The oldest epic in the world begins at the end, with its hero already home, and invites you to inspect his real estate. See the wall of Uruk, it says — climb it, walk its length, examine the brickwork: is it not burnt brick, and good? Then it opens a copper tablet-box and takes out the story of the man who built the wall: Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, two-thirds god and one-third man, taller, stronger, more beautiful and more tireless than anyone the gods had ever let loose in a human city. Which was, it turns out, exactly the problem.

Because a hero with no equal has no brake. Gilgamesh at the epic’s start is not evil; he is unbudgeted — an engine of appetite revving inside city walls. He exhausts the young men with contests and levies; he leaves no daughter to her mother, no bride to her bridegroom — the epic is unsqueamish about what royal privilege meant at a wedding. And the people of Uruk, who cannot fight their own protector, do what oppressed Mesopotamians always do in these stories: they complain to the sky, and the sky, for once, files the complaint.

“The gods heard their lament. They called to Aruru, the great one: you created this man — now create his equal. Let it be a match for the storm of his heart, and let them contend together, and let Uruk have peace.

So Aruru, the birth-goddess, washed her hands, pinched off clay, and threw it down on the steppe — and Enkidu was: a man made outside every city, coated in hair, knowing nothing of bread or beer or clothes, running with the gazelles at the water hole, tearing out the traps that hunters set. Notice the gods’ diagnosis, because the whole epic is folded inside it. The cure for the overmighty king is not a rival, not a rebellion, not a thunderbolt. It is a friend. Nothing in the wall-building, city-founding, epic-writing world of Mesopotamia could check Gilgamesh — so the gods sent something from before all of it.

The hunter whose traps Enkidu kept tearing out went home to his father shaking, having seen the wild man at the water hole. And the advice he received — from his father, and then from Gilgamesh himself when the matter reached the palace — is the most Mesopotamian battle plan ever drafted: do not send soldiers. Send Shamhat. She was a harimtu, a temple woman of Ishtar, and the epic assigns her, with entire respect, the taming of the last wild man on earth. She waited at the water hole; Enkidu came down with the herds; and she did her work, the text says plainly, for six days and seven nights.

And on the seventh day, when Enkidu rose satisfied and turned back to his life, his life had left. The gazelles ran from him. The wild beasts of the steppe drew away from his body. His knees, which had outrun everything on four legs, stood still — and the epic delivers one of its perfect double-edged lines: Enkidu was diminished, his running was not as before. But he himself had grown broad in understanding. He had lost the animal world and gained the human one in the same seven days, and the epic refuses to call it either a fall or an ascent. It calls it both, in one verse, and moves on — thousands of years before Genesis would tell of another innocent, another offered knowledge, another exile from the garden into clothing and history.

“You are handsome, Enkidu — you are become like a god. Why roam the steppe with beasts? Come, let me lead you to Uruk of the great square, where Gilgamesh is, perfect in strength, lording it over the young men like a wild bull.

She clothed him in half her garment, taught him bread — Enkidu, gently mocked by the text, gaping at a loaf, having nursed on the milk of wild things — taught him beer, seven jugs of it, whereupon his face shone and he sang; and led him toward Uruk. And Enkidu went gladly, because Shamhat had given him a purpose sized to his new understanding: in Uruk there was a king who took brides from their bridegrooms, and Enkidu, who now knew what a bride was, was going to stop him. He arrived on a wedding night, and planted himself in the door of the wedding house like a boulder in a river.

They fought in the doorway, and the city shook. Two beings the gods had built to the same specification met at last, and the epic gives them the honest physics of a title match: they grappled through the square, shattered the doorposts, made the walls quake — until Gilgamesh, with one knee planted, finally threw Enkidu, and the wrestling stopped, and something better happened. Enkidu, pinned, spoke the first words anyone had ever said to Gilgamesh as an equal: your mother bore a matchless king. And Gilgamesh, who had never lost so much as a step to anyone, lifted the wild man up. They kissed each other, the text says, and formed a friendship. The gods’ prescription had worked on contact: the storm of his heart had found something its own size, and Uruk’s daughters slept safe from that night — not because the king was defeated, but because he was, at last, occupied.

