The Epic of Gilgamesh

Four thousand years ago, in the ancient Mesopotamian city of Uruk, a king named Gilgamesh set out to discover whether there was any way for a human being to live forever. The story of that quest — inscribed in cuneiform on clay tablets, lost for two millennia, and rediscovered in the ruins of Nineveh in the nineteenth century — is the oldest surviving work of literature in the world. And it is still, four thousand years later, one of the most moving.

Gilgamesh loves his companion Enkidu with the total, unconditional love that only exists in the oldest stories. When Enkidu dies, Gilgamesh cannot accept it — and his grief drives him across the world in search of immortality. What he finds instead is something simpler and more difficult: the realisation that death is the condition of all human life, and that the work of living must be done in this world, among human beings, not in the pursuit of what lies beyond it.

Andrew George’s translation, based on the most recent cuneiform scholarship, is the definitive English text. The oldest story in the world — and still as immediate as this morning’s news. Published by Penguin Classics.