No, the ‘Epic of Gilgamesh’ Is Not the Oldest Surviving Work of Literature

If you think you know one thing about the ancient Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, then, chances are, you probably think that the epic is the oldest surviving work of literature in the whole world. This claim pervades basically all non-academic discussion of the epic. I was taught it in my history and literature classes all throughout my K-12 education, it is endlessly repeated on the internet, and, whenever I happen to talk to someone about the Epic of Gilgamesh, it is usually one of the first claims to come up.

The truth, however, is that the standard Akkadian version of the Epic of Gilgamesh (which is what most people mean when they talk about the Epic of Gilgamesh) is not even close to being the oldest surviving work of literature. In fact, it’s not even the oldest surviving poem about Gilgamesh.

The development of Sumerian cuneiform writing

As I also discuss in this post I wrote in April 2022 about the history of the earliest attested deities, the Sumerian culture first began to emerge in southern Mesopotamia sometime around 4000 BCE or thereabouts. The earliest period of Sumerian history, known as the Uruk Period, is generally said to have lasted from around 4000 BCE until around 3100 BCE. Over the course of this period, Sumerian urban communities grew into the very first true cities anywhere on earth.

During the Late Uruk Period (lasted c. 3500 – c. 3100 BCE), the Sumerians developed proto-cuneiform symbols, which are the earliest known writing system ever developed anywhere on earth. Possibly the earliest surviving example of writing ever discovered is a limestone tablet from the city of Kish dating to around 3500 BCE that bears extremely archaic proto-cuneiform signs.

All the surviving texts in proto-cuneiform are administrative or functional documents. Works of genuine cuneiform literature do not start to appear until many centuries after the initial development of writing.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing a limestone tablet from the city of Kish dating to around 3500 BCE, bearing probably the earliest known example of proto-cuneiform signs, now held in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a proto-cuneiform tablet dating to between c. 3100 and c. 2900 BCE, recording the transfer of ownership of a piece of land

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing a tablet dating to between c. 3200 and c. 3000 BCE bearing proto-cuneiform signs recording the allocations of beer from a set of storerooms

The development of Egyptian hieroglyphic writing

Hot on the heels of Mesopotamian proto-cuneiform came Egyptian proto-hieroglyphs. The earliest known examples of proto-hieroglyphic symbols occur on a set of clay tokens of a Predynastic king of Upper Egypt named “Scorpion I” that were discovered at the site of Abydos in 1998. These tokens date to sometime roughly between c. 3400 and c. 3200 BCE or thereabouts—only a century or two after the earliest known examples of Mesopotamian proto-cuneiform.

Like proto-cuneiform, proto-hieroglyphs were originally only used for administrative and functional purposes, not literature. The Egyptians only began to use hieroglyphs to record works of literature many centuries later, after the writing system had become significantly more developed.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing the designs of the clay tokens of Scorpion I discovered at Abydos, bearing the earliest known examples of proto-hieroglyphic symbols, dating to between c. 3400 and c. 3200 BCE

The earliest surviving works of Sumerian literature

Returning to Mesopotamia, the Uruk Period is followed by the Jemdet Nasr Period (lasted c. 3100 – c. 2900 BCE), which is followed by the Early Dynastic Period (lasted c. 2900 – c. 2350 BCE). It is during the Early Dynastic Period that some of the very first authors composed the oldest surviving works of written literature in the Sumerian language.

One of these extremely ancient works is the Instructions of Šuruppak (ETCSL 5.6.1), a work of didactic wisdom literature composed in the voice of the wise old king Šuruppak, son of Ubara-Tutu, addressed to his son Ziusudra, giving him advice about how he should live. This work was composed sometime in the early-to-mid third millennium BCE. The oldest surviving manuscript of it comes from the site of Abu Salabikh in the Al-Qādisiyyah Governorate of Iraq and dates to around the twenty-sixth century BCE or thereabouts.

