The Epic of Gilgamesh

by Anonymous

The standard version of the Babylonian epic is known from a total of 73 manuscripts extant: the 35 that have survived from the libraries of King Ashurbanipal at Nineveh, 8 more tablets and fragments from three other Assyrian cities (Ashur, Kalah and Huzirina), and 30 from Babylonia, especially the cities of Babylon and Uruk.

The eleven tablets of the epic vary in length from 183 to 326 lines of poetry, so that the whole composition would originally have been about 3,000 lines long. As the text now stands, only Tablets I, VI, X and XI are more or less complete. Leaving aside lines that are lost but can be restored from parallel passages, overall about 575 lines are still completely missing, that is, they are not represented by so much as a single word. Many more are too badly damaged to be useful, so that considerably less than the four-fifths of the epic that is extant yields a consecutive text. In the translation offered here the damaged state of the text is all too evident, pock-marked as it is by the clutter of brackets and ellipses.

‘O my friend, wild ass on the run, donkey of the uplands, panther of the wild,VIII 50 my friend Enkidu, wild ass on the run, donkey of the uplands, panther of the wild! It was we together who climbed the [mountains,] seized and [slew] the Bull of Heaven, destroyed Humbaba, who [dwelt in the] Forest [of Cedar.] ‘Now what is this sleep that has seized [you?]VIII 55 You’ve become unconscious, you do not [hear me!]’ But he, he lifted not [his head.] He felt his heart, but it beat no longer. He covered, like a bride, the face of his friend, like an eagle he circled around him.VIII 60 Like a lioness deprived of her cubs, he paced to and fro, this way and that.

‘[my friend, whom I love so dear,]X 55 [who with me went through every danger,] [my friend Enkidu, whom I love so dear,] [who with me went through every danger:]

‘[How can I keep silent?] How can I stay quiet? [My friend, whom I love, has turned] to clay, my friend Enkidu, whom I love, has [turned to] clay. [Shall I not be like] him, and also lie down,X 70 [never] to rise again, through all eternity?’

‘Why, Gilgamesh, do you ever [chase] sorrow? You, who are a mix of gods’ flesh and human, whom the [gods] did fashion like your father and mother!

‘Man is snapped off like a reed in a canebrake! The comely young man, the pretty young woman – all [too soon in] their [prime] Death abducts them! ‘No one at all sees Death, no one at all sees the face [of Death,]X 305 no one at all [hears] the voice of Death, Death so savage, who hacks men down. ‘Ever do we build our households, ever do we make our nests, ever do brothers divide their inheritance,X 310 ever do feuds arise in the land. 11 ‘Then all of a sudden nothing is there!’ ‘Ever the river has risen and brought us the flood, the mayfly floating on the water. On the face of the sun its countenance gazes, then all of a sudden nothing is there!X 315 ‘The abducted and the dead, alike is their lot! But never was drawn the likeness of Death, never in the land did the dead greet a man. ‘The Anunnaki, the great gods, held an assembly, Mammitum, maker of destiny, fixed fates with them:X 320 both Death and Life they did establish, but the day of Death they do not disclose.’

‘O Uta-napishti, what should I do and where should I go? A thief has taken hold of my [flesh!] For there in my bed-chamber Death does abide,XI 245 and wherever [I] turn, there too will be Death.’