Enkidu

Enkidu is created in the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh at the request of the god Anu, formed by the goddess Aruru out of clay to be a rival strong enough to check the king Gilgamesh, whose demands on the people of Uruk have grown intolerable. He begins life outside human society entirely: covered in hair, running with the gazelles, eating grass, and freeing animals from hunters' traps, a wild man in the fullest sense rather than a beast or a monster. His transformation into a social being comes through the temple woman Shamhat, who is sent to find him at a watering hole; after their encounter the animals no longer accept him, and she teaches him food, drink, clothing, and speech before bringing him to the city.

In Uruk, Enkidu confronts Gilgamesh directly, blocking his way to a wedding-night custom the epic frames as an abuse of royal privilege, and the two wrestle to a standstill before becoming inseparable companions rather than enemies. Together they travel to the distant Cedar Forest and kill its guardian Humbaba despite the guardian's pleas for mercy, an act the poem treats as morally costly rather than simply heroic. When the goddess Ishtar, spurned by Gilgamesh, sends the Bull of Heaven against Uruk, the two kill it together, and Enkidu compounds the offense by hurling a piece of the bull at the goddess. The gods respond by decreeing that one of the pair must die for these acts, and the sentence falls on Enkidu, who sickens over an extended, dream-haunted decline described at length before he dies.

Enkidu's death is the hinge of the whole epic — it is what drives Gilgamesh to his search for immortality — and the surviving material treats him with unusual psychological detail for the period: he curses the huntsman and Shamhat for civilizing him, then, persuaded by the god Shamash, blesses them instead, a reversal that gives him an interior life most figures in the tradition lack. A separate, older Sumerian poem gives him a different fate, descending into the underworld to recover objects for Gilgamesh and becoming trapped there, later summoned as a spirit to describe the conditions of the dead; the two traditions do not fully agree on his nature or his end, and reference works treat the underworld episode as a distinct strand rather than a continuation of the main epic's story.

The paragraphs below are extrapolated; no source supports them.

Read as a personality, Enkidu comes across as someone who never stops missing the world he was taken from, even as he embraces the one he was brought into — the curse-then-blessing on his own civilizing suggests a figure capable of real ambivalence rather than simple gratitude. His willingness to challenge a king outright, then submit to friendship rather than rivalry, points to someone who values an equal more than a victory. The horror he shows at killing Humbaba, in a poem that otherwise celebrates the deed, suggests a conscience that outlasts his own wildness — of the two companions, he is the one who seems to know, and to regret, exactly what they have done.