Case file · Folklore / legend
Enkidu, the first literary wild man
In the Epic of Gilgamesh, Enkidu is a hairy man created by the gods who lives among the animals on the steppe until he is tamed and becomes the friend of Gilgamesh, king of Uruk.
2,100 BCE · 31.32, 45.64 · status: legend
The account
Enkidu eats grass with the gazelles and frees animals from hunters' traps. After seven days with Shamhat, a temple woman, the animals flee from him and he learns human ways, then wrestles Gilgamesh and becomes his companion. Composed in Sumerian poems and the Akkadian epic of the 2nd millennium BC, he is the oldest literary wild man, an ancestor of the woodwose and, some argue, of modern hairy-hominid imagery.
The sceptical view
A literary figure exploring the line between nature and civilisation, not a report of a creature.