The Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the world's oldest pieces of literature, is an epic poem written about 4000 years ago in Mesopotamia. Most scholars think that the work has its origins in a series of ancient Sumerian poems, which were eventually compiled into this Akkadian version of the epic around the 18th or 17th century BCE.
The Epic of Gilgamesh was well known in its time, but only recently as been "rediscovered" by the modern world. The clay tablets that record the epic were only rediscovered in 1853 by Hormuzd Rassam, an Assyrian archaeologist, in what is now Iraq. The epic was first translated into English and published in the early 1870s by George Smith, a British Assyriologist....
