The Epic of Gilgamesh: Humanity's First Great Story
HISTORY 360
M. Muñoz
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153
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About this ebook
Four thousand years ago, a scribe pressed reed into clay and wrote the oldest great story in human history. Its hero is Gilgamesh, king of the city of Uruk, two-thirds god and one-third man, a ruler of terrifying power and unresolved grief. When his beloved companion Enkidu dies, Gilgamesh does what no man before him has ever done: he refuses to accept mortality and sets out to find the secret of eternal life. This book tells that story and the story behind it. Readers discover how the Epic of Gilgamesh evolved from ancient Sumerian oral traditions into a polished literary masterpiece, how it was lost for two thousand years and rediscovered in 1872 in the ruins of Nineveh, and how its flood narrative shook Victorian England by predating the biblical account of Noah. They follow Gilgamesh through the Cedar Forest, across the Waters of Death, and to the ends of the earth, watching a tyrant transformed by loss into a man who finally understands what it means to be human. They encounter Enkidu, the wild man whose death breaks the hero open, and Siduri, the tavern-keeper at the edge of the world, who offers the oldest recorded philosophy of how to live. And they find, in this ancient text, questions that have never been answered and may never be: What do we do with the knowledge that we will die? What endures after we are gone? What, finally, is a life for?
Four thousand years ago, a scribe pressed reed into clay and wrote the oldest great story in human history. Its hero is Gilgamesh, king of the city of Uruk, two-thirds god and one-third man, a ruler of terrifying power and unresolved grief. When his beloved companion Enkidu dies, Gilgamesh does w...
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