Gilgamesh is an epic poem of unparalleled antiquity, which is the first great heroic narrative of world literature. The history of the text is long and complex. It predates Homer's more famous epic poems by at least eight centuries. The evolution of this epic spans over a period of nearly a thousand years. Tablets containing portions of it have been found at various sites throughout the Middle East and in all of the languages written in cuneiform characters, wedged-shaped characters incised in clay or stone. For some unknown reasons, the literature of the cuneiform languages was not translated into the new alphabets that replaced them (Hebrew, Greek, and Roman). However, some portions of this once famous work survived as scattered and anonymous fragments and became a kind of invisible substratum.

The Standard Version of Gilgamesh was discovered in the city of Nineveh amid the ruins of the great royal library of Assurbanipal, the last great king of the Assyrian empire (668-627 BC) in the 1800s. The Standard Version of Gilgamesh is accredited to a priest-exorcist named Sin-leqi-unninni. The history of the epic itself begins sometime around 1600 BC. He assembled free translations of the oral versions of some of the tales into a connected narrative. This new work was not only a simple sequence of tales linked by the character Gilgamesh, but also a conscious selection and recasting of the Sumerian materials into a new form. It's important to note that some Gilgamesh tales were ignored, while elements from stories not associated with him in the Sumerian accounts were incorporated. The text was essentially stabilized by the time of Assurbanipal.

The Standard Version, which was written on twelve hardened clay tablets in Akkadian, a Semitic language like Hebrew and Arabic (one of the prinicipal languages of Babylonia and Assyria), was also the first discovered. The first eleven tablets, which are poorly preserved at a number of points, make up the primary adventures of Gilgamesh. In places, especially the adventure in the Cedar Forest, the translation relies heavily on the earlier, Old Babylonian version and fragments from a number of other versions. The twelfth tablet is usually presented as an appendix to the story because it tells of another story of Gilgamesh, "Gilgamesh and the Underworld," and it is unclear how it should be incorporated into the story of the other eleven tablets.

• Enkidu- foil or counterweight to Gilgamesh, human/wild animal

• Shamash (Utu)- the sun god, husband & brother of Ishtar, judge

• Ishtar (Inanna)- goddess of love, fertility, and war, queen of heaven
• Enlil- lord of air
• Anu- forefather of the gods & ruler of the heaven beyond the