The Epic of Gilgamesh was written on clay tablets in cuneiform script approximately four thousand years ago. It is the oldest surviving work of narrative literature. It is about a king who has everything, loses the one person who matters, and spends the rest of the story trying to undo the loss. He fails. He goes home. He looks at the walls of his city and realizes that what he built will have to be enough. If that sounds familiar, it is because every story about grief that has been written since is, in some way, a footnote to this one.

He Was Two-Thirds God and One-Third Terrified

Gilgamesh was king of Uruk, the greatest city in Mesopotamia. The text describes him as two-thirds divine and one-third human, which sounds impressive until you realize that the human third is the part that can die. He was strong enough to oppress his own people. He was beautiful enough that the gods had to create a companion, Enkidu, specifically to distract him from making everyone miserable. Assyriologists at the University of Pennsylvania, where some of the original tablets are housed, have studied the Gilgamesh-Enkidu relationship as one of the earliest literary depictions of transformative friendship. Enkidu begins as a wild man, raised among animals. He is civilized through human contact, fights Gilgamesh, and becomes his inseparable companion. Together they kill the monster Humbaba and the Bull of Heaven. They are heroes. They are invincible. They are young. Then Enkidu dies. The gods decree his death as punishment for killing Humbaba. He sickens, suffers, and dies in Gilgamesh's arms. The king who was two-thirds divine discovers that divinity does not protect the people you love.

The Quest for Immortality Was Always Going to Fail

Gilgamesh refuses to accept Enkidu's death. He wanders the wilderness. He crosses the ocean at the edge of the world. He finds Utnapishtim, the one mortal who was granted eternal life after surviving a great flood. He asks for the secret of immortality. Scholars of ancient Mesopotamian literature at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London have noted that Utnapishtim's response is essentially: you cannot have it. His immortality was a one-time gift from the gods after a specific event. It is not reproducible. There is no trick. There is no technique. You are going to die. Utnapishtim tells Gilgamesh about a plant at the bottom of the sea that can restore youth. Gilgamesh dives for it, retrieves it, and a serpent steals it while he sleeps. The plant is gone. The quest is over. Death wins. Gilgamesh returns to Uruk. He looks at the walls of his city. The last lines of the epic describe those walls with the same language used in the opening. The story is a circle. The king left his city searching for immortality and returned with nothing except the understanding that the city itself, the thing he built, the walls he raised, is the only answer available. Four thousand years later, we are still telling this story. We still lose the people we love. We still want to beat death. We still fail. We still look at what we have built and try to decide if it is enough. The tablets are cracked and incomplete. The grief is perfectly preserved.