How long does it take to read Gilgamesh?
Gilgamesh by Stephen Mitchell takes about 5 hours 34 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 5 hours 34 minutes
A weekend read
First published 2004. 304 pages, about 83,600 words.
12 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 9 hours 17 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 5 hours 34 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 3 hours 29 minutes |
The page count is the median across 11 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
"Gilgamesh dates from as early as 1700 BCE - a thousand years before the Iliad. Lost for almost two millennia, the eleven clay tablets on which the epic was inscribed were discovered in 1853 in the ruins of Nineveh, and the text was not deciphered and fully translated until the end of the century." "The epic is the story of literature's first hero - the king of Uruk in what is present-day Iraq - and his journey of self-discovery. Along the way, Gilgamesh discovers that friendship can bring peace to a whole city, that a preemptive attack on a monster can have dire consequences, and that wisdom can be found only when the quest for it is abandoned."--BOOK JACKET.
Subjects: Gilgamesh, Epic poetry, Poetry (poetic works by one author), Epic poetry, Assyro-Babylonian, Legends, Folklore
