"The Epic of Gilgamesh"

My sudden enthusiasm about ancient epic sagas brought me here and it evaporated here at the door of Babylon - contrary to what I expected and assumed, this was the first time that I couldn't get my head around piece of literature and in fact understand more from encyclopedic essays about it than the piece itself. All those long explanations of what it is and what it (probably) meant were by far more revealing than poem itself - I kind of expected, OK this is going to be something really, really ancient and probably very different from anything we are used to but really, it ended up more like extremely distant echo from a wind, something from not just another time but another planet as well. Sure, I understand this was 2 100 BC and things were quite different back than, but really, what I got from this were just a fragments of sentences and unconnected pieces - rarely a whole thought, except something so ridiculous as "open thy hymen" whatever that could have been - I can just imagine people trying to translate these ancient stone tablets from a long dead languages and turning them all upside down, walking around the tables and discussing what the hell was happening there. So it is fascinating as attempt to understand literary work from completely another time, but confusing once you actually approach it because this is far from anything complete - at least translation that came my way - which was 1920. Yale University joint work by two professors. There is a very interesting essay & introduction about it and I read carefully anything I could find on Wikipedia (my Bible) but honestly, I got far more from those than from the piece itself, in fact, to be honest, since these are all translations of translations of various versions, I really wonder how anybody ever came to any conclusions about anything about this story because to me it looks like way too many pieces of the puzzle are missing and everything is just a guesswork. So I read this is about Gilgamesh and Enkidu, but in piece itself I don't get it. Its like not exactly catching a radio wave so you can hear just a part of speech and trying to decipher something really difficult. I didn't understand a thing here and felt disappointed with myself and expectations I had build around it. This is where we'll stop for a moment with ancient epics.