According to the Sumerian king list, Gilgamesh was the son of Lugalbanda and the fifth king of Uruk (Early Dynastic II, first dynasty of Uruk). He ruled circa 2600 BC. He became the central character in the Epic of Gilgamesh?one of the best known works of early literature, which says that his mother was Ninsun (whom some call Rimat Ninsun), a goddess. Gilgamesh is described as two-thirds god and one-third human.

According to the "Tummal Inscription",^[1] Gilgamesh, and eventually his son Urlugal, rebuilt the sanctuary of the goddess Ninlil, located in Tummal, a sacred quarter in her city Nippur. In Mesopotamian mythology, Gilgamesh is credited with having been a demigod of superhuman strength who built a great city wall to defend his people from external threats.

Cuneiform references

In the Epic of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh is said to have ordered the building of the legendary walls of Uruk. An alternative version has Gilgamesh, towards the end of the story, boasting to Urshanabi, the ferryman, that the city's walls were built by the Seven Sages. In historical times, Sargon of Akkad claimed to have destroyed these walls to prove his military power.

Fragments of an epic text found in Me-Turan (modern Tell Haddad) relate that Gilgamesh was buried under the waters of a river at the end of his life. The people of Uruk diverted the flow of the Euphrates River crossing Uruk for the purpose of burying the dead king within the riverbed. In April 2003, a German expedition discovered what is thought to be the entire city of Uruk?including the former bed of the Euphrates, the last resting place of its King Gilgamesh.

Despite the lack of direct evidence, most scholars do not object to consideration of Gilgamesh as a historical figure, particularly after inscriptions were found confirming the historical existence of other figures associated with him: kings Enmebaragesi and Aga of Kish. If Gilgamesh was a historical king, he probably reigned in about the 26th century BC. Some of the earliest Sumerian texts spell his name as Bilgames. Initial difficulties in reading cuneiform resulted in Gilgamesh making his re-entrance into world culture in 1891 as "Izdubar".^[2]

In most texts, Gilgamesh is written with the determinative for divine beings (DINGIR) - but there is no evidence for a contemporary cult, and the Sumerian Gilgamesh myths suggest the deification was a later development (unlike the case of the Akkadian god kings). With this deification, however, would have come an accretion of stories about him, some potentially derived from the real lives of other historical figures, in particular Gudea, the Second Dynasty ruler of Lagash (2144?2124 BC).^[3]

Whether based on a historical prototype or not, Gilgamesh became a legendary protagonist in the Epic of Gilgamesh. The name Gilgamesh appears once in Greek, as "Gilgamos" (????????). The story is a variant of the Perseus myth: The King of Babylon determines by oracle that his grandson Gilgamos will kill him, and throws him out of a high tower. An eagle breaks his fall, and the infant is found and raised by a gardener.^[4]

See also

• Epic of Gilgamesh
• History of Sumer
• Uruk
• Sumerian king list
• Mesopotamian mythology
• Gilgamesh flood myth
• Adaptations of the Epic of Gilgamesh

Notes

References

• George, Andrew [1999], The Epic of Gilgamesh: the Babylonian Epic Poem and Other Texts in Akkadian and Sumerian, Harmondsworth: Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 1999 (published in Penguin Classics 2000, reprinted with minor revisions, 2003. ISBN 0-14-044919-1
• George, Andrew, The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic - Introduction, Critical Edition and Cuneiform Texts, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2 volumes, 2003.
• Hammond, D. & Jablow, A. [1987], "Gilgamesh and the Sundance Kid: the Myth of Male Friendship", in Brod, H. (ed.), The Making of Masculinities: The New Men's Studies, Boston, 1987, pp.241-258.
• Glossary, Appendices, Appendix (Chapter XII=Tablet XII). A line-by-line translation (Chapters I-XI).

External links

Original cuneiform text

• Original cuneiform text of the XI tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh (standard Babylonian version)

Text translations

• Sumerian texts: ETCSL
  • Gilgamesh and Humbaba, version A (the adventure of the cedar forest)
  • Gilgamesh and Humbaba, version B
  • Gilgamesh and the Bull of Heaven
  • Gilgamesh and Aga
  • Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the nether world
  • The death of Gilgamesh
• The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (http://www-etcsl.orient.ox.ac.uk/), Oxford 1998-.
• http://www.wsu.edu/~dee/MESO/GILG.HTM
• The Epic of Gilgamesh: A Spiritual Biography
• Comparison of The Epic of Gilgamesh to the Genesis flood

Translations for several legends of Gilgamesh in the Sumerian language have been written by:

• Black, J.A.,
• Cunningham, G.,
• Fluckiger-Hawker, E,
• Stephen Mitchell
  • Stripped Books: Stephen Mitchell on Gilgamesh - a comic-book adaptation of a talk by Stephen Mitchell about the epic poem.
  • Mitchell's translation was also adapted as a radio play for Radio 3 by Jeremy Howe, first broadcast on Sunday 11 June 2006 from 19:30-21:30 http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/dramaon3/pip/gci75/
• Robson, E.,
• Zólyomi, G.,

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