Gilgamesh : A New Rendering in English Verse by David Ferry

INTRODUCTION
    According to Sumerian tradition, Gilgamesh was an early ruler of the city-state of Uruk, biblical Erech, and the evidence, admittedly meager and indirect, puts him there around the twenty-seventh century B.C.E . Of his actual achievements we know nothing except what is perhaps reflected in the later traditions of him as heroic warrior and builder of his city’s mighty walls.
    For the Sumerians, and later for the Assyrians and Babylonians, Gilgamesh was both god and hero. As the former, he appears in a god-list about a century after his death, and he continued to be worshipped for another two thousand years, until the end of the Assyro-Babylonian civilization. He was an underworld deity, a judge there and sometimes called its king. His statues or figurines appear in burial rites for the dead, and his cult was especially important in the month of Ab (July–August), when nature itself, as it were, expired.
    As hero, Gilgamesh undoubtedly lived on in the oral traditions of the Sumerians, especially at the court of Uruk. When these traditions were first committed to writing is not known. The earliest compositions we have, five or six, probably do not go back further than the late third millennium B.C.E . Though they are sometimes poorly preserved, we can identify in them themes and tales that will later be integrated in the Babylonian epic. Thus, in one lay, we find Gilgamesh, along with Enkidu and other retainers, striving to achieve the immortality of fame by the slaying of the monster Huwawa (see below, Tablets IV–V). In another, we read of the royal oppression of Uruk (see below, Tablet I). In another, the goddess Inanna unleashes the Bull of Heaven upon Gilgamesh and Enkidu (see below, Tablet VI). In still others, Enkidu is trapped and must remain in the underworld (see below, Tablets VII–VIII), and Gilgamesh resents his own mortality (see below, Tablets IX–XI).
    These compositions in Sumerian, or similar ones, written or oral, in the Sumerian or the Babylonian languages, were the sources for the Babylonian composition that followed in the early second millennium B.C.E ., what is known as the Old Babylonian period. This epic is not a translation of a Sumerian original. It is, rather, a highly selective and creative adaptation and transformation of what we find in the earlier works. It is still known only in fragments, but it was certainly a work of at least one thousand lines, perhaps much longer, focused on a central theme, man’s mortality. It begins with Gilgamesh’s exhausting his people with the labors of the corvée and introduces a very new Enkidu, not the retainer of the Sumerian tradition, but a hairy Wild Man, created by the gods to match Gilgamesh’s enormous energies, eventually humanized, and Gilgamesh’s beloved friend and companion in his adventures. He joins Gilgamesh in his quest for the immortality of fame, an old Sumerian theme, but then the text goes its own highly original way: Enkidu is punished for his part in the death of Huwawa and dies. Consumed with grief, Gilgamesh reacts by rejecting the heroic ideals of the past and, in effect, rejects his humanity. He will be content now only with the true immortality of the gods. He therefore journeys to the end of the world to find the one immortal man, the Babylonian Noah, Utnapishtim, and to learn from him the secret of his unending life.
    In the centuries that followed, knowledge of the epic spread across the ancient Near East, not only in its Babylonian form but also in versions written in the Elamite, Hittite, and Hurrian languages. Recent discoveries indicate that the epic had assumed more or less its standard form by the thirteenth century B.C.E . The standard version of eleven tablets (with a twelfth as an appendix, a later and poorly integrated addition and, unlike the rest of the epic, a literal translation into Babylonian from a Sumerian original) is a work of about three thousand lines and is