The Epic of Gilgamesh – Ego & mortality

52 Books in a Year – Week 1

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.

Next Up: The Iliad