The Epic of Gilgamesh

by N.K. Sanders (Translator)

Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. 100% Money Back .

Genres: Fiction, Classics, Mythology, Epic Poetry, Literature, Poetry, Middle East

Mass Market Paperback

Published January 1, 1972

Reviews

[Ella · Rating 3 out of 5]

While I wouldn’t say this is a super enjoyable or amazing story to read. It is so cool to see how humans and their relationships have not really changed over 4000 years.

[Павел Качнов · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked up a short book about Babylonia and somehow ended up reading the oldest tragicomedy on earth. What starts as a myth turns into a story about divine office work. The divine bureaucracy gets a complaint ticket from Uruk: user Gilgamesh (v2.3) is overclocked and abusing admin rights, exhausting the citizens, and ignoring rate limits. Shamash handles quality control, Enlil enforces compliance, and together they open a support ticket. The fix: deploy Enkidu, a clay based daemon meant to throttle Gilgamesh’s excesses. But the patch befriends the bug. Together they delete Humbaba.exe, corrupting the resource directory, and crash the balance protocols. To restore order, the gods wipe Enkidu - rollback complete, but the deletion leaves Gilgamesh unstable. He starts probing mortality itself, breaking deeper layers of the system. Balance is declared restored, but the network never really recovers.

But under the humor there’s something deep and ancient - the first story about friendship, death, and guilt toward nature. The Cedar Forest feels like the first environmental crime scene, and Ishtar with her rapid shifts between idealization and rage at rejection, displays a pattern of affective instability, frantic efforts to avoid abandonment, and identity diffusion - traits the DSM would later codify millennia after her myth was told.

What’s strange is how modern it feels. The old stories already knew that people only wake up after loss, that gods can fail at their jobs, and that human life repeats the same pattern: we break something, learn, call it progress, and move on.

[Brandon Kriplean · Rating 3 out of 5]

An ancient epic for all of humanity. The quest for immortality is shared across culture and creed. However, what interested me most about this short story is the flood narrative of Utnapishtim. The parallels with the biblical account of Noah are remarkable. While the Gilgamesh epic is obscure in and of itself, its influence on Mesopotamian culture, and in turn its influence on the creation stories of three of the world’s most influential contemporary religions, shows its relevance for a global audience of 21st century readers.

[Katelyn Gray · Rating 3 out of 5]

I would say that I didn't like the introduction. Of course I liked the historic parts, and how it talked about the history of the epic, but it seemed like some things didn't make sense. I was struggling to even get through the introduction. On the other hand, I loved the epic itself. Showing the journey of Gilgamesh, honestly I did enjoy it. But that's the most that I liked from the book.

[Joshua · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn’t know Chad literature was this old. Inkidu and Gilgamesh were popping off the whole book.

[Kelly · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to read this bc of the important role it played in There Are Rivers in the Sky, but I probably would have dnf-ed otherwise

[ellaaa · Rating 5 out of 5]

yes i read this in one day. i literally have to read an outrageous amount for my classes. and enkidu slayed a little too hard….

[Chase Hull · Rating 4 out of 5]

What is it to be human? Depending on your philosophical or spiritual persuasion that question can have many different answers. The Epic of Gilgamesh isn’t purposefully a philosophical text, but one cannot help but wonder about such questions when reading it. At its heart, this Epic is a story of a great king and his experiences over his life. Likely the figure of Gilgamesh was worshipped in some capacity, though we lack any concrete archaeological evidence of his existence. The adventures of Gilgamesh and his companion Enkidu clearly made an impact on ancient society, with those beliefs and desires continuing on in their own fashion today.

As stated above, this Epic is primarily one mythological in nature, but it is impossible to not feel its connection to the human condition. The search for remembrance and immortality, a mastery over nature, the desire for a good and ethical leader, these are all themes that have stood the test of time from theirs to ours. When reading these scripts whether it be the original texts or later adaptations the reader feels a kinship across the millenia to the original authors.

