Originally performed at the Lakewood Public Library

Love, sex, murder, jealousy, heroism, vanity lust…

All that and more can be found in the first great masterpiece of world literature, The Epic of Gilgamesh. This sweeping saga recounts the adventures of a legendary king and is based in all likelihood on an actual historical figure, Gilgamesh, the ruler of the Babylonian city of Uruk around 2700 B.C.  Credited with erecting the massive wall around Uruk, the first major city, Gilgamesh emerged over the centuries as the hero of a cycle of poems, and eventually of the 3,000-line epic, which reached final form around 1200 B.C.

Like all ancient Mesopotamian literature, the epic of Gilgamesh was lost to historical memory with the eclipse of the ancient cultures of Assyria and Babylonia in the centuries before Christ. Only in the mid-19th century did British and French archaeologists begin to explore the mysterious mounds in present-day Iraq that held the remains of the first urban societies. A particularly rich find was the library of Ashurbanipal, last great king of Assyria: in the 1850s, British archaeologist Austin Henry Layard and his Iraqi associate, Hormuzd Rassam, unearthed it in the ruins of Nineveh. They shipped 100,000 tablets and fragments home to the British Museum; gradually scholars began to piece them together and decipher the ancient texts.

In 1872, the young curator George Smith created a sensation when he unearthed Gilgamesh’s broken tablets in the museum’s collection. Smith immediately perceived that the character of Uta-napishtim, Gilgamesh’s ancestor, constituted an early version of the Bible’s Noah—a striking parallel at a time when Victorian debates over religion and science were at their height.