An Old Babylonian Version of the Gilgamesh Epic

Four thousand years before Homer, an unknown scribe pressed wet clay into tablets and captured something that would outlive every civilization that followed. This is the oldest epic humanity has ever found, and it asks the same questions we still ask tonight: Why must we die? Can love defeat death? Morris Jastrow's landmark translation brings us the Babylonian version, discovered in the ruins of ancient libraries and painstakingly reconstructed from fragments. We follow Gilgamesh, the tyrannical king of Uruk, as he is tempered by friendship with the wild man Enkidu, humbled by monsters, and finally broken by the one enemy no hero can slay: mortality. The poem's power lies not in its battles, though they are vivid, but in its unbearable honesty about loss. When Enkidu dies, Gilgamesh does what all of us wish we could do: he refuses to accept it. He travels to the edge of the world seeking the one man who survived the great flood, hoping to learn the secret of eternal life. What he finds instead is something quieter and truer. This is essential reading for anyone who has ever grieved, or ever will.