A uniquely human experience is one of religion. There is no other animal that searches for a higher power like that of the human race. A reader with a baseline knowledge of the Abrahamic religions will see parallels between the Epic of Gilgamesh and those respective religious texts. The Deluge (the Great Flood), a lone survivor ordained by God (Uta-Napishti or Noah), a foundling who goes on to be an important societal figure (Enkidu or Moses), these are all themes shared between the two traditions. The Epic of Gilgamesh was written almost 2,000 years prior to the first Abrahamic text. Does this point towards a shared reality or were these texts simply retellings of a story told for millennia before? That's up to the reader to decide.

[Joshua · Rating 5 out of 5]

Introduction was wonky but the epic itself is… well it’s an ancient epic. I can’t in good faith give anything less than a five star, given it’s one of the most important things we have access to.

Crazy to see the obvious inspiration this has on the world of story telling. The hero’s journey so evidently came from things like this. Heck, the story of Noah’s Ark seems to have come from this.

Very enjoyable epic, and pretty dang easy to understand and comprehend.

[Reader · Rating 4 out of 5]

Weird book but I still enjoyed it I guess.
“He who saw the deep” kinda overhyped not gonna lie.
Wasn’t that deep… homie loses his best friend who he also just met by the way and finds immortal Noah and gets his God request denied.

Also humbaba pretty weak honestly kinda embarrassing

[Sindoos]

the original bromance

[Brendan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Who doesn't love a good epic?

[Lloyd Downey · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve been wanting to read the story of Gilgamesh for many years. And I’ve certainly read potted versions of it and was well aware of the connection with Noah’s Ark. But I hadn’t ever gotten around to reading the real story. And, I must admit up front, that I still haven’t done so with this Blinkist Summary of the story. Nevertheless, I have found the Blinkist people, do a pretty good job of abstracting the essential facts and material from the originals. And life is short! So I’m making do with the summary with all the limitations that involves. And the following are some snippets from the Blinkist version which capture the essence of the book for me.
“You can find pieces of this story written in at least three ancient languages: Sumerian, Akkadian, and Babylonian. The version we know best today was written down around 1,200 BCE, but the tale it tells is much older. Early merchants and travellers carried the story far beyond Mesopotamia. They shared it in market squares and royal courts across the ancient world, from Egypt to Turkey, and beyond.......Archaeologists continue to unearth new fragments of the epic, hiding in museum collections or buried in ancient ruins. Some pieces fill in missing scenes, while others show us how the story changed as it travelled from one culture to another.
Our story opens in the great city of Uruk, where Gilgamesh rules as a young king drunk on his own power. Two-thirds god and one-third human, Gilgamesh towers eleven feet tall, with the majestic beauty of a wild bull. His dark locks flow like the grain god's barley, and his muscles ripple like the sun god's bronze......Despite these divine gifts and incredible strength, he uses them to terrorize his people......raping women and forcing young men to wrestle just for his own pleasure.
Meanwhile, the goddess Aruru creates a wild man named Enkidu, formed from clay and blessed with tremendous strength....A trapper discovers Enkidu disrupting his hunting snares.....And the priests send Shamhat, a temple priestess, to help tame him. For six days and seven nights, Shamhat teaches Enkidu about human pleasures and customs. When she finishes, the animals no longer accept Enkidu as one of their own. But he has gained something new: human consciousness and understanding.
He travels to Uruk, where [Emidu and Gilgamesh] meet in an epic wrestling match that shakes the very foundations of the city walls. Neither man has ever met an equal in strength. The fight ends in a draw, and in that moment of mutual respect, the fiercest of rivalries transforms into the deepest of friendships.
Through Enkidu's eyes, Gilgamesh begins to see how he has misused his power. Through Gilgamesh, Enkidu learns the ways of civilization and kingship.....Together, they channel their tremendous energies away from oppressing the city and toward heroic quests that will win them lasting fame.
For six days they travel, until they reach a mountain paradise where sacred cedar trees pierce the clouds. Here dwells Humbaba, a terrifying monster......Despite Enkidu's warnings about angering the gods, Gilgamesh insists on cutting down the sacred cedars to bring glory to Uruk. But this effort brings about a great battle with Humbaba........They behead the guardian and fell the finest cedars to build a great raft.
This act of defiance seals Enkidu's fate. The gods meet in council and decide that one of the friends must die for killing Humbaba and cutting down the sacred trees. They choose Enkidu, striking him with a wasting illness.
Enkidu's death shatters Gilgamesh.
Like anyone having an existential crisis, he abandons rational thought, and becomes obsessed with finding a way to change his fate. He sets out to find Utnapishtim, the one human granted eternal life by the gods.......Gilgamesh's journey takes him beyond the edges of the known world. He passes through the mountains where scorpion-people guard the rising sun. He crosses the Waters of Death to reach Utnapishtim's distant shore. There, the immortal man tells how the gods once sent a great flood to destroy humanity, how he built a massive boat to save the animals, and how the gods granted him eternal life for preserving earth's creatures.
This flood story, written centuries before similar tales appeared in other cultures, ends with a challenge. Utnapishtim tells Gilgamesh that to prove himself worthy of immortality, he must stay awake for six days and seven nights. But Gilgamesh, exhausted from his labours falls asleep. However, the immortal man's wife takes pity on him and urges her husband to share one last secret. Utnapishtim reveals the location of a thorny plant growing at the bottom of the ocean that can restore youth.........Diving deep into the waters with stones tied to his feet, Gilgamesh plucks this precious plant from the ocean floor..... While Gilgamesh bathes in a cool pool, a serpent smells the sweet fragrance of the plant. It slithers up, snatches it, and in eating it sheds its skin and renewing its youth.
It is at this moment that Gilgamesh finally breaks.....Now he must return to Uruk with empty hands, but forever changed......Approaching his city's gates, Gilgamesh sees them with new eyes.....He notices details he'd missed before: the gleaming temples, the thriving gardens, the lively markets.
Back on his throne, Gilgamesh becomes a different kind of king. He no longer seeks glory through force and fear. Instead, he works to strengthen his city's foundations, improve its gardens, and protect its people. He records his journey on clay tablets, not as a boast, but as a lesson for future generations.
When you read about Gilgamesh destroying the environment for glory, you might think about our own challenges with climate change.....Even his friendship with Enkidu resonates with current conversations about accepting those different from ourselves.....You can find traces of Gilgamesh in Homer's Odyssey.......And the flood story appears in religious texts worldwide,
When you struggle with grief, you might find comfort in knowing that people felt the same pain even four thousand years ago. When you wonder about your legacy, you can look to Gilgamesh's realization that true immortality lies in how we touch others' lives.
In sharing these eternal concerns, the Epic of Gilgamesh doesn't just tell us about our past-it helps us understand ourselves and shows us paths toward wisdom that remain as true today as they were four millennia ago”.So what’s my overall take on the book. I liked it. I now feel that I have the gist of the story of Gilgamesh and also a smattering of knowledge about how the lessons in that epic might be applied to us today. Five stars from me.

