This version of the Epic of Gilgamesh is a work of fiction first and a representation of the historical text a far distant second. I have read several modern translations of several ancient versions of the story, and have tried to include as much from as many versions as I can. However, I have also freely modified the language, changed some minor events, and liberally added description and narrative. Do not think of this as a translation, because it is not, but rather think of it as just another story teller telling the same familiar story like so many before me.
Gilgamesh hails from the land that is now Iraq and was once called Mesopotamia, "The Land Between the Rivers". Here, in this fertile land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers is what people have referred to as the Cradle of Civilization. It was here, thousands of years ago, that villages and towns first became cities, that mankind first developer the technology of the written word. And it was here, around 2800 BCE, that a man named Gilgamesh ruled as king of the city of Uruk.
The Epic of Gilgamesh is the oldest piece of narrative literature we have discovered anywhere in the world. There are many older pieces of writing, but many of them are simply prayers to gods, dedications to kings, and bits of dry accounting. Gilgamesh is the oldest story. The most ancient fragmentary copies that have been found date back to around 2100 BCE. To the people of the ancient middle east and Mediterranean, it was once as well and widely known as the Old Testament. Even during the Roman empire the stories were still remembered, though garbled by time and distance.
However, eventually, the world forgot. That is, until a British archeologist working in the ruins of the Assyrian capital city of Ninivah found several clay tablets covered with the hatchmark cuneiform writing of ancient Mesopotamia and was astonished to recognize a story of a great flood which covered the world. In the early days of Western archeology, a lot of effort was focused on confirming the historicity of the christian bible. Thus, the discovery of this version of the flood myth dating to a thousand years before the oldest preserved hebrew writing, raced across the western public consciousness like electricity. Little attention was paid to the rest of the narrative at first, but eventually the flood myth was recognized as just the final section of the wondrous epic of Gilgamesh.
Many versions of the Gilgamesh story have been found in various stages of completion. Often only a few fragments are found at a time, but the most complete version comes from the ruins of the palace of the Assyrian King Ashurbanipal from around 700 BCE. These tablets were a great work of literary reconstruction even in their day, as they were compiled at the order of the king to synthesize the many versions of this already ancient story. The Assyrian scribes had drawn together Old Babylonian versions of the epic, which were in turn compiled from even older Sumerian stories of the great hero that were widely known, but not compiled into a single narrative arc.
Time changes all things and we can only partially reconstruct what these stories might have originally been to the Sumerians who first told them. Even the names are different; a Sumerian would have known Gilgamesh as Bilgamesh. The gods Ishtar, Shamash, and Aruru were Innana, Utu, and Ninhurshag. The fearsome giant Humbaba was pronounced Humwawa. In this version I have known the later Assyrian names as a few of them, like Ishtar and Gilgamesh, are still somewhat familiar to modern audiences. Also, to be frank, the name Humwawa does not sound fearsome to an english ear.
The epic of Gilgamesh is also special because it seems that Gilgamesh was a real person, a historical king and not just a legendary invention. While there is no direct evidence produced during his life, historical artifacts have been found referring to mundane events of the life of a son of his, Ur-lugal, as well as artifacts attesting the the truth of other kings who appear as minor contemporary figures in the Gilgamesh stories. This is in addition to the famous Sumerian Kings list, which lists Gilgamesh as one of the early post-diluvian kings who ruled for somewhat more reasonable time frames than the more mythical figures said to rule before the flood.