Another work of Early Dynastic Sumerian literature is the Kesh Temple Hymn (ETCSL 4.8.0.2), a hymn composed in the voice of Nisaba, a Sumerian goddess associated with writing and grain, that describes Enlil, the chief god of the Sumerian pantheon, selecting and praising the temple in the city of Kesh. As with the Instructions of Šuruppak, this work was composed sometime in the early-to-mid third millennium BCE and the oldest surviving manuscript fragments of it come from Abu Salabikh and date to around the twenty-sixth century BCE or thereabouts.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing a fragment of a clay tablet from the Sumerian city-state of Adab dating to around 2400 BCE or thereabouts, now held in the Oriental Institute Museum at the University of Chicago bearing a portion of the text of the Instructions of Šuruppak

The tomb inscription of Metjen

Moving back over to Egypt, possibly the oldest surviving work of literature in the Egyptian language is the tomb inscription of the high official Metjen, who began his career under Huni (possibly ruled c. 2600 – c. 2575 BCE), the final pharaoh of the Egyptian Third Dynasty, and died during the reign of Sneferu (possibly ruled c. 2575 – c. 2545 BCE), the first pharaoh of the Egyptian Fourth Dynasty.

Metjen’s tomb (LS 6), originally located at the site of Saqqara in the Giza Governorate of Egypt, bears a long inscription in the Egyptian language using the hieroglyphic writing system, which gives a highly detailed account of his life and career. This is the oldest currently known Egyptian tomb inscription that gives more than just a person’s name and titles.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing the detailed biographical inscription from the tomb of the Egyptian high official Metjen, who died during the reign of Pharaoh Sneferu, now held in the Neues Museum in Berlin

The Egyptian Pyramid Texts

Metjen may have been the first Egyptian that we know of to have a long inscription on the walls of his tomb, but he was certainly far from the last. In the centuries after his death and entombment, pharaohs and their wives began to get in on the action.

During the late Old Kingdom and early First Intermediate Period, pharaohs and their wives—beginning with Unas I (possibly ruled c. 2353 – c. 2323 BCE), the final pharaoh of the Egyptian Fifth Dynasty, and continuing through the Sixth Dynasty into the Eighth Dynasty—had funerary texts inscribed in the Egyptian language using the hieroglyphic writing system on the interior walls of the burial chambers of their pyramids.

These inscriptions, which modern scholars have dubbed the “Pyramid Texts,” consist mainly of spells intended to protect and aid the pharaoh and/or his wife in the afterlife. They are the oldest surviving corpus of ancient Egyptian funerary texts.

As I discuss in this blog post I wrote back in January 2020, these extensive funerary texts that are inscribed on the interior walls of Egyptian pyramids are just part of the evidence for how modern scholars know that the pyramids were built as tombs for the pharaohs—not as particle accelerators, alien power plants, devices to slow down time, space ports, or whatever other equally insane theories conspiracy theorists have come up with now.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing the interior of the burial chamber of the Pyramid of Unas I, the last pharaoh of the Egyptian Fifth Dynasty

ABOVE: Photograph showing the room before the burial chamber in the Pyramid of Unas I

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a wall covered in funerary inscriptions from the pyramid at Saqqara built by Teti, the first pharaoh of the Egyptian Sixth Dynasty

The poems of Enḫeduanna

Possibly the oldest surviving poems in any language that are attributed to a single named human author are the ones in the Sumerian language that are attributed to Enḫeduanna, the daughter of the Akkadian king Sargon (ruled c. 2334 – c. 2279 BCE) who served at her father’s appointment as the en-priestess of the moon-god Nanna in the Sumerian city of Ur.

According to Renate Marian van Dijk-Coombes in her chapter “The Use of Sumerian and Akkadian during the Akkadian Period: The Case of the “Elites,’” published in 2021 in the book Multilingualism in Ancient Contexts: Perspectives from Ancient Near Eastern and Christian Contexts (specifically on pages 133–136), at least six works in the Sumerian language—the Sumerian Temple Hymns, three lengthy hymns to the goddess Inanna, a balbale to the god Nanna, and one other fragmentary poem—are attributed to Enḫeduanna.