[Alexandra Silva · Rating 3 out of 5]

My biggest criticism about this book is the fact that the introduction is too long but other than that, is a quite redable story. is some parts of the story dont have a lot of connection with each other but I belive the epic is incomplete so is hard to review

[Glen Kirby · Rating 4 out of 5]

Where better to start than the beginning.

The beginning of all of it. The first documented fantasy story, as far as we can tell, that any human being ever wrote down. The Epic of Gilgamesh, composed somewhere between 2100 and 1800 BCE, preserved on clay tablets, lost for centuries, found again in the ruins of an ancient library in what is now northern Iraq in the 1840s, and not successfully deciphered until 1872. A story that sat in the ground for thousands of years waiting for someone to understand it.

That fact alone should stop you for a moment. It stopped me.

I want to be honest about the experience of picking this up, because I think it shapes how you read it. I was not holding an ancient scroll. I was not touching anything that felt remotely connected to 2100 BCE. I was holding what was almost certainly a print-on-demand paperback that had spent most of its existence in an Amazon warehouse. The physical object offered nothing. Which meant the work of connection had to happen entirely in my head, the deliberate decision to lock myself away and accept that what I was reading was not just a story but a piece of history. Not ancient in the comfortable, academic sense. Ancient in the genuinely vertiginous sense. This was written by human beings who had never heard of Greece, of Rome, of Christianity, of anything that has shaped the world as we currently understand it.

