Legendary king of Uruk on the banks of the Euphrates, who is said to have lived around 2700 BC. The name means roughly "the ancestor (was) a prince" and is the short form of a longer name. A longer name is attested as Pagbilgameš-Utu-pada in the archaic texts of Ur. In a list of gods he is named as a god and the construction of the wall of Uruk is attributed to him (but also to another ruler). However, it cannot be completely ruled out that this was merely a literary figure. The city of Uruk (mentioned in the Old Testament of the Bible as Erek) was the centre of Sumerian culture in the 3rd millennium BC (today the ruined site of Warka in southern Iraq). At that time, the Sumerians ruled a large part of Mesopotamia. They were organised into city states and were the forerunners of the later empires of Assyria and Babylonia. Gilgamesh is the central hero of numerous Hittite, Sumerian and Akkadian poems.
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