It’s not impossible, but direct influence is vanishingly unlikely.
Not impossible: yes, Sumerian was long dead, and so were the Sumerian Bilgames poems. But the most prestigious story of Gilgamesh is the Standard Version of the Gilgamesh epic, composed by Sîn-liqe-unnini sometime around the 11th century BCE in Akkadian. That’s the one that survives in dozens of fragmentary copies and which you’ll see published in modern editions under the title ‘the epic of Gilgamesh’.
Somewhere north of 30 fragmentary copies of the Standard Version were found at the library of Ashurbanipal, which was burned in 612 BCE, and the poem continued to be in circulation as late as the 1st century BCE. So in principle it’s not impossible that there was some influence.
Vanishingly unlikely: The scholar that’s done the most work in trying to interpret the Homeric epics against the background of ancient Near Eastern literature — I emphasise interpret, that is, literary interpretation rather than constructing a historical causal chain — is Bruce Louden in his books The Iliad. Structure, myth, and meaning (2006) and Homer’s Odyssey and the Near East (2011). Louden thinks that reading the Homeric epics benefits especially from thinking about Ugaritic literature in particular, Hebrew literature secondarily, and Mesopotamian literature (such as Gilgamesh) as a more distant background.
Louden draws on Gilgamesh principally for the themes of a hero winning great fame and dying, and the thematic importance of funerary memorials; divine councils discussing the fates of heroes and cities; a private relationship between a hero and a mentor-god; and a god’s divine wrath against a specific mortal. At one point he suggests that his ‘default position’ on parallels is that the Greeks and Israelites each adapted literary motifs from the literature of another culture, probably Phoenician/Ugaritic (HONE 121).
But I imagine it’s already clear from that quick summary that Louden’s work isn’t a study of literary influence, but more often boils down a hide-and-seek game of literary parallels. It often feels more like a TVTropes page than a historical study. To some extent a similar charge may be levelled against M. L. West’s The east face of Helicon (1997), though West is enormously more learned and much better at drawing out historical links where they are available.
The best available study of historical influence on early Greek poetry from eastern parts is Mary Bachvarova’s From Hittite to Homer. The Anatolian background of ancient Greek epic (2016). Bachvarova’s work is by far the best at drawing historical causal chains between Homer and Bronze Age Asian literature. But notice her title. The culture that she identifies as having direct influence on Greek poetry and mythology is that of the Hittites — not Ugarit, and definitely not Assyria or Babylon.
Here’s what Bachvarova says about the indirect influence of the Gilgamesh tradition — not the Standard Version specifically — on the Homeric tradition. Page 298:
We now can briefly outline the layers of formative influence from Near Eastern myth on the Odyssey … The story of a wandering hero who encounters monsters on the edge of the world, proves himself, and returns from the world of the dead, seems very old, and many of the elements shared between the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Odyssey could have been in the Greek tradition long before any influence from Gilgamesh specifically. Some of the motifs that had their origin in Sargonic or Gilgamesh myths could have come directly across the Mediterranean from Syro-Anatolia, via the same route and for the same reasons that trade connections with Cyprus were cultivated by Greek warrior-traders. And, the Greeks themselves used the stories to provide a mythological background to their journeys westwards, to areas wild and unexplored, in the opposite direction of the ‘civilized’ eastern centers of Neo-Hittite, Cypriot, and eventually Neo-Assyrian power.
The Odyssey may have originally addressed the values of the heroic trader, lauded as far back as The Valorous Sun and driving the interest in Sargonic legend in the Old Assyrian period, but as the values of the Greek aristocratic class changed and trade was viewed more negatively, the role of the hero would have lost its trader aspects. In addition, the wandering hero was given the departure point of Troy in order to link his story to the master narrative that subsumed all other legends.
Elsewhere (p. 454) she suggests that parallels between Achilleus and Gilgamesh could have developed in the context of Thessalian contact with the Near East via trade routes going through Cyprus, and therefore belong to a supposed ‘Aeolic phase’ of the epic tradition. I find this much more doubtful, personally, since there are some powerful objections not only to the idea of an ‘Aeolic phase’ but also to the idea of a tradition of hexameter epic going back to the Bronze Age. These things might be real, but they can’t be taken as given.
The short answer is that for the most proximate influences on Homer from Near Eastern literature, the best place to look is (1) Hurro-Hittite-Luvian hymns and chants, (2) possible influence from Ugaritic poetry. These should be thought of as intermediaries between Gilgamesh and Homer. (So maybe Louden has a point after all.)
For my own part I’ll add a big catch. The catch is that, in early Greek poetry, Homer is not the first place to be looking for this kind of influence. Hesiod is.
The two main Hesiodic poems — the Theogony and the Works and days — show fairly clear signs of consciously trying to synthesise Greek traditions with Near Eastern structural and generic elements, such as the succession myth (Theogony) and Hittite/Ugaritic wisdom literature (Works and days). The succession myth, in particular, is a very striking intrusion of Ugaritic-Akkadian myth into the structure of Greek myth. In the case of the Works and days as an example of wisdom literature, we don’t need to posit something quite as direct: the conventions of Near Eastern wisdom literature are present in several other early Greek poems, suggesting that there was a vogue for that genre — we should be thinking of a vogue, rather than someone imitating a specific poem.
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