Gilgamesh in the arts and popular culture

According to historian Wolfgang Röllig, the Epic of Gilgamesh addressed many basic concerns and important themes of human culture such as creation, death, friendship, enmity, pride, arrogance, humility, and failure.

[12] In his 1947 existentialist novel Die Stadt hinter dem Strom, the German novelist Hermann Kasack adapted elements of the epic into a metaphor for the aftermath of the destruction of World War II in Germany,[12] portraying the bombed-out city of Hamburg as resembling the frightening Underworld seen by Enkidu in his dream.

[12] In the United States, Charles Olson praised the epic in his poems and essays[12] and Gregory Corso believed that it contained ancient virtues capable of curing what he viewed as modern moral degeneracy.

[12] The 1966 postfigurative novel Gilgamesch by Guido Bachmann became a classic of German "queer literature"[12] and set a decades-long international literary trend of portraying Gilgamesh and Enkidu as homosexual lovers.

[16][12] The Great American Novel (1973) by Philip Roth features a character named "Gil Gamesh",[16] who is the star pitcher of a fictional 1930s baseball team called the "Patriot League".

[16] Gil Gamesh reappears late in the novel as one of Joseph Stalin's spies[16] and gives what American literary historian David Damrosch calls "an eerily casual description of his interrogation training in Soviet Russia.

[17] Hussein's first novel Zabibah and the King (2000) is an allegory for the Gulf War set in ancient Assyria that blends elements of the Epic of Gilgamesh and the One Thousand and One Nights.

[18] Like Gilgamesh, the king at the beginning of the novel is a brutal tyrant who misuses his power and oppresses his people,[19] but, through the aid of a commoner woman named Zabibah, he grows into a more just ruler.