And once I made that decision, once I genuinely accepted the distance, what I found was something that felt uncomfortably close.

The Question It Is Actually Asking

Let me get to the heart of it immediately because the heart of it is where the power lives.

The Epic of Gilgamesh is about one question. A single question that every human being who has ever lived has had to find some way of answering.

How do you live, knowing you are going to die?

That is it. That is the whole thing. A king, two thirds divine and one third human, loses the person he loves most in the world and cannot accept that he too is mortal, and goes to the ends of the earth trying to find a way out of it. He does not find one. Nobody ever has. And the poem does not pretend otherwise. What it does instead, quietly and with enormous intelligence, is suggest that the question itself might be the wrong one. That the obsession with not dying might be getting in the way of the business of living. Andrew George, Professor of Babylonian at SOAS and the author of what is widely considered the definitive modern translation, puts it plainly in his introduction. The Epic of Gilgamesh is, above all, about mankind's eternal struggle with the fear of death. Barnes & Noble Not the fear itself as something to be solved, but as something to be understood and eventually, painfully, set down. Scholar Jeffrey Tigay goes further, arguing that Gilgamesh ultimately learns to accept his mortality instead of wasting the rest of his life in his vain struggle against death SciELO, finding in the walls of his own city the only immortality ever actually available to him. His legacy. The thing he built. The story someone eventually wrote down.

I have read that idea in a thousand places since. Self-help books, philosophy, therapy culture, stoicism repackaged for Instagram. None of them said it as cleanly as a story written on clay tablets four thousand years ago. That either says something remarkable about the story or something slightly depressing about how little we have moved on. Probably both. We damned humans!

The Ego

I want to talk about the ego before I talk about the mortality because I think it is underrated as a theme and because it is the thing that makes Gilgamesh feel shockingly modern in a way I was not prepared for.

Gilgamesh at the start of the story is a tyrant. Not in the cartoonish sense. In the very specific sense of a man who has never been told no by anything or anyone, who has power so complete that it has never occurred to him that other people's experience of him might differ substantially from his own experience of himself. He is two thirds divine. He is the greatest warrior in the known world. He is the king. The idea that any of this might come with obligations as well as privileges has simply not landed.

The story does not lecture him about this. It does not sit him down and explain that power comes with responsibility. It sends him Enkidu instead.

Enkidu is wild. Raised outside of civilisation, fully human in the way that Gilgamesh, with his divine dilution, is not quite. They fight when they first meet, because of course they do, two beings of extraordinary power encountering each other for the first time. And then they become inseparable. Enkidu is the first person in Gilgamesh's life who is his equal. The first person whose presence changes him rather than simply reflecting his own greatness back at him.

And then Enkidu dies.

I will not pretend the way they meet is uncomplicated. There are elements of the early story, involving sexual coercion and class dynamics, that are troubling by any standard and worth sitting with rather than glossing over. The ancient world was the ancient world and this text does not sanitise that. But what comes after, the friendship, the transformation of a tyrant into something more genuinely human, is where the story finds its power and its relevance.

The Mortality

When Enkidu dies, Gilgamesh does what the majority of us would do if we were honest about it. He refuses to accept it.

Not in the quietly dignified way we sometimes perform grief when we feel watched. In an undignified way. He sits with the body for days. He will not let them bury it. He keeps looking for signs of life. And then, when the evidence becomes impossible to deny, he turns the grief outward into terror. Because if Enkidu could die, then he can die. And that thought, which he has presumably always known in the abstract, lands on him for the first time as something real.

What follows is the journey. Across the waters of death, to the one human being granted immortality by the gods, a man called Utnapishtim, who survived a great flood that will sound extremely familiar to anyone who has encountered the Bible. Gilgamesh wants to know the secret. How do you become immortal? What is the trick?

Utnapishtim tells him the harsh truth. That the gods keep life for themselves and gave death to humanity and that is simply the nature of things. He then offers Gilgamesh a plant that restores youth, a consolation prize. Gilgamesh takes it. A serpent steals it from him while he sleeps. He returns home with nothing.

