page_title: Gilgamesh
section_title: In antiquity
hierarchical_section_title: Gilgamesh / Later influence / In antiquity
context_page_description: Gilgamesh was a major hero in ancient Mesopotamian mythology and the protagonist of the Epic of Gilgamesh, an epic poem written in Akkadian during the late 2nd millennium BC. He was also most likely a historical king of the Sumerian city-state of Uruk, who was posthumously deified. His rule probably would have taken place sometime between 2800 and 2500 BC, though he became a major figure in Sumerian legend during the Third Dynasty of Ur.
  Tales of Gilgamesh's legendary exploits are narrated in five surviving Sumerian poems. The earliest of these is most likely "Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the Netherworld", in which Gilgamesh comes to the aid of the goddess Inanna and drives away the creatures infesting her huluppu tree. She gives him two unknown objects, a mikku and a pikku, which he loses. After Enkidu's death, his shade tells Gilgamesh about the bleak conditions in the Underworld. The poem "Gilgamesh and Agga" describes Gilgamesh's revolt against his overlord King Agga. Other Sumerian poems relate Gilgamesh's defeat of the ogre Huwawa and the Bull of Heaven, while a fifth, poorly preserved poem apparently describes his death and funeral.
context_section_description: The Epic of Gilgamesh exerted substantial influence on the Iliad and the Odyssey, two epic poems written in ancient Greek during the eighth century BC. According to Barry B. Powell, an American classical scholar, early Greeks were probably exposed to Mesopotamian oral traditions through their extensive connections to the civilizations of the ancient Near East and this exposure resulted in the similarities that are seen between the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Homeric epics. Walter Burkert, a German classicist, observes that the scene in Tablet VI of the Epic of Gilgamesh in which Gilgamesh rejects Ishtar's advances and she complains before her mother Antu, but is mildly rebuked by her father Anu, is directly paralleled in Book V of the Iliad. In this scene, Aphrodite, the later Greek adaptation of Ishtar, is wounded by the hero Diomedes and flees to Mount Olympus, where she cries to her mother Dione and is mildly rebuked by her father Zeus.
  Powell observes that the opening lines of the Odyssey seem to echo the opening lines of the Epic of Gilgamesh. The storyline of the Odyssey likewise bears numerous similarities to that of the Epic of Gilgamesh. Both Gilgamesh and Odysseus encounter a woman who can turn men into animals: Ishtar (for Gilgamesh) and Circe (for Odysseus). In the Odyssey, Odysseus blinds a giant Cyclops named Polyphemus, an incident which bears similarities to Gilgamesh's slaying of Humbaba in the Epic of Gilgamesh. Both Gilgamesh and Odysseus visit the Underworld and both find themselves unhappy whilst living in an otherworldly paradise in the presence of an attractive woman: Siduri (for Gilgamesh) and Calypso (for Odysseus). Finally, both heroes have an opportunity for immortality but miss it (Gilgamesh when he loses the plant, and Odysseus when he leaves Calypso's island).
  In the Qumran scroll known as Book of Giants (c. 100 BC) the names of Gilgamesh and Humbaba appear as two of the antediluvian giants, rendered (in consonantal form) as glgmš and ḩwbbyš. This same text was later used in the Middle East by the Manichaean sects, and the Arabic form Gilgamish/Jiljamish survives as the name of a demon according to the Egyptian cleric Al-Suyuti (c. 1500).
  The story of Gilgamesh's birth is not recorded in any extant Sumerian or Akkadian text, but a version of it is described in De Natura Animalium (On the Nature of Animals) 12.21, a commonplace book which was written in Greek sometime around 200 AD by the Hellenized Roman orator Aelian. According to Aelian's story, an oracle told King Seuechoros of the Babylonians that his grandson Gilgamos would overthrow him. To prevent this, Seuechoros kept his only daughter under close guard at the Acropolis of the city of Babylon, but she became pregnant nonetheless. Fearing the king's wrath, the guards hurled the infant off the top of a tall tower. An eagle rescued the boy in midflight and carried him to an orchard, where it carefully set him down. The caretaker of the orchard found the boy and raised him, naming him Gilgamos (Γίλγαμος). Eventually, Gilgamos returned to Babylon and overthrew his grandfather, proclaiming himself king. The birth narrative described by Aelian is in the same tradition as other Near Eastern birth legends, such as those of Sargon, Moses, and Cyrus. Theodore Bar Konai (c. AD 600), writing in Syriac, also mentions a king Gligmos, Gmigmos or Gamigos as last of a line of twelve kings who were contemporaneous with the patriarchs from Peleg to Abraham; this occurrence is also considered a vestige of Gilgamesh's former memory.
caption: The episode involving Odysseus's confrontation with Polyphemus in the Odyssey, shown in this seventeenth-century painting by Guido Reni, bears similarities to Gilgamesh and Enkidu's battle with Humbaba in the Epic of Gilgamesh.[55]
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