Gilgamesh
Mesopotamian epic, regarded as the first great narrative work of world literature, whose most complete version —known as the 'Standard Babylonian version', composed in Akkadian around the twelfth century BCE and traditionally attributed to the scribe Sin-leqi-unninni— was reconstructed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from dozens of fragmentary cuneiform tablets found mainly in the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal at Nineveh, though earlier Sumerian versions attest to a process of oral and written composition and transmission spanning over a thousand years. The work narrates the adventures of Gilgamesh, semi-legendary king of the Sumerian city of Uruk, a ruler of superhuman strength and beauty but tyrannical towards his people, to whom the gods send Enkidu as a counterweight, a man created from clay who initially lives among the wild animals until he is civilised through sexual contact with a priestess and brought into the city, where he becomes Gilgamesh's great friend and companion in adventure after an initial fight between the two. Together they undertake heroic feats —slaying the monster Humbaba in the cedar forest and the Bull of Heaven sent by the goddess Ishtar in revenge for Gilgamesh's rejection of her— but Enkidu's sudden death as divine punishment for these deeds plunges Gilgamesh into acute existential despair at the certainty of his own mortality, driving him on a desperate quest for immortality that leads him to Utnapishtim, the sole human survivor of a universal flood sent by the gods, who narrates to him, in an episode notably parallel to the biblical flood story, his own tale of survival. Although he briefly obtains a plant that grants rejuvenation, Gilgamesh loses it to a serpent before he can bring it back to Uruk, and ultimately returns to his city, finally accepting the limits of mortal condition and finding a measure of consolation in the enduring legacy of his civilising works. The epic constitutes one of the earliest and most profound literary testimonies to universal human reflection on friendship, grief, mortality and the meaning of existence in the face of the inevitability of death.