And here is where I had a genuine argument with the text. Because just before finding the plant, Gilgamesh receives wisdom from a tavern keeper named Siduri, who tells him something so lucid and so true that it should have ended his quest on the spot. She tells him to eat, drink, enjoy his wife and children, look at the child who holds his hand, live fully in the present because that is all any of us has. It is essentially a four-thousand-year-old argument for mindfulness, stated with considerably more poetry than most modern versions can muster.

Gilgamesh hears this wisdom and then goes and gets the plant anyway. Talk about losing honor and respect. I lost a lot of value for Gilgamesh after this, at first anyway. After much reflection, I realised he is only human after all. And the fact he loses it to a snake... the irony! Which is not an accident on Homer's part. The text is making a point about the specific human stubbornness that insists on learning everything the hard way. We are told. We know. We go after the plant regardless. And then the snake takes it.

What Ego Actually Is

I regularly debate ego and its origin with people. The idea that the ego is a modern invention, that ancient people were somehow humbler, more connected to the natural order, is a tad ridiculous. The Epic of Gilgamesh is my evidence to support my case. Here is a man, four thousand years ago, so consumed by his own significance that he cannot accept the one rule that applies to absolutely everyone. He is not unusual... he is only the first documented version of something that has never gone away. He represents the ego that cannot accommodate its own limits. We may have more sophisticated language for it now, more therapeutic frameworks, more Instagram captions. But the thing itself has not changed at all.

That is either reassuring or alarming. On different days, I find it both.

The Fragmentation

Honestly, I feel the Epic of Gilgamesh is fragmented. Some tablets survived in better condition than others. Some sections feel complete and propulsive. Others feel like arriving at a film midway through a scene you needed the beginning of. The translator you choose makes an enormous difference to how this lands.

Although this is not necessarily a bad thing. This fragmentation is the honest condition of something that survived four thousand years by accident. You cannot hold that against it. But you can acknowledge that it makes the reading experience uneven in ways that more complete works on this upcoming list do not.

It is the oldest story we have. It is also, in places, a story we only partially have. Those two facts coexist, and the second one occasionally interrupts the first.

What It Started

Profound thoughts… How do you live with loss. What do you owe the people beside you? What do you leave when you go? What is the point of glory if it ends?

Gilgamesh asked all of these first. Not because the other traditions read Gilgamesh and borrowed from it. The text was lost for most of history and would not have been available to them. But because these questions are not cultural. They are human. Every civilisation that has ever existed has arrived at them independently because every civilisation is made of people who lose things they love and cannot find a satisfying answer for why.

The Epic of Gilgamesh is the first time someone wrote the questions down. Everything else on this list is, in some sense, another attempt at the answers.

Final Verdict

★★★★☆ (4/5)

Four stars, and I want to be precise about why it is not five. It is not five because the fragmentation is real and occasionally interrupts. It is not five because, for long stretches of the story, Gilgamesh himself is difficult to love, making me less interested in his success.

But four very serious stars. Because it asked the question first. Because the ego it describes is still walking around wearing different clothes. Because Siduri the tavern keeper gave better advice four thousand years ago than most of what fills the self-help section of any bookshop you care to visit. Because a story written on clay tablets and lost for millennia and deciphered by one scholar in 1872 still has the capacity to make you recognise yourself in ways that are not entirely comfortable.

The oldest story we have. Still relevant. Still asking the question none of us has fully answered.

This is where it all starts. Everything else follows from here.

[Jeremy Walton · Rating 5 out of 5]

He who saw the Deep
I first read this epic (which has been described as perhaps the oldest written story on Earth) more than forty years ago, having bought it at the Smithsonian after (I guess what must have been) an interesting afternoon in the Assyrian exhibition, and read it on the bus from Washington to Knoxville. It's sat on my shelves since then, but I pulled it out to re-read after having read the novel "There Are Rivers In The Sky" last month.

