The new epic 'bear witness to a wholesale revision of Gilgamesh material to form a connected story composed around the principal themes of kingship, fame, and the fear of death.' (2) This Old Babylonian (OB) account of Gilgamesh is the earliest, perhaps also the most immediately felt and compelling, version of the Akkadian Epic. About 1700 B.C.E., a Babylonian author created a unified Epic about the hero Gilgamesh. In the present essay, I shall discuss the changing emphases of three major versions of the Akkadian Epic of Gilgamesh. Thus in the final analysis, Gilgamesh must also come to terms with his own nature and learn to die, for he is both a man and a god, and as both he will experience loss and will die. But the work emphasizes the theme of death and explores the realization that in spite of even the greatest achievements and powers, a human is nonetheless powerless against death. He must find ways to express his tremendous personal energy but still act in a manner that accords with the limits and responsibilities imposed upon him by his society and universe. The story draws together the many strands that make up the identity of Gilgamesh: man, hero, king, god. It talks about the powerful human drive to achieve, the value of friendship, the experience of loss, the inevitability of death. Most of all, the work grapples with issues of an existential nature. The Epic explores many issues it surely provides a Mesopotamian formulation of human predicaments and options. It is a work of adventure, but it is no less a meditation on some fundamental issues of human existence. THE EPIC OF GILGAMESH (1) combines the power and tragedy of the Iliad with the wanderings and marvels of the Odyssey. We will notice that in the Epic there is a constant conflict between the heroic values that the warrior-hero Gilgamesh represents and those other existential values that defined Mesopotamian culture and that appear in the Epic in the form of Gilgamesh's several non-heroic identities: in the Old Babylonian version, the conflict is that of hero versus man in the eleven-tablet version that of hero versus king and in the twelve-tablet version that of hero versus god. The focus is on the underlying conflict or conflicts that define and impart power to the work, that is, the conflict between the extraordinary and the normal. This essay traces the history of the several major versions (Old Babylonian, eleven-tablet, and twelve-tablet) of the Akkadian Epic of Gilgamesh and examines the development of meaning from one version to the next.

Gilgamesh tavern keeper