Occupied — and soon restless. Peace, to two beings built for contest, was a diet; and Gilgamesh proposed the adventure that fills the epic’s middle: the Cedar Forest, at the edge of the world, where the timber of the gods grows — guarded by Humbaba the Terrible, whose voice is the deluge, whose speech is fire, whose breath is death, appointed by the god Enlil himself to terrify humankind away. Enkidu, who had run the steppe and knew exactly what Humbaba was, begged him not to go. The elders of Uruk begged him not to go. And the reason Gilgamesh gave for going is the engine of everything he does before and after — the first appearance of the fear that will own the second half of the epic, wearing its youthful disguise of glory:

“Who can climb to heaven, my friend? Only the gods live forever with the sun. As for man, his days are numbered; all he ever does is wind. You fear death now — where is the strength of your heart? If I fall, I shall have made my name: Gilgamesh, who joined battle with Humbaba the Terrible.

They went, they fought the guardian in his own forest — and when Humbaba was down, pleading for his life in words the poem lets be genuinely pitiable, offering to serve Gilgamesh and cut his timber for him forever, it was Enkidu, the child of the wild, who insisted on the kill: finish it before Enlil finds out. They finished it, felled the tallest cedars, and rode the timber home down the Euphrates like a raft of trophies. It was glorious, and it was overdraft. Two beings had just killed a warden the gods themselves had posted — and heaven, which had built the second of them precisely to restrain the first, began to reconsider its arithmetic.

Gilgamesh came home from the Cedar Forest, washed the war from his hair, and put on his crown — and Ishtar, goddess of love and of war, queen of Uruk’s own great temple, looked at him and wanted him. Her proposal is magnificent and entirely royal: be my bridegroom, and I will give you a chariot of lapis and gold, kings kneeling, your goats bearing triples. And Gilgamesh answered with the most reckless speech in Mesopotamian literature — a suitor’s catalog, except it is a catalog of her previous suitors, recited to her face. Which bridegroom of yours, he asks, ever kept his shape? Tammuz, the lover of her youth — for him she ordained weeping year on year. The shepherd — she struck him and turned him into a wolf, torn by his own dogs. The gardener Ishullanu, who brought her dates — a frog in the reeds (readers of this archive have met this goddess before, under her older name, sentencing another consort who displeased her: Inanna, fastening the eye of death on Dumuzi).

“You are a brazier that goes out in the cold; a back door that keeps out neither wind nor storm; a waterskin that soaks its carrier; a shoe that bites its owner’s foot. Which of your lovers lasted forever? Come, I will tell you the tale of them.

Ishtar went up to heaven incandescent, and demanded from her father Anu the Bull of Heaven — the constellation itself, drought on four legs — threatening, if refused, to smash the gates of the underworld and let the dead up to eat the living. She got the Bull. It came down on Uruk snorting pits into the earth: a hundred men fell into the first crack, two hundred into the second. And the two friends did the thing the whole city had watched them train for since the wedding-house door: Enkidu seized the Bull by the tail, Gilgamesh put the sword in behind its horns, and the drought died in the dust of the great square.

And then they went too far, in the way only the beloved of the gods can. Ishtar stood on the wall cursing, and Enkidu — Enkidu the once-wild, drunk on the day — tore off the Bull’s haunch and flung it in her face, with words to match. The city feasted; the two heroes paraded; Gilgamesh asked the crowd, rhetorically, who is the most glorious of men? It was the peak of both their lives, and the epic lets it blaze for exactly the length of the feast. That night, Enkidu dreamed. In the dream, the great gods were in council — Anu, Enlil, Ea, Shamash — and the agenda had one item: these two have slain Humbaba and slain the Bull of Heaven. Therefore one of them must die.