Part of that novel is a fictional representation of the work of George Smith of the British Museum, who was the first to translate (what is now known as) the eleventh tablet of Gilgamesh, which contains an account of the Great Flood that pre-dates the Hebrew account (in the Bible) by around fifteen centuries. That story - which is one of the reasons Gilgamesh's epic is so well-known - is chapter 5 in this edition; the translator makes an interesting comparison between the it and the Hebrew myth in the Introduction, pointing out that, whilst the latter ends with God's solemn covenant with Noah that the flood won't occur again, there is no such promise in Gilgamesh's epic, and it's suggested that "part of the cause of the malaise present in the Mesopotamian psychology was this insecurity under which people lived out their lives" [p42]. There's also the comment that, when Gilgamesh goes on his quest to find eternal life, he "must cross the same Ocean which was the last boundary of the known or knowable earth to all the ancients, Greeks, Semites, or Sumerians [...] Even sophisticated Romans were afraid of the Atlantic; and Caesar's crossing to Britain was considered an act of almost superhuman daring, because, unlike the Mediterranean Sea, the English Channel was the beginning of Ocean." [p39].

The translation of the epic used in the novel uses the epithet I've taken as the title of my review; this doesn't appear here (the translator gives a lengthy account in the Introduction of how the various parts - written in Sumerian, Akkadian and Hittite - have been combined to make a "straightforward" English version of the story) but the text is no less poetic - here, for example, is the stirring opening:

"I will proclaim to the world the deeds of Gilgamesh. This was the man to whom all things were known; this was the king who knew the countries of the world. He was wise, he saw mysteries and knew secret things, he brought us a tale of the days before the flood. He went on a long journey, he was weary, worn-out with labour, returning he rested, he engraved on a stone the whole story" [p61]

What follows is an engrossing tale about Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, and Enkidu, a wild man created by the gods to prevent the king from oppressing his people. Enkidu travels to Uruk and challenges Gilgamesh to a test of strength, which Gilgamesh wins, following which, the two become friends. Together, they travel to the Cedar Forest, where they slay its guardian and cut down the sacred cedar. Next, the goddess Ishtar sends the Bull of Heaven to punish Gilgamesh for spurning her advances; Gilgamesh and Enkidu kill it, and so the gods sentence Enkidu to death by giving him a fatal illness.

Distress over Enkidu's death causes Gilgamesh to undertake another long journey to discover the secret of eternal life. He meets Utnapishtim and his wife, the only humans to survive the flood, who give the account of the flood ("The time was fulfilled, the evening came, the rider of the storm sent down the rain" [p110]), including the thanksgiving sacrifice they make at its conclusion. This contains the startling detail that "when the gods smelled the sweet savour [of the sacrifice] they gathered like flies over [it]" [p111]. Finally, Utnapishtim tells Gilgamesh that what he seeks will never be found, since it is the gods who "decree the fates of men. Life and death they allot but the day of death they do not disclose" [p107]. The epic ends with Gilgamesh returning to Uruk, where he eventually dies.

This is a dense story, which takes up only about fifty pages in this edition, but - despite its primitive origins - is gripping and stimulating, touching on such fundamental concerns of humanity as creation, death, friendship, arrogance, humility and failure. Recommended.

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I will proclaim to the whole world the deeds of Gilgamesh. This was the man to whom all things were known; this was the king who knew the countries of the world. He was wise, he saw mysteries and knew secret things, he brought us a tale of the days before the flood. He went on a long journey, was weary, worn-out with labour, returning he rested, he engraved on a stone the whole story”


The delight of this is the mix of the mythological and epic of the poem; and the Victorian era Indians Jones styling of the discovery of buried cities and treasure of knowledge. Reading this reignited my excitement of all things Sumer and Ur.

It’s explosive from the start. It’s fireworks and stands tall across millennia. There is waaaay more sex in this than you might expect. “She was not ashamed to take him. She made herself naked and welcomed his eagerness; as he lay on her murmuring love she taught him the woman’s art”

I love the way she introduces Enkidu to Gilgamesh. And how their friendship and love is so strong - echoes of the ideals of fraternal love which matches and echoes romantic love

NK Sandars is her own poet - and reminded me lovingly of the university of London and walking through the quads and learning spaces. I love her reflection of Gilgamesh not as prototype, antecedent or parent of Homeric epic, but a creator of the same atmosphere.

