The Epic of Gilgamesh

"Gilgamesh is tremendous! ... I hold it to be the greatest thing a person can experience." - Rainer Maria Rilke

"The original epic of human self-knowledge." - Ali Smith, The Guardian.

"One of the oldest and noblest poems in the world." Peter Monro Jack, The New York Times.

The Epic of Gilgamesh, the first work listed in Harold Bloom's The Western Canon, predates and has echoes in both Homer and the Old Testament.

Gilgamesh, two-thirds god and one-third human, king of Uruk, was a formidable, though tyrannical, ruler. To restrain him, the gods created Enkidu, a wild man, almost his equal. After a tense struggle, Gilgamesh eventually triumphs. They emerge with mutual admiration and a deep friendship. Together, they defeat Humbaba, the terror of humanity and the guardian of the cedar forest, and even the bull of heaven. The gods decree that Enkidu must die, in shame, of illness, not in battle. This is the turning point. Gilgamesh, face to face with mortality, terrified for the first time in his life, embarks on a solo quest for immortality. Failing, he returns having gained precious life wisdom.

The epic embodies the universal themes of literature: the hero's quest, the power of friendship, the nature of true greatness, the inevitability of death, and the search for lasting meaning. It even anticipates the very modern concern with humanity's conflict with the natural world. As Sophus Helle observes, literature's greatest art is to tell the story of one person and make it feel like the story of everyone. The Epic of Gilgamesh achieves this wonderfully, so the reader echoes Rilke: "Gilgamesh is tremendous!"

R. Campbell Thompson was a distinguished British archaeologist, Assyriologist, and cuneiformist. Thompson's version, prepared in Nineveh, stands apart from modern prose translations through its distinctive poetic rhythm. He rendered the cuneiform tablets into English hexameters, a meter chosen to echo the grand, musical cadence of the original. This dignified atmospheric translation feels genuinely ancient and heroic.