Gilgamesh: Was the King of Uruk Real, and Why Is He a Giant?

Gilgamesh was probably a real king of Uruk in the early third millennium BCE, later the hero of the Epic of Gilgamesh, and his name reappears among the giants in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Gilgamesh was a king of Uruk, probably a real ruler of the early third millennium BCE, whom the Sumerian King List credits with a reign of 126 years. Poems about him were written in Sumerian around 2100 BCE, and they grew into the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, whose standard version is attributed to the scholar Sin-leqi-unninni.

Tablet I introduces him: 'Two-thirds of him are divine, and one-third of him human.' His mother is the goddess Ninsun. He is huge, restless, and oppressive, so the gods create Enkidu from clay as his match. The two become friends, kill Humbaba, and slay the Bull of Heaven sent by Ishtar. When the gods decree Enkidu's death, Gilgamesh sets off to find Utnapishtim and the secret of eternal life.

He fails. He loses the plant of youth to a snake and returns to Uruk, where the epic ends by praising the city's walls, which archaeologists have traced at Warka in southern Iraq. Those walls are the epic's final answer to his quest: a man cannot live forever, but what he builds and what is remembered of him can last. The opening lines invite the reader to climb the wall and walk around the city, and the tale ends the same way.

Gilgamesh has an afterlife in unexpected places. The Aramaic Book of Giants from Qumran names a giant 'Gilgamesh' among the sons of the Watchers, a sign that Jewish writers knew the Babylonian hero and counted him among the Nephilim. The fragments are too broken to say much about his role there, but his name appears while the giants argue over their ominous dreams.