A king so restless and tyrannical that the gods fashion a wild man from clay to be his equal, and from their combat a friendship is born that carries both to the edge of the world and the threshold of death. First inscribed around 2100 BC in Sumerian and later shaped into Akkadian verse, these clay tablets constitute the oldest surviving narrative literature, and their central question has never been surpassed: what does a mortal do with the knowledge that he must die? Gilgamesh searches for immortality across waters of death and finds it in a plant that a serpent steals while he sleeps. He returns empty-handed, and the poem asks him to look at the walls of his city and find in that enough. It is the first story, and it is still ours.