The oldest story ever written

How an ancient epic full of sex, violence and a pre-biblical flood got lost and found, and how its legacy lives on in "Lethal Weapon."

By Laura Miller

Read more: Books, Laura Miller, Books Features

April 24, 2007 | There's no better illustration of the fragility and the power of literature than the history of "The Epic of Gilgamesh," the oldest known literary work, composed in Babylonia more than 3,000 years ago. About 400 years later, after one of the ruthless, bloody sieges typical of that time, the epic was buried in the ruins of a Mesopotamian palace. There it lay, utterly forgotten along with the name of the king who once reigned in that palace, until a British archaeologist and his Iraqi assistant unearthed it not far from the modern city of Mosul in 1840.

David Damrosch's artful, engrossing new history, "The Buried Book," relates how "The Epic of Gilgamesh" was lost and found -- or rather how it was found and lost, since he tells the story backward, from the present to the past, in an archaeological fashion. It's a risky narrative gambit, and Damrosch is gifted enough to pull it off, no small feat. Think of it: He asks you to be excited about what the characters in his story are discovering even before you know quite how important it is. But that, after all, is the nature of archaeology and what gives the discipline its distinctive thrill. What you're excavating is probably just another empty Egyptian tomb, stripped clean by grave robbers hundreds of years ago. Or you could be Howard Carter on the best day of his life in 1922, prying open that tiny breach in the left-hand corner of a doorway, catching a whiff of air unbreathed for thousands of years, shining in a light and telling your companions that you see, "Yes, wonderful things!"

The recovery of the "The Epic of Gilgamesh" was less dramatic, mostly because it was drawn out over decades, but the prize was even more fabulous than the treasures of King Tut's tomb: the oldest story ever told -- or, at least, the oldest one told in writing. It is the tale of a king, and full of sex, violence, love, thievery, defiance, grief and divine retribution. It's the first buddy picture, the first depiction of the Underworld, the precursor to the legend of Noah and his ark. If it were like hundreds of other great and ancient stories -- the death and resurrection of Osirus, the quest of Orpheus, Sigurd's slaying of the dragon Fafnir -- it would have reached us through countless retellings, gradually morphing and splitting and fusing with other stories over the years. Those stories come to us like the DNA of our ancestors, still present within us, but reshaped by generations of mutations and ultimately as familiar as our own faces.

Instead, "The Epic of Gilgamesh," preserved on 12 clay tablets, fell into a kind of time capsule in the fabled cradle of civilization. When archaeologists dug it up again it was like one of those movies in which a caveman captured in permafrost gets thawed out to meet the modern world. True, some bits of the epic have embedded themselves in other stories -- most notably the Old Testament -- and then have been handed down from one storyteller to the next through the ages. But much of the epic feels both fresh and alien, a piece of the past all Westerners (and many Asians) share, unsmoothed by the passage of the centuries.

Its hero, Gilgamesh, is the regal son of a man and a goddess, a lineage that makes him one-third human and two-thirds divine. At the beginning of the epic, Gilgamesh is a dreadful king, rampaging through his city-state of Uruk, forcing the young men of his kingdom to engage in endless contests and, worst of all, insisting on the droit de seigneur -- or the right of a lord to deflower his community's virgins on their wedding nights. The women of Uruk protest this violation to the gods, who respond in an exceptionally roundabout way by making a man out of clay, Enkidu, and letting him loose in the wilderness, where he lives alone, befriending the animals and ripping apart the traps hunters set for them. The hunters retaliate by asking Gilgamesh to send a temple prostitute to the wilderness to seduce and civilize Enkidu. She succeeds -- but not before Enkidu manages to sustain an erection for an impressive seven days and seven nights.

The priestess persuades Enkidu to move to a village, where he meets a wedding party lamenting the forthcoming rape of the bride by Gilgamesh. The outraged Enkidu storms into Uruk, confronts Gilgamesh and an earthshaking wrestling match ensues. The two men battle to a draw, whereupon Gilgamesh realizes that he has finally met his equal and new best friend. In fact, Enkidu is the very man whose coming Gilgamesh's mother has prophesied: "Like a wife you'll love him, caress him and embrace him." (The blatantly homoerotic dimension of this great friendship doesn't figure in the very earliest Sumerian legends about Gilgamesh; it was added to the now-standard Babylonian version of the epic, written down 1,000 years later.)

Enkidu moderates Gilgamesh's "restless spirit," but even he cannot dissuade the king from launching a timber raid on a cedar forest outside his borders. The timber (a valuable commodity in arid Mesopotamia) is guarded by the fearsome ogre, Humbaba. In the midst of this expedition, for reasons not entirely clear, Enkidu suddenly switches strategies and stops restraining his friend. Instead, he eggs Gilgamesh on, encouraging him to slaughter the defeated Humbaba, and bringing the ogre's terrible curse down upon them both.

After that, things go downhill. The love goddess Ishtar attempts to seduce Gilgamesh, but he rejects her haughtily. In vengeance, the gods send the Bull of Heaven to plague Uruk, but Gilgamesh and Enkidu slay it and Enkidu taunts Ishtar with the beast's hindparts. This is the last straw; the gods set aside their previously rather indirect methods and kill Enkidu. After mourning his friend for an entire tablet, Gilgamesh sets off in search of a distant ancestor, Uta-napishtim the Faraway, the sole survivor of a great, primeval flood and the only man to be spared death by the gods. Uta-napishtim refuses to help him, and he must return to Uruk empty-handed and still doomed to die. Back home, he comforts himself with rejoicing in the magnificence of his city. (A final tablet, a kind of appendix, describes how Enkidu once stumbled into the underworld -- the "House of Dust" -- and, after being rescued by the gods, told Gilgamesh everything he saw there.)

As Damrosch points out, although the epic was lost for millennia, some threads from Gilgamesh's story survived in other myths. Enkidu, who loses his ability to commune with the beasts after succumbing to the temple prostitute, is like Adam and Eve cast out of the Earthly Paradise and estranged from the state of nature. But for the Mesopotamians, Damrosch goes on to explain, this didn't constitute a fall from grace; as they saw it, Enkidu graduated from savagery to a civilized existence, a step up. The friendship of Gilgamesh and Enkidu resembles that of Achilles and Patroklos in "The Iliad," and that's no coincidence, according to the classicist M.L. West, who has argued that "poet-singers were likely performing 'Gilgamesh' in Syria and Cyprus during the period in which the Homeric epics were first being elaborated."

Next page: A biblical flood and a villain named Budge