured in the siege that follows, Gilgamesh recalls an old kindness and lets him go home free.

In his grief, Gilgamesh refuses to let Enkidu be buried until what happens?

A maggot falls from his nose as Enkidu lies unburied, and only then does Gilgamesh accept that his friend is gone; the sight leaves him so afraid of his own death that he takes to the wilderness.

What role do ancient prayers give Gilgamesh after his death?

Judge of the dead in the Underworld is the rank the Sumerian poem of his death gives him, so the king who failed to escape dying ends up ruling on everyone else who does.

What does the grieving Gilgamesh order his craftsmen to make after Enkidu dies?

A statue of his friend is what he demands from the smiths and jewellers; he also lays out grave gifts from his treasury so that the gods below will give Enkidu a kind welcome.

In Aelian's Roman-era tale, why does Gilgamesh's grandfather keep his daughter under guard?

An oracle warned of her son: the Chaldaeans foretold he would take the throne, and Aelian jokes that the king played Acrisius, who locked up Danaë for the same reason; it failed here too, for the girl bore a son anyway.

Beyond the dark tunnel under Mount Mashu, Gilgamesh walks into a garden whose trees bear what?

Jewels hang there in place of fruit and leaves, carnelian and lapis lazuli among them; Gilgamesh reaches the garden only by racing the length of the sun's own tunnel in total darkness.

Enkidu, before he is tamed, eats grass and drinks at the waterhole alongside which animals?

Gazelles are his herd until his days with Shamhat: when he goes back to them they bolt at the sight of him, and he finds his legs can no longer keep up.

In a Sumerian poem, Gilgamesh clears creatures out of which goddess's huluppu tree?

Inanna had been tending the tree to make herself a throne and a bed from its wood, and wept when it was infested; Gilgamesh, her brother in this poem, fells it so the furniture can be made.

In Enkidu's dying dream, how are the inhabitants of the Netherworld's 'house of dust' clothed?

In bird feathers, like Enkidu himself in the dream: a dark figure pins him down, turns his arms into wings and leads him to a lightless house where clay is the only food.

What does Enkidu make from the tallest cedar he and Gilgamesh cut down?

A temple door, rafted downriver as a gift to the gods; on his deathbed Enkidu curses it, saying that had he known how he would be repaid he would have taken an axe to it.

According to fragments found at Mê-Turan, where was Gilgamesh entombed?

Under a riverbed: in the Sumerian poem of his death the Euphrates is turned from its course, the tomb is built in the dry channel, and the water is then let back over it.

In Aelian's account, how was the infant Gilgamesh saved after guards threw him from a tower?

The bird set him down in an orchard, where the gardener raised him.

On his journey to the edge of the world, Gilgamesh kills which animals and wears their skins?

Lions terrify him at first: he prays to the moon god for protection, then wakes from a dream, falls on the pride with axe and dagger and takes their pelts for clothing.

George Smith was so thrilled on first deciphering the Gilgamesh flood story in 1872 that he reportedly did what?

Started to undress is how his coworkers told it: Smith pulled off articles of clothing and ran around the reading room shouting in delight.

The Epic of Gilgamesh introduces its hero as what fraction divine, with the rest of him mortal?

Two-thirds divine is the epic's odd arithmetic for the son of a goddess and a king, and the single human third is enough to doom him to die.

Which Star Trek captain recounts the Epic of Gilgamesh to an alien commander in the 1991 episode Darmok?

Jean-Luc Picard tells the tale to Dathon, whose people speak only in allusions to their own myths, because its two heroes mirror the aliens' story of Darmok and Jalad.

Which video game series features a recurring multi-armed, sword-collecting boss named Gilgamesh?

Final Fantasy even gives its Gilgamesh a faithful sidekick called Enkidu, a nod to the friendship at the heart of the ancient epic.

In which 2021 Marvel film does Don Lee play Gilgamesh, the strongest member of a superhero team?

Eternals recasts Gilgamesh as the devoted companion of Angelina Jolie's warrior Thena, a long way from the overbearing king of the ancient poem.

Which Hayao Miyazaki film is partly based on the Cedar Forest episode of the Epic of Gilgamesh?

Princess Mononoke, released in 1997, replays the epic's clash between humans hungry for resources and the guardian of an ancient forest.

Which Greek hero's wanderings are said to echo Gilgamesh, right down to a missed chance at immortality?

Odysseus gives up eternal life when he leaves Calypso's island, and most scholars agree the far older Gilgamesh epic left its mark on Homer's poems.

What do Gilgamesh and Enkidu do the first time they meet, before becoming inseparable friends?