The oldest surviving manuscripts of Enḫeduanna’s poems date to the Third Dynasty of Ur (lasted c. 2112 – c. 2004 BCE) and some scholars have doubted that she really wrote them, but their reasons for doubting her authorship are questionable and most scholars whose works I have read seem to think there is compelling evidence that she really wrote all the poems attributed to her or, at the very least, the three long hymns to Inanna.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the “Disk of Enḫeduanna,” a bas-relief carving bearing a representation of Enḫeduanna, the ancient Sumerian priestess and poet

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing a tablet currently held in the Oriental Institute Museum at the University of Chicago bearing the text of the poem Inanna and Ebiḫ (ETCSL 1.3.2), also known as Goddess of the Fearsome Divine Powers, attributed to the priestess and poet Enḫeduanna, describing the goddess Inanna’s battle with the mountain Ebiḫ

The Royal Annals of the Old Kingdom

Other extremely early works of literature come from Egypt. For instance, the Royal Annals of the Old Kingdom is a stele most likely carved sometime in the mid-Fifth Dynasty that is inscribed with a text in Egyptian hieroglyphic writing that lists the pharaohs of the First Dynasty through the early Fifth Dynasty, along with some of the notable events of their reigns.

Seven fragments of the stele are currently known to survive, the most famous of which, the Palermo Stone, is currently held in the Antonino Salinas Regional Archeological Museum in Palermo, Italy.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing the Palermo Stone, one of seven extant fragments of the Royals Annals of the Old Kingdom of Egypt, a stele which dates to the Egyptian Fifth Dynasty

The Maxims of Ptahhotep

The Egyptian vizier Ptahhotep, who flourished in the twenty-fourth century BCE during the reign of Djedkare Isesi, the eighth and penultimate pharaoh of the Egyptian Fifth Dynasty, is traditionally credited as the author of The Maxims of Ptahhotep, a work of didactic wisdom literature in the Egyptian language.

The only complete surviving copy of The Maxims of Ptahhotep comes from the Prisse Papyrus (Egyptien 187), a papyrus manuscript written in the Egyptian language using an early archaic form of the hieratic script (i.e., a cursive form of hieroglyphs). This manuscript dates to the Egyptian Twelfth Dynasty (lasted c. 1991 – c. 1802 BCE) and is currently held in the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing the Prisse Papyrus 187, lines 75–123

The autobiography of Weni

Weni was a high official of the Egyptian Sixth Dynasty who lived in around the twenty-third century BCE during the reigns of Pharaoh Pepi I Meryre and his successor Pharaoh Merenre Nemtyemsaf I. He rose through the Egyptian military ranks to become the commander-in-chief and instituted a series of significant military reforms, which lasted for over a thousand years after his death.

Like Metjen before him, Weni had a highly detailed account of his life and career inscribed in Egyptian hieroglyphic writing on the inside of his tomb in the necropolis of Pepi I in Saqqara. One difference between Metjen and Weni, however, is that Weni built not one, but two, entirely separate tombs with almost identical versions of the same inscription inscribed in both of them.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing the autobiographical tomb inscription of Weni

The Coffin Texts

The Pyramid Texts, which I mentioned earlier, were originally only used for the pyramids of pharaohs and their wives, but, during the First Intermediate Period (lasted c. 2181 – c. 2055 BCE), starting around 2100 BCE or thereabouts, people from outside the royal family who could afford it began having various spells meant to protect and aid them in the afterlife inscribed on their coffins, tomb walls, canopic chests, tomb stelae, mummy masks, and various other funerary surfaces.

Roughly half of the spells in this corpus are clearly derived from the older Pyramid Texts. Nonetheless, this corpus also includes a significant amount of new spells and material not found in the Pyramid Texts. Modern scholars have dubbed these writings the “Coffin Texts.” They appear on Egyptian coffins and other funerary surfaces throughout the First Intermediate Period and the Middle Kingdom (lasted c. 2055 – c. 1650 BCE).

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing the coffin of Gua, an Egyptian man of the Twelfth Dynasty (lasted c. 1991 – c. 1802 BCE), found at Deir el-Bersha, now held in the British Museum, bearing some of the Coffin Texts painted on its interior

Mesopotamian literature of the Third Dynasty of Ur and the Isin-Larsa Period

Sometime around 2112 BCE or thereabouts, King Ur-Nammu of the Sumerian city-state of Ur founded the Third Dynasty of Ur (commonly referred to as “Ur III”). Some scholars have dubbed the period of this dynasty, which lasted for just over a hundred years, the “Sumerian Renaissance.” It was the last Sumerian dynasty to independently dominate Mesopotamia both culturally and politically.

