The Epic of Gilgamesh is the oldest great story that survives. It is about a king of Uruk, a city in what is now southern Iraq, who may really have ruled there in the third millennium BCE. The best-known version, written on twelve clay tablets and credited to a scholar named Sin-leqi-unninni, was put together more than three thousand years ago from even older Sumerian poems. And for a story that is mostly about the fear of death, it ends in a strange place: on top of a city wall.
The story in one breath
Gilgamesh starts out as a bad king, so strong and restless that his own people beg the gods for relief. The gods answer by making Enkidu, a wild man who becomes his equal and then his closest friend. Together they cross to the Cedar Forest and kill its guardian, Humbaba, then kill the Bull of Heaven. The gods decide one of them has to pay for it, and Enkidu dies.
Grief turns into terror. Gilgamesh leaves everything to find Utnapishtim, the one man the gods ever made immortal, the survivor of the great flood. He wants the secret. Utnapishtim tests him by asking him to stay awake for six days and seven nights, and Gilgamesh falls asleep almost at once. As a parting gift he learns of a thorny plant at the bottom of the sea that makes the old young again. He dives for it, gets it, and loses it on the way home when a snake steals it while he is bathing.
He comes home with nothing he went looking for.
Why the poem ends on the wall
Back at Uruk, Gilgamesh turns to Urshanabi, the ferryman who brought him across the waters of death, and tells him to climb the wall of Uruk and walk along it. Look at the foundations, he says. Look at the brickwork, and see whether it isn't made of fired brick. The poem lists what the wall encloses: the city, its date groves, its clay pits and the temple of Ishtar.
Those lines are not new. They are the same words the poem used at the very beginning, when it spoke directly to the reader and told them to go and look at the walls for themselves. The story walks you all the way to the edge of the world and back, and then hands you the answer it gave you on the first page.
The answer is not eternal life. Gilgamesh can't keep himself, and he can't keep his friend. What he can see, standing on the wall, is the thing he built. It is still standing after him, it shelters a whole city, and people can climb it and walk it and read their way around it. You can't live forever, but what you build can outlast you.
What that means if you are building something now
Gilgamesh Enterprise is named after this story, and that last scene is the reason. It is a useful thing to remember when you are running a business, a side project, a channel or a family on not enough sleep.
- The search for a shortcut usually comes back empty. Gilgamesh crossed the world for a secret and lost it to a snake. The thing that lasted was the slow, visible work.
- Build things other people can use. The wall matters because a city lives inside it. Work that only serves you tends to end when you do.
- Look at the brickwork. The poem asks you to check the materials and the foundations. Quality is what lets something stand for a long time.
- Go home and look again. Sometimes the thing you are looking for is already standing behind you.
The Walls of Uruk design
We drew that final scene as the main design for the shop: the walls of Uruk with their stepped battlements and a gate of light, the sun disk of Shamash, the sun god who helps Gilgamesh in the poem, overhead, and his name written in cuneiform. Underneath it says what lasts is what you build.
It comes as a Walls of Uruk tee, a heavyweight hoodie and a poster in three sizes. The rest of the Epic of Gilgamesh collection draws on other moments from the poem, including the dive for the plant and the tablet the poem tells its reader to open. 25% of the profit from every merch sale goes to SM-Give.
If you have never read the poem, it is short, strange and worth an evening. Start at the wall, and end there too.