Wrestle each other is how the great friendship starts: Gilgamesh wins in the end, but he is so impressed by his opponent's strength that the two become close.

Which institution, where George Smith worked as an assistant, held the Gilgamesh flood tablet he translated in 1872?

The British Museum had kept the tablet untranslated since its excavation at Nineveh, until its own assistant worked out what the text actually said.

Scholars have long compared wild Enkidu's seduction by Shamhat with the story of which biblical couple?

Adam and Eve follow the same arc: the man accepts food from the woman, covers his nakedness and must leave his former home, unable to return.

From what does the goddess Aruru shape Enkidu when the gods want a match for Gilgamesh?

A pinch of clay is all Aruru needs, and the hair-covered strongman she makes from it lives in the wilderness with a herd of animals for company.

What does Gilgamesh plan to do with the plant of youth before eating it himself?

Test it on an old man is his cautious plan, and the delay costs him everything, because the plant is stolen on the way home before anyone tries it.

What shape is the six-decked boat that rides out the great flood in the Epic of Gilgamesh?

A cube is what the survivor builds, each side 120 cubits, because his instructions call for a boat with equal dimensions rather than one made to sail.

After the flood in the Gilgamesh epic, the gods gather around the survivor's sacrifice like which creatures?

Flies is the poem's unflattering image for its gods, who smell the sweet odour of the offering and swarm over it.

What must Gilgamesh cut from the forest before the ferryman can take him across the Waters of Death?

Punting poles let the boat be pushed along without anyone touching the water, which matters because the Waters of Death are deadly to the touch.

Which part of the slain Bull of Heaven does Gilgamesh keep and dedicate to his personal god?

Its horns are filled with oil and presented for the anointing of the divine patron Gilgamesh prays to, a trophy from a beast sent to destroy him.

Which god sends the flood in the Gilgamesh epic, then ends up granting its survivors eternal life?

Enlil arrives angry that anyone lived, is condemned by a fellow deity for starting the flood, and then blesses the survivors with a gift never repeated.

Which deified king, the hero of his own Sumerian poems, is named as the father of Gilgamesh?

Lugalbanda is the father Gilgamesh swears by in the old poems, and later rulers of Ur claimed the same parent and called the hero their brother.

On which mountain does the boat come to rest after the great flood in the Epic of Gilgamesh?

Mount Nimush, a name older translations read as Nisir, holds the boat firmly for several days before the survivor dares to send out birds.

In a Sumerian poem, whom does Gilgamesh promise in marriage to trick the Cedar Forest's guardian?

His two sisters are the bait, one to marry and one as a concubine, offered with other bribes so the guardian will hand over his protective powers.

George Smith, first translator of the Gilgamesh flood story, was apprenticed at fourteen to learn which trade?

Banknote engraving was his day job at a London printing firm, and he spent his lunch hours studying newly excavated tablets until he could read them.

Siduri's advice to Gilgamesh about enjoying life is thought to have been borrowed by which biblical book?

Ecclesiastes gives much the same counsel, to eat well, dress well and enjoy one's family, and several scholars suggest its author borrowed it directly.

Gilgamesh turns up as a giant in the Book of Giants, an Aramaic text preserved among which manuscripts?

The Dead Sea Scrolls include Aramaic copies of the Book of Giants, which names Gilgamesh among the giants who lived before the flood, and followers of Mani later adopted the text.

Which prime minister sat in the London audience when George Smith first presented the Gilgamesh flood story?

William Gladstone was the sitting prime minister when he came to listen, a measure of the stir the newly read tablet caused in Victorian Britain.

Ancient masks and omen texts give the Cedar Forest's guardian a face resembling which body part?

Coiled intestines, specifically those of a sheep examined for divination, form the monster's face on one surviving mask.

Before its signs could be read correctly, under what mistaken name was Gilgamesh first reintroduced to the world?

Izdubar was how Victorian scholars first sounded out the signs of the hero's name, and the earliest translations and retellings were published under it.

The flood story in Gilgamesh is widely thought to have been lifted from which older Babylonian epic?

Atra-Hasis tells of a great flood in its own right, and many scholars believe an editor took the tale from it for the standard Gilgamesh text.

By which opening words is the older, Old Babylonian version of the Gilgamesh epic known?

Surpassing All Other Kings is the first line of the version dated to the 18th century BCE, because Mesopotamian works took their titles from how they began.

Babylonian versions of the Gilgamesh story place the Cedar Forest in the mountains of which modern country?

Lebanon, long famous for its cedars, is where the later Babylonian texts send the heroes west, while the older Sumerian poems point east toward the Zagros Mountains.

Urshanabi, who ferries Gilgamesh over the Waters of Death, has been compared to which figure of Greek myth?

