The Epic of Gilgamesh is a ‘warrior/kingly’ class saga, complete with the solar motif of Gilgamesh the king living under the divine protection of the sun god Shamash (Sumerian ‘Utu’). Far from being the ideal ruler however, he abuses his station, is prone to overindulging in sentimentalism, and overturns the right order of things. Later in the story, the wise figure of Utnapishtim in simple terms judges his lot to be with that of the fool, the lowest class of human society, rather than king.

And so the gods create Enkidu from clay to be Gilgamesh’s equal and set him right.
Enkidu to me is an interesting figure. He’s a beastly man, straight from the earth, completely detached from society and entering it from without, later to be Gilgamesh’s friend, counsellor and servant. Not only does he achieve ‘reason and understanding’ through a ritual-coupling (not unlike the way Odin retrieved the Poetic Mead), interpret dreams, and through his death set Gilgamesh on his path to correct himself – but he’s also the character in other Gilgamesh stories who speaks from the land of the dead.

And so my eye sees him as the folkish element of tradition imbued with the otherwise lost divine wisdom straight from the gods, or as the wilderness recluse come back with a divine mission to guide a disordered state. At Enkidu’s death Gilgamesh precedes the later Achilles’ emotionalism. His existential crisis towards the reality of death leads him to now wish for immortality and a quest to achieve it, so he seeks the immortal wise man Utnapishtim.
His quest fails.

His continued misunderstanding of his place in the world and his actions bring to mind Arjuna’s despair, which Krishna promptly corrects.
Utnapishtim sets Gilgamesh and his idiot quest aright: to realize the futility of his previous life and worldview and to safeguard proper religious order and his people. Gilgamesh is given new clothing to symbolize his return to rightness and new state of being; “Let your clothes be clean!” to which the biblical “Let thy garments be always white!” can also say.

I feel that the conclusion to be taken from the Epic being “immortality through legacy” is less interesting than the themes mentioned here. That Gilgamesh became “He Who Saw the Deep”