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Friendship & the Loss of a Companion

A king and a wild man become inseparable — and it is grief, when one dies, that teaches the other he too must die.

The Epic of Gilgamesh gives world literature one of its first great portraits of friendship. The gods create the wild man Enkidu to match the overbearing king Gilgamesh; after a wrestling-match they become inseparable companions, adventuring and fighting monsters together. When Enkidu sickens and dies as punishment from the gods, Gilgamesh's grief is overwhelming and transformative: it is the loss of his friend, not abstract fear, that forces him to confront his own mortality and sets him on his desperate search for eternal life. Love and loss, not conquest, are the engine of the epic's deepest reflection.