The verdict fell on Enkidu — the made one, the junior, the one whose death would punish the king more than the king’s own. He took twelve days to die, of nothing a sword could reach: fever, wasting, the slow bureaucratic sickness of a sentence being executed. And the epic spends the days unforgettably. Enkidu curses the door he made from the tallest cedar — a door, having heard him, that will outlast him. He curses the hunter, and curses Shamhat with a lifetime of gutter misfortune — take away the taming, and he would still be running with the gazelles, and none of this would ever have touched him. And the sun god Shamash answers from heaven with gentle, devastating accounting: who gave you bread fit for a god, beer fit for a king, a great friend, and Gilgamesh himself to mourn you? And Enkidu, hearing it, withdraws the curse and blesses her — the wild man’s last act of understanding: that the life which killed him had been worth the trade.

“My friend, whom I loved so dear, who went with me through every danger — the fate of mankind has overtaken him. Six days and seven nights I wept over him; I would not give him up for burial, until a worm fell out of his nose.

Read that confession again, because there is nothing else like it in ancient literature. The king of Uruk sat by the corpse of his friend for a week, refusing burial, waiting for him to get up — until the body itself overruled him, with the smallest and most final of witnesses. That worm is the pivot of the entire epic. Before it, death was a word Gilgamesh used in speeches about glory. After it, death was a fact with a smell in his own throne room, and it applied — this was the discovery that broke him — to Gilgamesh too. He tore off his royal robes, put on the skin of a lion, and walked out of his city, out of his kingship, out of the entire map: not to mourn, and not to die. To find the one man in history who was exempt, and ask him how.

The journey out of the world is told like a fever. Gilgamesh, gaunt, wind-bitten, wrapped in lion skin, kills lions in the passes and eats them; reaches the mountains of Mashu where the sun goes in at night; talks his way past the scorpion-people who guard the tunnel; and runs the sun’s own road under the mountains — twelve leagues of absolute darkness, racing the sunrise that would incinerate him — bursting out at the far end into the garden of the gods, where the trees carry carnelian for fruit and lapis for leaves. He has left geography. Everyone he meets from here on says the same first words to him: Why are your cheeks so hollow, your face so wasted, why is there grief in your heart? — and he gives back, every time, the same tolling answer: my friend Enkidu died. Shall I not die too, and lie down like him, and never rise, through all eternity?

At the edge of the sea that surrounds the world there is a tavern, and in the tavern there is Siduri, the divine alewife — and in the older version of the epic she gives Gilgamesh the most famous advice in Babylonian literature, the philosophy of every sensible civilization compressed into a toast:

“Gilgamesh, where are you running? The life you seek you will never find. When the gods made mankind, they set death aside for mankind, and kept life for themselves. Fill your belly; make merry day and night; let your clothes be clean, your head washed; look at the child who holds your hand, and let your wife delight in your embrace — for this too is the lot of man.

It is true, it is kind, and it is wasted: the man who would not give up a corpse to burial is not going to give up the quest to a beer. Siduri, seeing it, does the kind thing and gives him directions instead — to Urshanabi, ferryman of Utnapishtim, the one pilot who crosses the Waters of Death, the lethal moat around the island of the only immortal man. Gilgamesh, being Gilgamesh, opens negotiations by smashing the ferry’s sacred tackle, the Stone Ones, in a rage — thereby destroying the only safe means of crossing, and having to cut three hundred punting-poles to replace what he broke, each pole used once and dropped, so that no drop of the deadly water touches his hand. Even his self-sabotage he out-rows. And on the far shore, an old man is watching the boat come in, counting the strokes, already knowing who this must be.

Utnapishtim the Faraway — the man the gods made deathless — turns out to be the least mysterious being in the epic: an old man on a beach who tells the truth. Immortality, he tells Gilgamesh, was not won; it was awarded, once, under circumstances that cannot recur. And he tells the story — tablet XI, the most famous cuneiform text in the world, the one whose excavation made a Victorian assistant at the British Museum reportedly leap from his desk and begin to undress: the story of the Flood, told by its survivor, a thousand years and more before Genesis wrote it down with the names changed. The gods resolved to drown the world; Ea, god of wisdom, leaked the warning through a reed wall — wall, listen! — and Utnapishtim built the boat, sealed it with pitch, and loaded his family and the seed of every living thing.