During this period, authors writing in the Sumerian language composed some of the oldest surviving long narrative poems about mythical subjects, possibly including Inanna and Enki (ETCSL 1.3.1), Inanna’s Descent into the Underworld (ETCSL 1.4.1), Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta (ETCSL 1.8.2.3), and Enlil and Ninlil (ETCSL 1.2.1), but the exact dates of all these works are uncertain.

Five narrative poems about Gilgamesh in the Sumerian language that were most likely composed during the Third Dynasty of Ur have survived to the present day: Gilgamesh and Aga (ETCSL 1.8.1.1), Gilgamesh and Huwawa (ETCSL 1.8.1.5), Gilgamesh and the Bull of Heaven (ETCSL 1.8.1.2), Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the Netherworld (ETCSL 1.8.1.4), and The Death of Gilgamesh (ETCSL 1.8.1.3). All of these poems are relatively short compared to the later standard Akkadian Epic of Gilgamesh and each one describes one individual episode or adventure.

People during this period also composed works of erotic love poetry, such as Šu-Suen B (ETCSL 2.4.4.2) and Šu-Suen C (ETCSL 2.4.4.3), erotic poems that describe torrid sex between the goddess Inanna and Šu-Suen (ruled c. 2037 – c. 2028  BCE), the fourth and penultimate king of the Third Dynasty of Ur, mostly using vivid similes and metaphors. These particular poems were most likely composed and written down during Šu-Suen’s reign.

A series of Sumerian “debate poems,” such as the Debate between Hoe and Plow (ETCSL 5.3.1), the Debate between Sheep and Grain (ETCSL 5.3.2), the Debate between Winter and Summer (ETCSL 5.3.3), the Debate between Bird and Fish (ETCSL 5.3.5), the Debate between Silver and Copper (ETCSL 5.3.6), and the Debate between the Date Palm and the Tamarisk (ETCSL 5.3.7), may date to the period of the Third Dynasty of Ur or slightly later.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Sumerian cylinder seal impression depicting King Ur-Nammu, the founder of the Third Dynasty of Ur, seated on his throne

In around 2004 BCE or thereabouts, King Kindattu of the Shimashki Dynasty of Elam led the allied armies of Elam and Susa against Ur. They successfully sacked the city and captured Ibbi-Sin, the last king of the Third Dynasty. After the destruction of Ur, the cities of Isin and Larsa became the most prominent in southern Mesopotamia. As a result, the period following the sack of Ur by the Elamites is known as the Isin-Larsa Period.

During this period, people continued to write works of poetry in the Sumerian language. For instance, probably during this period, someone wrote a poem known as the Lament for Ur (ETCSL 2.2.2), which, as the title suggests, is a lament over the destruction of Ur by the Elamites.

People also continued to produce works of long narrative poetry. The scholar Barbara Böck argues in her chapter “Explaining the Emergence of Social Institutions in Ancient Mesopotamia: The Sumerian Myth Enki and the World Order” (published in the book Narrating the Beginnings, edited by Alberto Bernabé Pajares and Raquel Martín Hernández and published in 2021 by Springer VS, on pages 23–52) that a famous mythological poem Enki and the World Order (ETCSL 1.1.3) was most likely composed sometime in the first few decades of the Isin-Larsa Period. She seems to imply that another poem, Enlil and Sud (ETCSL 1.2.2), might date to this period as well. Both of these dates, however, are uncertain.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing a tablet dating to around 1800 BCE or thereabouts bearing the text of the Lament for Ur in Sumerian cuneiform, currently held in the Louvre Museum in Paris

Mesopotamian literature of the Old Babylonian Period

The Isin-Larsa Period came to an end when King Hammurabi (ruled c. 1792 – c. 1750 BCE) of the Old Babylonian Empire conquered the lands of Sumer and Akkad, ushering in an era of Babylonian dominance over the region.

The Sumerian language gradually died out as a living vernacular between c. 2000 and c. 1700 BCE, but, in much the same way that educated people in western Europe continued to use Classical Latin as a literary and liturgical language for millennia after it died out as a living vernacular, educated people of Mesopotamia continued to use Sumerian for literary and liturgical purposes.

