![]() Suddenly interest surged, and over the last hundred years more and more fragments related to the great Sumerian king have been unearthed. The importance of the fragments wasn't realized until 1872, when translator George Smith realized he was working on an elaborate account of the Great Flood - but a decidedly non-Biblical one. Luckily, the first Gilgamesh tablets were discovered in the mid 19th century by Englishman Austen Henry Layard, whose bestselling accounts of his excavations of Nineveh and Nimrod are full of all the derring-do (and dated cultural views) you'd expect from a 19th century imperialist/adventurer. Its main topic is death, its main thesis is the inevitability of death, and it fittingly almost didn't survive into the contemporary world. Gilgamesh is the earliest surviving piece of "big" literature: that is, something more substantial than maxims, law codes, hymns or inscriptions. Enkidu, the friend I love, has turned to clay. ![]()
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