“Six days and seven nights the wind blew, and the deluge flattened the land. Even the gods were terrified of it, and fled up to the heaven of Anu, and cowered like dogs against the wall. And Ishtar cried out like a woman in labor: how could I have spoken evil in the assembly, and ordered the destruction of my own people?

When the waters stilled, the boat grounded on a mountaintop, and Utnapishtim sent out a dove, which came back; a swallow, which came back; a raven, which did not. He poured a libation on the peak — and the gods, starved a week of sacrifices, gathered like flies over the sweet smoke, the text says, in mythology’s least flattering image of the divine. Enlil, who had ordered the Flood, raged that anyone had survived, was shamed down by Ea — punish sin with sin, not the world with a deluge — and then, in the strange grace of the defeated bureaucrat, blessed the survivor and his wife with the life of the gods, and settled them at the mouth of the rivers, forever. That, says Utnapishtim, is the entire secret: be the last man alive at the one apocalypse the gods regret. Then he sets his guest the small test that ends the quest. You seek life eternal? Very well: stay awake for six days and seven nights. And Gilgamesh — mighty Gilgamesh, hero of the longest waking vigil in literature — sits down on the sand, and sleep breathes over him like a fog, instantly.

He sleeps seven nights, and — foreseeing the hero’s denial — Utnapishtim’s wife bakes a loaf each day and sets it by his head, so that when Gilgamesh wakes swearing he had barely dozed, the evidence is lined up beside him in seven states of staleness: the first loaf dried out, the last still warm. No monster in the epic defeats Gilgamesh; a row of bread does. The man who cannot hold off sleep — death’s nightly rehearsal — for one week has his answer about holding off death forever, and it is an answer baked, dated, and inarguable.

Beaten, Gilgamesh is given his boat home — and then, at the last moment, a consolation. Utnapishtim’s wife intercedes: this man wore himself to the bone to reach you; send him home with something. And the old man reveals one more secret: a plant that grows at the bottom of the freshwater deep, thorned like a rose, whose name is The-Old-Man-Grows-Young — not immortality, but renewal; not exemption, but a second youth. Gilgamesh ties stones to his feet, sinks into the abyss, and tears it up, thorns and all, bleeding and jubilant. And he does something that is easy to miss and impossible, once seen, to forget: he does not eat it. He plans to carry it home to Uruk and test it on an elder first — the tyrant of tablet I, who took whatever he wanted on sight, now holding the most valuable object in the world and budgeting it for his city.

“Gilgamesh saw a pool whose water was cool, and went down and bathed in the water. A snake smelled the fragrance of the plant; it came up silently, and carried the plant away; and as it turned, it sloughed its skin.

On the road home he stops at a cool pool to bathe — a moment of ordinary human comfort, the first the epic has allowed him since Enkidu died — and while he is in the water, a snake takes the plant and sheds its skin as it goes: renewal, delivered to the wrong species by a margin of ten feet, which is why snakes grow young forever and men do not. Gilgamesh sits down and weeps the epic’s last tears: For whom have my arms labored? For whom has my heart’s blood dried? I brought no blessing back for myself — I did a favor for a reptile. There is no rage left, and no quest after this; there is nowhere further than the edge of the world, and he has been there, and the score is final.

And then the ending, which is one of the great structural strokes in all literature. Gilgamesh comes home to Uruk with the ferryman Urshanabi — exiled now, his own crossing done — and says to him, word for word, the lines the epic opened with: Go up on the wall of Uruk and walk its length. Inspect the foundation, examine the brickwork: is it not burnt brick, and good? Did not the seven sages lay its cornerstone? The poem is a ring; the end is the beginning, because the traveler has come back to where he started and can finally see it. This is the epic’s whole answer to death, and it is the oldest answer on record: the wall. The city. The well-laid brick that will hold other people’s lives long after yours; the tablet-box; the story itself, which has now outlived its king by four thousand years and is, at this moment, still working. He found the immortality after all. You are holding it.