In fact, the Old Babylonian scribal curriculum was entirely centered around the Sumerian language and a select canon of literature written in that language. Thousands upon thousands of tablets bearing texts in Sumerian survive from this period and most of the surviving works of Sumerian literature that probably date to the Third Dynasty of Ur and the Isin-Larsa Period survive only through Old Babylonian copies.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a limestone votive monument depicting King Hammurabi of the Old Babylonian Empire

The Old Babylonian Period also produced some of the earliest surviving works of literature in the Akkadian language. Andrew R. George notes in his introduction to the second edition of his translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh for Penguin Books (on page xxii) that copies of these early works of literature in Akkadian from school contexts are so rare relative to copies of Sumerian works from this period that they cannot have been part of the official prescribed scribal curriculum. Nonetheless, people wrote, read, and copied these works throughout the period.

The Akkadian-language literary output of this period includes a diverse array of works about religious rituals, astrology, divination, medicine, and mathematics. It also includes some works of epic poetry. One such work is the Atraḫasīs Epic, an epic poem about a global flood that was most likely composed in around the eighteenth century BCE or thereabouts. The Atraḫasīs Epic is generally agreed to be the source for the later flood narrative found in the standard Akkadian Epic of Gilgamesh and it bears many striking similarities to the flood narrative found in the Book of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible.

It was around this same time that someone writing in the Akkadian language composed the earliest known continuous epic about Gilgamesh, stitching together many different stories about the hero found in older Sumerian sources. This epic was known in antiquity by the title Šūtur eli šarrī, which means “Surpassing All Other Kings”—a title derived from the poem’s incipit (i.e., its first line). Modern scholars usually refer to it as the “Old Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh.” Sadly, the vast majority of this older, Old Babylonian version of the epic has not survived. Only a few fragments remain.

ABOVE: Ancient Mesopotamian terra-cotta relief plaque dating to between c. 2250 and c. 1900 BCE, depicting Gilgamesh slaying the Bull of Heaven

The Ṛgveda Saṃhitā

While all of this was going on, people from outside of West Asia and Egypt were beginning to produce some works of literature. Notably, from far outside Mesopotamia, the oldest religious text that has been in continuous use ever since it was first composed is the Ṛgveda Saṃhitā, which is a collection of sūktas, or hymns, in very archaic Vedic Sanskrit that are thought to have been originally composed between c. 1500 and c. 1200 BCE, making at least some of them most likely older than the standard Akkadian version of the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Even today, Hindus still revere the Ṛgveda Saṃhitā as the oldest part of the śruti (i.e., the body of ancient Sanskrit texts that are considered to hold religious authority) and they still use verses from it for important religious ceremonies, including some Hindu weddings.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing the text of the Ṛgveda 1.1.1 – 1.1.9 in the original Sanskrit in a northern manuscript in the Devanagari script dating to before the fourteenth century CE

Sîn-lēqi-unninni’s standard Akkadian Epic of Gilgamesh

The Babylonian scribe Sîn-lēqi-unninni most likely composed (or, perhaps more accurately, redacted) the standard Akkadian version of the Epic of Gilgamesh sometime between c. 1300 and c. 1000 BCE, relying heavily on older Sumerian and Old Babylonian poems about Gilgamesh.

Sîn-lēqi-unninni’s edition of the epic bears the Akkadian title Sha naqba īmuru, which means “He who saw the Deep” and comes from the incipit or first line of the poem. This version of the Gilgamesh epic became widely read throughout the ancient Near East for many centuries thereafter. It is the most complete surviving version of the epic, the version that is most frequently read in English, and the version that most people are referring to when they talk about the “Epic of Gilgamesh.”

The Neo-Assyrian king Ashurbanipal (lived 669 – 631 BCE) prided himself greatly on having received a scribal education and he amassed a vast collection of literary works in the Akkadian language inscribed on clay tablets in cuneiform for his royal library at Nineveh. This library was the largest ever to exist in the ancient Middle East before the Hellenistic Period. It contained over 30,000 clay tablets in total, including possibly as many as four complete copies of Sîn-lēqi-unninni’s version of the Epic of Gilgamesh.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of cuneiform tablets from the Library of Ashurbanipal on display in the British Museum in London

In 612 BCE, an alliance of Babylonians and Medes laid siege to the city of Nineveh for three months until it fell. The armies sacked and burned the entire city. Ironically, the same fire that destroyed Nineveh also baked all the clay tablets that were in Ashurbanipal’s library, thereby inadvertently preserving them.

