Gilgamesh: Understanding His-Story

In the story of Gilgamesh, individuals are not single human people, they are entire peoples. So when we read about a young man of a noble family, in a council and temple-run city who partners with an unwashed mountain man. Remember the mountain man named Enkidu is entire armies with amazing new weapons of bronze, never seen before; an army of cavalry numbers untold before, When Gilgamesh says 'I' he means all the people he controls.

When Gilgamesh and Enkidu say they fight the strange and horrible Humbaba, they are fighting all the people protecting their forests from invaders' axes. When Enkidu is made partially civilized by lying with a woman, that is all the women given to the barbarians to appease them in the country side, much like China did later with ancestors of the European Huns. The logic was always to hope human exchange would raise 'normal language' speaking children, and teach settled ways to the uncontrollable nomads in the hinterlands.