Charon rows souls across the Styx, and one leading scholar suggests Gilgamesh's boatman may likewise have been imagined as a carrier of the departed.

Along which river do Gilgamesh and Enkidu raft home with the giant cedar they have felled?

The Euphrates carries their raft home with the giant tree and, possibly, the head of the forest's slain guardian as well.

Which TV series launched its New Adventures novels in 1991 with Timewyrm: Genesys, a tale featuring Gilgamesh?

Doctor Who sent its Seventh Doctor and his companion Ace to ancient Mesopotamia, where they join forces with Gilgamesh against the Timewyrm.

Gilgamesh is a major antagonist of which 2004 visual novel, written by Kinoko Nasu for the studio Type-Moon?

Fate/stay night makes him one of the legendary heroes summoned to fight over the Holy Grail, and he returns in its prequel Fate/Zero and a string of spin-offs.

Which auction house sold the smuggled Gilgamesh Dream Tablet in 2014 with a false account of its origins?

Christie's claimed the tablet had been on the American market for decades, and the sale, for about $1.6 million, ended with the piece being seized.

Which American novelist put a star pitcher named Gil Gamesh into his 1973 satire The Great American Novel?

Philip Roth makes Gil Gamesh a star pitcher who is banished from baseball after raging at an umpire, then resurfaces late in the novel as a Soviet spy.

Which comics creator introduced Marvel's version of Gilgamesh, known as the Forgotten One, in 1977?

Jack Kirby created the character, an outcast whom the ruler of his own people confined to one corner of their city for meddling too proudly with mortals.

The composer Bohuslav Martinů wrote the text of his 1950s oratorio The Epic of Gilgamesh in which language?

English was his choice because he worked from a 1928 verse translation, though the piece premiered in German and he later wished he had used Czech.

What does Gilgamesh hope to win by marching on the Cedar Forest to kill its monstrous guardian?

Lasting fame is what he is after, and he presses on to gain renown despite warnings from both Enkidu and the city's council of elders.

Who persuades the flood survivor to give the departing Gilgamesh a parting gift, the secret of the plant of youth?

His wife asks for it as Gilgamesh is leaving empty-handed, and only then does her husband reveal the plant that grows at the bottom of the sea.

Which thinker read Gilgamesh and his companion as standing for 'man' and 'crude sensuality'?

Sigmund Freud made the pairing while the companion was still known by the misreading Eabani, and his pupil Carl Jung went on to discuss the hero often.

By what epithet is the immortal flood survivor known, the man Gilgamesh sets out to find after Enkidu dies?

The Faraway suits a man who lives beyond the Waters of Death, a crossing so dangerous that Gilgamesh needs a ferryman to attempt it.

On a Gilgamesh tablet a museum acquired in 2011, Enkidu laments that the heroes have reduced the Cedar Forest to what?

A wasteland is his verdict straight after the guardian's death, and he fearfully imagines an angry god demanding to know why they did it.

Which American science fiction writer retold the epic as the 1984 historical novel Gilgamesh the King?

Robert Silverberg followed the novel with stories about the hero's adventures after death, among them the award-winning novella Gilgamesh in the Outback.

Before the deluge, the flood survivor of the Gilgamesh epic was king of which ancient Mesopotamian city?

Shuruppak was a real city, and a flood deposit found there dates to about 2900 BC, the era in which the legendary survivor would have lived.

In 1904 the Assyriologist Alfred Jeremias equated Gilgamesh with which king named in the Bible?

Nimrod was his pick, and he went further, arguing that Gilgamesh must have drawn his strength from his hair and performed labours like a Greek hero.

By what name is the flood survivor of the Gilgamesh epic known in the earliest, Sumerian tellings?

Ziusudra means 'life of long days', and the Greek-writing priest Berossus later passed the name on as Xisuthros.

Which archaeologist, never a university academic, published a popular translation of The Epic of Gilgamesh in 1960?

Nancy Sandars was an independent scholar and prehistorian, and her 1960 version became a popular way into the epic for general readers.

The Bull of Heaven's rampage through the city of Gilgamesh opens up what, swallowing hundreds of men?

Huge pits open in the ground and swallow 300 men, while the beast's endless drinking dries up the marshes.

Which animators made the 1985 short film The Epic of Gilgamesh, or This Unnameable Little Broom?

The Quay Brothers based their animated short on the ancient epic, one of the stranger screen treatments the story has received.

Which king do both the Sumerian King List and the Tummal Chronicle name as the son of Gilgamesh?

Ur-Nungal follows his father on the Sumerian King List, which gives him a 30-year reign and names Udul-kalama as his own son.