“Our world may be infinitely larger, but it still ends in the abyss, the upper and nether waters of our ignorance. For us the same demons lie in wait, the ‘devil in the clock’, and in the end we come back to the place from which we set out, like Gilgamesh who ‘went on a long journey, was weary, worn-out with labour, and returning engraved on a stone the whole story’

“timor mortis conturbat me" (“the fear of death disturbs me")

“A short time back I discovered among the Assyrian tablets in the British Museum an account of the flood”

A fascinating section on diction, and the aims of the oral tradition and poetic aims of the senmetic and Babylonian, make me want to explore this aspect in much more detail.

“Our days are numbered, our occupations are a breath of wind”

[jaycob · Rating 4 out of 5]

While Sanders's translation itself is concerned mostly with conveying the meaning of the tablets as accessibly as possible, it nonetheless retains a beauty simply by being a translation of the oldest written story that we have. The first 60 pages of notes on the history of discovering and possessing the clay tablets, the literary disputes over what parts to keep, and the historical and political contexts do well in framing the epic.
The epic itself, while not staggering with style, is interesting to think about both as an examination of the heroic story structure and as a preservation of the oldest values we have retained as people. The story structure has what might be considered surprising complexity coming from a society in the age of oral tradition. To think that parts of this epic have been retold as a collection of six or seven (haha) important events in this 'cycle' leads one to reflect on the importance of these moments in Gilgamesh's life:
-the encounter of a true friend
-the heroic journey
-the death of a friend
-the denial of mortality
-the flood myth
-the return home and acceptance of mortality

Each of these events can be viewed as mirrors to universal human experiences. The idea that the oldest remaining work of literature centers around the tragedy of a rich man who is concerned about his death is extremely compelling. From the beginning, we have understood the richness of a life not remembered through cliched triumph and heroic deed, but rather through a conflicted acceptance of the human condition. Gilgamesh is not remembered as the richest or most powerful or most respected man of his time, but as a symbol of quiet acceptance.

The other equally compelling idea is that we have long understood that human connection, friendship, and acceptance are more desirable facets of life than wealth, fame, power, and Epicurean pleasure.

[Ethan Hulbert · Rating 1 out of 5]

I did a comparative analysis of two translations of Gilgamesh, one by N.K. Sanders, and one retold by Stephen Mitchell.

This two star review is specifically for the translation by N.K. Sanders. I love the Gilgamesh story overall, 5 stars, classic. The N.K. Sanders version? It sucks.

Reading Sanders' version of Gilgamesh is like watching an airplane version of a movie, except worse, because instead of just cutting out some scenes, it fully twists them to degrade and insult central characters, which in turn completely obscure central themes of the whole book.

In the story, there's a priestess of Inanna named Samhat, and part of the duties of priestesses during this era in history revolved around sexual pleasure. This was a completely different society with completely different moral judgements and ideas, and sex was seen as something related to religion and the gods, something that took place in temples through rituals at times, something that reflected civilization, etc. Samhat is sent to civilize the wild man Enkidu through "sexual arts" and it is a pretty vital part of his story and whole character trajectory.

In Sanders' version, Samhat isn't even given a name. Sanders just says, basically, "yeah they sent some prostitute out and they, well, you know, anyway" - cutting her whole role from the story and insulting her (historically inaccurately too) in the process.

Sometimes you get translations that are dry because they're very academic and faithful to the source text, even when it sounds stilted in modern English. Those are at least respectable. Sanders' translation is dry AND outright disrespectful to the source text and the culture it comes from. The introduction is also terribly written as well.

Avoid the Sanders translation, please.

[Michelle Tang · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Oh father Utnapishtim, I wish to question you concernng the living and the dead, how shall I find the life for which I am searching?'
"There is no permanence"

"You were given the kingship, such was your destiny, everlasting life was not your destiny. Because of this do not be sad at heart, do not be grieved or oppressed; he has given you power to bind and to loose, to be the darkness and the light of mankind."

While Gilgamesh may feel that he has gained "nothing" in terms of his original goal, he actually gains everything in terms of personal growth.
If he had succeeded and didn't loose the plant to the snake in the last moment, he would have remained the same person who set out on the quest. But such loss and grief in life transformed him, shaping him to become a wise ruler who began to see that his true legacy lies not in immortality, but in his impact on the city of Urak. If he had simply returned with the plant and gained eternal youth, his character arc would have remained incomplete. Now, he must confront the essentials, ask deeper questions, and realize that living a meaningful life—rather than simply prolonging it—is the real achievement.
Turning away from seeking immortality, his contributions to his city and people left an immortal legacy.

