The ancient Mesopotamian epic poem about the king of Uruk — compiled in its most complete form around 1200 BCE from older Sumerian traditions — that tells of friendship, loss, and the search for immortality, and is among the oldest surviving works of literature, containing a flood narrative that predates and closely parallels the biblical story of Noah.
More than a thousand years before Homer, someone wrote a poem about a king who watched his best friend die and then spent the rest of his life trying to escape death. We found most of it on clay tablets buried under Nineveh. It is the oldest story we have, and it is about the things we still cannot stop thinking about.