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Analysis
On the one hand, I don't want to fall into the trap of comparing Gilgamesh to Homer's epic poems, since the contexts of their creations are both geographically and temporally distinct. On the other hand, both provide some of the earliest explorations of the human experience, and thus seem ripe for comparison. I will simply say that I prefer the richness of Homer, but there is certainly something attractive about the raw emotions and experiences in the Gilgamesh epic.
Gilgamesh gets right at the heart of the human experience in its most basic terms: love, fear, power, and friendship. Almost right from the start, the Epic begins to explore the nature of human civilization, and the benefits and costs of moving from a more natural state of living to the sophisticated city life of ancient Mesopotamia. Gilgamesh takes full advantage of his position of power in Uruk, lording it over his subjects. Another powerful dynamic in the city is religion, the only potential power capable of addressing the people's woes. Of course, the gods only react when they get tired of hearing the whining from below. Their solution is to match might with might, through the creation of Gilgamesh's equal: Enkidu. Of course, Gilgamesh's first effort to deal with the threat is to turn to religion as well, in the form of a temple prostitute. She it is who is able to tame and civilize the wild Enkidu. All of this should remind us of the constant battle between wild nature and the cultivated (read: agricultural) city inherent in the earliest civilizations.
The social nature of the human experience is also heavily emphasized, particularly through the friendship of Gilgamesh and Enkidu. Together they achieve great feats of wonder, just as ancient kings organized their people in the construction of great buildings and public works. We should remember that the infamous Tower of Babel was built not too far from Uruk. In fact, like the builders of the Tower of Babel, the team of Gilgamesh and Enkidu become a threat to the gods themselves when they kill the Bull of Heaven, and thus Gilgamesh's world must be thrown into confusion. The lamentations of Gilgamesh for his one true friend in the world of men are powerful and emotional - stirring up feelings that all humans must experience at some time in their life, that of loss and loneliness.
The death of Enkidu spurs the famous quest of Gilgamesh for immortality. This quest becomes a contemplation on the nature of mortality. As we can also learn from Homer's Iliad, what truly distinguishes men from the gods is their mortality. But where Homer shows us that the gods, in all their immortality, are missing something (and know it), here human mortality is portrayed with a typically Mesoptamian pessismism. Gilgamesh will die; there is nothing he can do about it (it is his, as for all men, destiny, despite attempts to thwart it); that is why the gods are to be envied.
The Epic of Gilgamesh, therefore, becomes the perfect segway between the earlier Mesopotamian poems, which focused almost solely on the exploits of the gods, and the earliest Greek poems, which will move us further and further into a truly human perspective, which makes this ancient literature so meaningulf for us, even 3000 years later.
