Composed by a poet and priest in Middle Babylonia around 1200 BCE, the Epic of Gilgamesh foreshadowed later stories that would become as fundamental as any in human history, the Odyssey and the Bible. But in 600 BCE, the clay tablets that bore the story were lost--buried beneath ashes and ruins when the library of King Ashurbanipal was sacked in a raid. This book begins with the rediscovery of the epic and its decipherment in 1872 by George Smith, a brilliant self-taught linguist, who created a sensation when he discovered Gilgamesh among thousands of undistinguished tablets in the British Museum. From there the story goes backward in time, all the way to Gilgamesh himself.--From publisher description.
