Serpents

After Utnapishitim told Gilgamesh about the flood, his disappointment was clearly obvious because the flood was not going to repeat itself, and therefore he would never gain immortality. However, he then found the magical plant at the bottom of the sea, but later on lost it to a serpent. Once again, I found a connection to the Bible. Because Gilgamesh lost the plant he lost immortality, just as Adam and Eve lost the Garden of Eden to a snake. This time the serpent tempted Eve into taking a bite of the Forbidden Fruit, and so God forced them into exile. I wanted to make reference to how the serpent is often a symbol of evil, not only in classic texts. For example, in Harry Potter Lord Voldemort owns a snake, and the symbol of Slytherin is also a snake. Both of these are evil, making the snake a representation of evil in this famous novel. Another example is the Jungle Book. The evil animal is the snake, and all he wants to do is kill Mowgli. My last example is one that is not a very known movie, called Ella Enchanted. Here, the snake is owned by an evil man, but the snake is also bad itself. All if wants to do is kill the prince in order to gain the crown, and he comes very close to it. As you can see, the snake is very often the symbol for bad, in fact, I believe that it is the most used animal for this purpose. My only question is, what did the snake do to us that caused such hatred towards them?