The Buried Book

A “lively and accessible” history of the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh , and its sensational rediscovery in the nineteenth century ( The Boston Sunday Globe ). Composed in Middle Babylonia around 1200 BCE, The Epic of Gilgamesh foreshadowed later stories that would become as fundamental as any in human history: the Bible, Homer, The Thousand and One Nights . But in 600 BCE, the clay tablets that bore the story were lost—buried beneath ashes and ruins when the library of the wild king Ashurbanipal wa