The Epic of Gilgamesh: From Uruk to Dilmun

The epic begins here: Gilgamesh, "two-thirds god and one-third man", is king of Uruk and presses his people hard until the gods answer the people's cries. It ends here too. After all his wandering, Gilgamesh returns and the sight of the city's massive walls makes him praise them to the ferryman Urshanabi. The real Uruk, now the ruins of Warka, was a very early city, and its Eanna district holds the earliest known writing. Excavators even label one stretch the "Gilgameš" city wall, though the king himself is known from legend.

Gilgamesh and his companion march six days to the Cedar Forest, and each night Shamash sends Gilgamesh a dream. At the entrance he trembles, then Shamash tells him to go in because the guardian Humbaba wears only one of his usual seven coats of armor. Where the forest lay is unsettled. Older Sumerian poems send the hero east toward Iran, later Babylonian versions west to Lebanon, whose mountains were once shaded by thick cedar. The pin marks the Cedars of God as one candidate only.

Location precision: No ancient text names the forest; sources disagree between Iran and Lebanon, and the pin marks one Lebanese grove.

Near the world's edge, Gilgamesh finds Utnapishtim, who tells him the gods sent a great flood. Enki warned him to build a boat, and the storm raged six days and nights. In Mesopotamian legend Utnapishtim's home was Shuruppak, one of the cities before the flood. Archaeology adds a separate point: excavators in the 1930s reported a layer of flood deposits at the mound now called Tell Fara. That shows local flooding, not the legendary deluge.

Gilgamesh asks Utnapishtim how he won immortality. In the Sumerian tradition the gods took the flood hero to Dilmun, "the Land of the Living", to live forever. Dilmun was a real trading civilization, and its capital is usually placed at Qal'at al-Bahrain, where a Danish expedition under Geoffrey Bibby dug from 1954 to 1972. Not everyone agrees: one scholar proposed a tell in southern Iraq instead. The epic gives no map, so the identification stays open.

Location precision: The epic does not locate Dilmun; the pin marks the Bahrain fort, the common identification, while a southern Iraq site has also been proposed.

Visitor guidance: Qal'at al-Bahrain stands on the north coast of Bahrain Island, near the capital.

The epic's tablets lay for centuries in the ruins of Nineveh. In the early 1850s Hormuzd Rassam found a library in King Ashurbanipal's palace, a king who wrote to cities across Mesopotamia for copies of their texts. About 15,000 fragments came out of it, and the Epic of Gilgamesh was among them. No record was made of the exact finds, so the tablets were soon mixed up.

Location precision: The pin marks the ancient city; the excavators kept no record of where in the palaces each tablet lay.

Most of the Nineveh tablets went to England and now sit in the British Museum. The museum hired George Smith to study them, and in 1872 he read translated fragments to the Society of Biblical Archaeology, which put Gilgamesh back in the world after more than two thousand years. Even later, in 1998, a fragment carrying the epic's opening line, "He who saw all", turned up in the storeroom, more than a century after it was recovered.

Visitor guidance: The British Museum is in Bloomsbury; check which Mesopotamian objects are on display before you go.