Table of Contents
The Epic of Gilgamesh opens by telling you what kind of hero this is: not the strongest or the wisest, but the one who knows what happened before the Flood. That first promise is the reason Gilgamesh is everywhere on this site. He is a king in the Sumerian King List, the hero of the oldest long poem we have, a giant in the Book of Giants, and for some writers a hybrid of the sky people. I collect those readings here.
He who saw everything
On Epic of Gilgamesh: Tablet I the prologue reads:
He ‘twas discovered the secret concealed
(Aye), handed down the tradition relating to (things) prediluvian,
R. Campbell Thompson, The Epic of Gilgamish, Tablet I, Luzac and Co., London, 1928
The same tablet sends the reader to the wall of Uruk, whose plans were laid out by the Seven Sages themselves, and to a copper tablet box holding his story on lapis lazuli. Those sages are the Apkallu, the teachers who came before the Flood. The rest of the tablet brings in Enkidu, the wild man made by the gods to match him. On There Were Many Gardens of Eden I compare his change with Adam’s, from the line:
Comely thou art, e en like to a god, O Enkidu, shalt be,
R. Campbell Thompson, The Epic of Gilgamish, Tablet I, Luzac and Co., London, 1928. The scan reads "e en" where the book printed e'en.
A king in the list
Gilgamesh is not only a figure of poetry. On Sumerian King List he appears in the first dynasty of Uruk, his father given as “that of the wind”, ruling as “lord of Kulaba” for 126 years. On Dynasty of Uruk I set him among Mesh-ki-ang-gasher, Enmerkar, Lugalbanda and Dumuzi. Tablet I makes him the offspring of Lugalbanda and of the goddess Ninsun, which is where the idea of a part-divine king comes from.
Did Genesis copy the flood?
The flood is the reason most people know Gilgamesh, and the question is always whether Genesis borrowed it. How the hero of that flood is called Utnapishtim in the epic, Ziusudra in Sumerian and Noah in Genesis is laid out on What Is the Relationship Between Utnapishtim, Ziusudra, and Noah?. Matthew LaCroix thinks the link is direct. On Matthew LaCroix and Robert Edward Grant on Egypt and Turkey:
the Genesis account is directly tied I think back to Epic of Gilgamesh
Matthew LaCroix, LaCroix and Grant on Egypt and Turkey, at 42:07
InspiringPhilosophy argues the opposite on Did Genesis copy the Gilgamesh flood:
the similarities between both accounts do not mean one side copied the other
InspiringPhilosophy, Genesis and the Gilgamesh flood, at 12:41
That second view is closer to how I see it: shared details can come from a shared memory of one event. Paul Wallis puts the question the other way round on Paul Wallis on biblical stories and older texts:
Gilgamesh and think whoa these stories sound familiar the question you should ask is well how does the biblical
Paul Wallis, Paul Wallis on the Bible and Mesopotamia, at 18:09
Gilgamesh among the giants
The Dead Sea Scrolls Book of Giants names a giant Gilgamesh, which surprises most readers. Iñaki Marro Sánchez, on The Book of Giants: What the Fragments Say, links its garden scene to the epic:
The garden is equivalent to the cedar forest in the cycle of Gilgamesh, as in the Tablet V of the Epic
Iñaki Marro Sánchez, The Book of Giants (Munich dissertation, 2026), p. 86
He also notes that “Gilgamesh does not appear in the fragments of Turfan”, the later Manichaean version, so the name belongs to the Qumran layer.
The search for his tomb
In 2003 a German team led by Jörg Fassbinder scanned the old course of the Euphrates at Uruk with magnetometry. On Tomb of The Giant Gilgamesh Discovered! Paul Wallis’s documentary quotes him:
"We found structures already described in the Epic. The most surprising thing was discovering garden structures and field layouts exactly as depicted in the text. We also found remains of a building in the middle of the former Euphrates, which could be interpreted as a burial site."
Jörg Fassbinder, quoted in Paul Wallis, The 5th Kind
The war began soon after and the find was never confirmed. Sling and Stone builds a larger story on it on Tomb of Gilgamesh and a stargate claim. I keep the tomb as an open question, not a result.
Related pages
- Epic of Gilgamesh: Tablet I
- Sumerian King List
- Dynasty of Uruk
- Apkallu
- There Were Many Gardens of Eden
- The Book of Giants: What the Fragments Say
- Did Genesis copy the Gilgamesh flood
- Tomb of The Giant Gilgamesh Discovered!
For every page I tagged with gilgamesh, see the gilgamesh tag archive.
