The Epic of Gilgamesh
The oldest surviving great work of literature asks what to do about death.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 900 years
- Known to
- ± 200 years
- Era
- Bronze Age, Holocene
Assembled from older Sumerian poems into an Akkadian epic in the early second millennium BCE, Gilgamesh follows a king who loses his friend Enkidu, refuses to accept it, and travels to the edge of the world seeking immortality — which he fails to obtain. It includes a flood narrative closely paralleling the later Genesis account, a resemblance that caused a sensation when George Smith deciphered it in 1872. Its subject is mortality, and it is still readable as one.