[Batgii Erdenebat]

While detailing the tale of Gilgamesh and his journey with Enkidu, Sanders offers readers the evolution of transcription. Throughout the 20th to 21st century, new fragments of The Epic of Gilgamesh were discovered, further uncovering the texts and refining the already transcribed text into fullness.

Despite starring the same characters (Gilgamesh and Enkidu), different versions have circulated, with a division in the period it was written down by scholars. Some versions entail the domineering and vigorous victory Gilgamesh secures over Humbaba, while others detail the cunning and strategic victory secured by Gilgamesh and Enkidu. The difference in what seems to be the same text is a wondrous example for showing that knowledge does not stagnate, only growing at the hands of predecessors.

If you wish to not only read about The Epic of Gilgamesh but also about various scholars' efforts made in restoration, this book authored by N.K. Sanders is an excellent place to start.

[Meg A. · Rating 3 out of 5]

This translation started strong in the first half and then the second half got incredibly repetitive. It felt like I was reading two different translations of the same work because the style changed so much. The second half felt so lazy and wasn’t nearly as good of a read as the first half since I could pretty much skip full paragraphs since it just repeated the same damn thing for about 100-200 words. I know for a fact it could’ve been varied up. Still an interesting read to see just how much of this story has influenced other classics which in turn have influenced every modern story we read today.

[Jeanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

While visiting my brother, he brought this out for my sister and I to read. I have read it before, but many moons ago. I appreciated Sanders’s thorough and insightful introduction (which is as long as the epic itself). I love the simplicity of the epic and the friendship at the heart of it. I also love how the human experience remains the same many centuries later. It’s why I read - as a constant reminder that we are all connected through a common fabric of life: of love, loss, joy, friendship, laughter and tears, tragedy and ecstasy.

[Rising Fire · Rating 4 out of 5]

All in all, I seriously enjoyed this book. This version, as published by Penguin Classics, spends the first half of what's included explaining the discovery of the story, as well as the historical context of it. The second half is the story itself. As a history guy, I thoroughly enjoyed the foreword, but the story itself is a little lacking compared to the hype. The story isn't complex, but the presentation is the highlight. Very fun to read, would recommend if you've got an afternoon of free time.

[Aly · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting read. Despite being the oldest story known to mankind, it is so to speak a tale as old as time. Arrogant man goes on an adventure with his best friend and learns a few lessons along the way amidst tragedy and torment. More than half of this edition is filled with the introduction and information on the history of this epic. It is really helpful in understanding the meaning and importance behind this short story.

[Brooksie Fontaine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such a beautiful book. It's fitting that the oldest story we know encapsulates themes that remain timeless: the fear of death, the urge to create something everlasting, the immortality of love.

You can feel the echoes of these ancient myths in all of our modern mythos, and there's a sense of connection through them to every human who has ever lived and the chords of divinity that underly all our mortal lives.

[A Screaming Possum · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is not a review of The Epic of Gilgamesh, this is a review of N.K Sandar’s 50+ page foreword. Absolute gibberish. Sentences that make no grammatical sense. I felt like I was having a stroke. I was looking forward to getting the background on the story and ended up resorting to Wikipedia. This is one of the most non-reader friendly forewords I’ve ever attempted to read.

[Briggi · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this redemptive story, particularly the strong friendship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu that grew to brotherhood as they faced trials together. It also made me appreciate the simplicity of serving one true God as opposed to several fickle false gods. It’s not a long read and I would recommend it.

[Julian Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading this was almost a spiritual experience that gave me a better understanding of what it means to be human. Like Gilgamesh, humans have always struggled to find purpose and meaning in the face of mortality.

The introduction is dense and requires general understanding of literary history and mythology. But there’s a helpful glossary of Sumerian mythological figures.

[Federico Sanchez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rereading this years later, I am amazed at the depths of human experience captured in such an old text — showing that as long as we have had the tool of language, we have been able to plunge into that most marvelous mystery of subjectivity.