The Epic of Gilgamesh is named after its king, but the story does not really start until Enkidu walks out of the wilderness. Without him, Gilgamesh is a tyrant. Because of him, Gilgamesh becomes a hero. And when Enkidu dies, Gilgamesh turns into the man the rest of the poem is about: someone who cannot accept that the people we love end.
Made from clay to match a king
At the start of the poem Gilgamesh is two-thirds god and one-third man, and he is wearing out the city of Uruk. He has no equal, so nothing checks him. The people cry out to the gods, and the gods answer by asking the mother goddess Aruru to make him a match. She pinches off clay, throws it down in the wild, and Enkidu is born there.
He is not a man yet. He is covered in hair, eats grass with the gazelles, drinks at the watering hole with the animals and pulls up the hunters' traps. A trapper who keeps losing his catch goes for help, and the answer he brings back is Shamhat, a woman from the temple, who goes out to meet Enkidu at the watering hole. After their time together the animals run from him. He is slower than he was, but he understands things he did not before. Shamhat brings him to the shepherds, where he eats bread and drinks beer for the first time, washes, dresses and becomes human.
The fight that became a friendship
When Enkidu reaches Uruk he blocks Gilgamesh in the street, and the two of them fight until the doorposts shake. The fight ends without either one crushing the other, and what comes out of it is a friendship, the first time in his life Gilgamesh has met someone he cannot simply overpower.
Together they go after glory. They travel to the Cedar Forest and kill its guardian, Humbaba, with Enkidu urging Gilgamesh on when he hesitates. Back in Uruk the goddess Ishtar offers to marry Gilgamesh, he refuses her and lists what happened to her past lovers, and she sends the Bull of Heaven down on the city. The friends kill the bull too.
Why Enkidu has to die
The gods decide that someone has to pay for Humbaba and the Bull of Heaven, and they choose Enkidu. He falls sick. In his anger he curses the trapper and Shamhat for bringing him out of the wild, until the sun god Shamash reminds him that she gave him bread, beer, clothes and his friendship with Gilgamesh, and Enkidu blesses her instead. He dreams of the underworld, a house of dust where the dead eat clay, and after days of illness he dies.
Gilgamesh weeps over him for six days and seven nights and will not give him up for burial. Then he has a statue made of his friend, puts on animal skins and walks out into the wild, the same place Enkidu came from, looking for a way to never die himself.
What Enkidu teaches
- Nobody becomes who they are alone. Gilgamesh only changes when he meets someone strong enough to stand in his way. Most people who build something have an Enkidu: a partner, a friend, a parent or a rival who refuses to be overpowered.
- Civilization is a gift people give each other. Enkidu becomes human through bread, beer, clothes and company, all of them given by someone else.
- Grief can be the start of the real work. The whole second half of the epic happens because Gilgamesh lost his friend. It ends with him back home, looking at what he built. You can read that ending in The Walls of Uruk.
A note for anyone who keeps reading: the twelfth and last tablet of the standard version tells a different story, where Enkidu goes down to the underworld alive and his ghost comes back to describe it. Scholars mostly treat it as an add-on, a translation of an older Sumerian poem attached to the end, which is why Enkidu is alive in it even though the epic already buried him.
Designs from the poem
The Epic of Gilgamesh collection follows the rest of Gilgamesh's road after Enkidu: the dive in He Who Saw the Deep, the poem's invitation in Read the Tablet, and the city he comes home to in Walls of Uruk. You can also read the flood story from Tablet XI.