Long before Homer composed the Iliad, long before the Hebrew Bible was written, scribes in ancient Mesopotamia pressed cuneiform characters into wet clay to record the adventures of Gilgamesh, king of Uruk. The epic — pieced together from tablets found across Iraq, Turkey, and Syria — is the oldest substantial work of literature in human history, dating in its earliest forms to around 2100 BCE.
Gilgamesh is two-thirds divine and one-third mortal, a tyrant so powerful that the gods create Enkidu — a wild man raised among animals — to be his equal and rival. After an epic wrestling match, the two become inseparable friends and embark on adventures: slaying the demon Humbaba in the Cedar Forest, killing the Bull of Heaven sent by the goddess Ishtar, and defying the gods themselves.
When Enkidu dies as divine punishment, Gilgamesh is shattered. For the first time he confronts his own mortality and sets out on a desperate quest for eternal life. He crosses the Waters of Death to find Utnapishtim, the one human granted immortality by the gods — who tells him the story of a great flood (strikingly similar to the later biblical account of Noah). Utnapishtim reveals a plant at the bottom of the sea that restores youth. Gilgamesh retrieves it, only to have it stolen by a serpent while he sleeps.
He returns to Uruk empty-handed but transformed. Standing before the great walls of his city, he understands at last that immortality lies not in living forever but in what we build, what we write, and what we leave behind. It is a conclusion that humans have been reaching, and forgetting, and reaching again for four thousand years.