The tablets of Sîn-lēqi-unninni’s standard Akkadian Epic of Gilgamesh from the Library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh are the oldest surviving manuscripts of this version of the epic, but modern Assyriologists have discovered and identified at least seventy-three manuscripts of the standard version so far. All of these manuscripts are damaged and fragmentary to some degree, but some are more fragmentary than others.

According to Andrew R. George, the latest surviving manuscript that modern scholars have so far identified dates to around 130 BCE or thereabouts and was copied by a man named Bel-ahne-uṣur, who worked as a temple astrologer in training in Babylon at a time when the Iranian Parthian Empire had recently conquered Mesopotamia from the Hellenistic Seleukid Empire, the Akkadian language was long dead as a living vernacular, and the majority of people in the region spoke either Aramaic or Koine Greek.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing the newly discovered Tablet V of the Epic of Gilgamesh held in the Sulaymaniyah Museum in Iraq, most likely dating to the Neo-Babylonian Period (lasted 626 –539 BCE) according to Farouk Al-Rawi and Andrew R. George

The forgetting of Gilgamesh in later antiquity

The scholar of ancient Mesopotamia Jeffrey H. Tigay in his book The Evolution of the Gilgamesh Epic, published in 2002 through Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers, documents the last surviving mentions of Gilgamesh in the ancient literature before the legend was finally completely forgotten.

The Book of Giants, an apocryphal Jewish text that was composed sometime around 200 BCE or thereabouts, mentions both Gilgamesh and the giant Humbaba. The work survives among the Dead Sea Scrolls and a later, very similar version of it was popular among Manichaeans in late antiquity.

The Roman orator Klaudios Ailianos (lived c. 175 – c. 235 CE), who wrote exclusively in Greek, retells a fascinating legend about Gilgamesh in his On the Nature of Animals 12.21 that is not attested in any ancient Mesopotamian source. He writes, as translated by A. F. Scholfield for the Loeb Classical Library (with some minor edits of my own):

“A love of man is another characteristic of animals. At any rate an Eagle fostered a baby. And I want to tell the whole story so that I may have evidence of my proposition. When Euechorsos was king of Babylon, the Chaldeans foretold that the son born of his daughter would wrest the kingdom from his grandfather. This made him afraid and (if I may be allowed the small jest) he played Akrisios to his daughter: he put the strictest of watches upon her.”

“For all that, since fate was cleverer than the king of Babylon, the girl became a mother, being pregnant by some obscure man. So the guards from fear of the King hurled the infant from the citadel, for that was where the aforesaid girl was imprisoned. Now an Eagle which saw with its piercing eye the child while still falling, before it was dashed to the earth, flew beneath it, flung its back under it, and conveyed it to some garden and set it down with the utmost care. But when the keeper of the place saw the pretty baby he fell in love with it and nursed it; and it was called Gilgamos and became king of Babylon.”

“If anyone regards this as a legend, I, after testing it to the best of my ability, concur in the verdict. I have heard however that Achaemenes the Persian, from whom the Persian aristocracy are descended, was nursed by an Eagle.”

The Syriac-language Christian theologian Theodore bar Konai, who flourished near the end of the eighth century CE or thereabouts, lists a king named “Gligmos” or “Gmigmos” as the last in a major royal lineage and a supposed contemporary of the Biblical patriarch Abraham.

Theodore bar Konai is the last ancient writer who seems to have been independently familiar with a version of the Gilgamesh legend. After him, Gilgamesh seems to have been completely forgotten, apart from the references to him preserved in Ailianos and Theodore, until the epic about him was rediscovered in the nineteenth century CE. Over the course of the past century and a half since its rediscovery, this epic has come to be universally regarded as a classic of world literature.

Conclusion

The Epic of Gilgamesh is genuinely an extremely ancient work of literature. It is most likely several centuries older than even the very oldest passages that are now included in the Hebrew Bible and is certainly many centuries older than any surviving work of ancient Greek literature, including the Iliad and the Odyssey. It predates Vergil’s Aeneid and Ovid’s Metamorphoses by well over a thousand years.

Despite this, however, the Epic of Gilgamesh is not the oldest surviving work of literature from ancient Mesopotamia, let alone the oldest surviving work of literature from any culture on earth, and it is high time that people stopped constantly repeating this inaccurate claim.