The gods made Enkidu because Gilgamesh was out of control. The king of Uruk was too strong, too restless, too much. He exhausted his people with building projects and demanded the right to sleep with every bride on her wedding night. The people cried out to the gods, and the gods responded not with punishment but with a companion. They shaped Enkidu from clay, set him in the wilderness, covered him with hair, and let him run with the gazelles. He was the answer to a question that Gilgamesh did not know he was asking: what happens when the strongest person in the world meets someone who is his equal?

Andrew George's translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest surviving work of narrative literature, places Enkidu at the center of the story's emotional architecture. Gilgamesh is the hero. Enkidu is the reason the hero becomes human. Without Enkidu, Gilgamesh is simply a powerful man doing powerful things. With Enkidu, he becomes a person capable of love, grief, and the terrifying awareness that everything he loves will eventually end.

He Lost the Wilderness and Gained a Friend and the Trade Was Not Simple

Enkidu lived among the animals. He drank at their watering holes. He grazed in their fields. He freed them from hunters' traps. He was not human in any social sense. He had a human body and an animal life, and the text does not present this as inferior. It presents it as a different way of being, complete in itself, that was destroyed when the temple priestess Shamhat was sent to civilize him.

Shamhat slept with Enkidu for seven days. When he returned to the animals afterward, they ran from him. He had become human, which is to say he had lost the ability to be anything else. Benjamin Foster's anthology notes that this is one of the earliest literary explorations of what civilization costs. Enkidu gained language, clothing, bread, and beer. He gained the ability to live among humans. He lost the ability to live among animals. The text treats both as real losses and real gains, which is more sophisticated than most modern treatments of the nature-versus-civilization question.

The Fight With Gilgamesh Was the Beginning Not the End

When Enkidu arrived in Uruk, he blocked Gilgamesh from entering a bride's chamber. They fought in the streets. The wrestling match is described in terms that suggest the walls of the city shook. Gilgamesh won, narrowly, and they immediately became inseparable friends. The transition from combat to love is instantaneous in the text, as if the fight was not a conflict but a recognition. They had been made for each other, literally, and the violence was simply how they discovered it.

What followed was the great friendship of ancient literature. They killed Humbaba, the guardian of the Cedar Forest. They defeated the Bull of Heaven. They became famous across the world. And then the gods, offended by their audacity, decided that one of them had to die. They chose Enkidu.

He Died and Gilgamesh Learned What It Means to Lose Everything

Enkidu's death occupies several tablets of the epic and is one of the most devastating sequences in the history of literature. He falls ill. He curses the priestess who civilized him, then takes back the curse when the sun god reminds him that civilization also gave him Gilgamesh. He has a dream of the underworld. He weakens. He dies.

Gilgamesh's response is total disintegration. He refuses to let the body be buried until a maggot falls from Enkidu's nose. He wanders into the wilderness wearing animal skins. He crosses oceans and mountains searching for the secret of immortality. He finds it and loses it. He returns to Uruk, looks at the walls of his city, and understands that the walls are his monument and the dead friend is his meaning and that neither one cancels out the other.

Enkidu was made from clay to solve a political problem. He became the reason the oldest story ever told is not about power or glory but about what happens when you love someone and they die. He was human for what appears to have been a few years at most. It was enough.