Tablet I — The Coming of Enkidu

Tablet I

Of this tablet, only a few fragments survive. The true beginning, as determined by Professor Haupt, reads:

He who has looked upon the entire tale of Gilgamesh, who knows all that befell him—all of it together— who has beheld every kind of wisdom, who knows the mysteries and has seen what is hidden, who brings back news from before the flood— he has traveled roads of immense distance and grown weary. And now he has written upon a memorial tablet all these other things… the wall of Uruk-šuppuri.

(Lines ten and eleven are lost.)

He spoke a charm that never leaves him… the god who, from the earliest days…

Thus far the first page of Haupt's text. To this same tablet—as Haupt and Jeremias have shown—belongs page fifty-one, which narrates a siege of the city of Erech.

…His cattle forsook him. He went down to the river, pushed his boat into the water, and covered it. …Full of sorrow, he wept bitterly. He returned, perhaps, to the city of Gan-gan-na, which the enemy had utterly destroyed.

The she-asses trampled down their own foals; the cows in their madness turned upon their calves. And as the cattle were seized with panic, so were the people. Like doves, the maidens sighed and mourned.

The gods of Uruk, the strong-walled, assumed the shape of flies and buzzed about the streets. The protecting deities of Uruk, the strong-walled, took the shape of mice and hurried into their holes.

Three years the enemy besieged the city of Uruk; the city's gates were barred, the bolts shot home. Even Ishtar the goddess could make no headway against them.

But Bel opened his mouth and spoke to Ishtar, the queen, saying to her…

(Here the text breaks off. Traces remain—perhaps twenty-one lines—among them the words, “Babylon, the city of joy.” The king's death must have plunged the city into the consternation described above. Then Gilgamesh came as her savior, and in time he reigned as her king.)