Comentarista82
Literotica Guru
- Joined
- Jul 23, 2014
- Posts
- 1,563
Now this was a truly fascinating book. In short, the story of the rediscovery of the first great masterpiece of world literature: the ancient epic of the legendary Sumerian king Gilgamesh who possibly lived around 2,700BC. Several copies of a largely complete version of the 4,000-year-old poem were part of the great library of the palace of Nineveh collected there by the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal, who ruled from 669 B.C. After Nineveh was sacked in 612 B.C., the Gilgamesh epic was forgotten for more than 2,000 years until archaeologists uncovered the library and shipped 100,000 clay tablets and fragments to the British Museum in the 1840s and '50s where the Akkadian was deciphered and the ancient account of Noah's Flood found.
It's the oldest book in the world and I find it quite fascinating to read about the life of a king who lived possibly 5,000 years ago and is still remembered. Must have been quite the guy. It's a really readable book, not at all dry and the author is a Prof of literature or something, not an archaeologist so in the last half of the book there's far more emphasis on looking at the story itself. The epic was covered in a way that was interesting and I really appreciated the authors views on the similarities in themes and plots with both the Old Testament and other works such as the Odyssey.
"The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh"
I'll have to note that; related to this is when Capt. Picard recounts a partial story of Gilgamesh in The Next Generation episode "Darmok (great ep by the way)."