Recommended reading for anyone interested in knowing more about the work.
However, I do not like that it, like most other comments that provide only partial information about Gilgamesh, fails to mention some details that I consider culturally relevant.
For instance, it lists only 3 benefits of civilization with which the wild man is lured to leave his former life: professional women, eating bread & drinking beer.
I fact, the Gilgamesh epic lists 4 benefits of civilization, the 4th being the pleasure of being massaged with oil (apparently sesame oil is meant, presumably flavored).
In the antiquity, vegetable oil had only a minor role as food, its principal application was for massage, normally as perfumed oil. Massage with oil was a very widespread practice, even among the relatively poor.
The technologies of oil extraction, of milling flour, of making bread and of making beer by fermentation, were indeed major advantages of the settled people living on agriculture, in comparison with hunter-gatherers.
Most comments about Gilgamesh list only the first 3 benefits of civilization, because those are the most easy to understand for modern readers. Massage with oil is much less used today, so many modern readers do not realize that by the time of Gilgamesh (and also millennia later, e.g. in the Roman Empire, where it was still the main use of olive oil) it was considered a pleasure as important as eating and drinking.
Well, as a modern reader, I take 'massage oil' to be Opoids.
For example Pliny the Elder says this at the transition between book 14 (on vines and wine) and book 15 (on olive trees and olive oil):
"There are two liquids that are specially agreeable to the human body, wine inside and oil outside, both of them the most excellent of all the products of the tree class"
A rather similar description is given in Gilgamesh when comparing the pleasures of drinking beer and being massaged with oil, except that the plants that provided alcohol and oil are different, barley instead of grapevines and sesame instead of olive trees.
Probably because everyone smelled pretty bad most of the time, and skin diseases were everywhere. Oil was likely a relief.