Epic of Gilgamesh ca. 1300 BCE

The Epic of Gilgamesh is one of the world's earliest surviving written texts, and its author, Sinleqeunnini, is the earliest author of a surviving text whose name is known—although he was less a writer and more a compiler and adapter of stories that already existed. These stories were written, or passed along orally, in Sumerian probably beginning sometime around 2000 bce. At about the turn of the thirteenth century bce—though scholars differ about the date—Sinleqeunnini (also written Sin-leqe-unini) recorded the version that survives in Akkadian, a Semitic language related to Hebrew, the language of the Jewish people. It is his version that is regarded as the “standard” version of the epic. The story was lost for more than two millennia until it was rediscovered near modern-day Mosul, a city in Iraq on the eastern bank of the Tigris River. In ancient times, this was the site of the city of Nineveh. The first of the tablets upon which the epic was inscribed was found in about 1853 during an expedition led by Sir Austen Henry Layard of the British Museum.