Anonymous (Epic of Gilgamesh)

We do not know who wrote the Epic of Gilgamesh. The poem has no single author. It grew over more than a thousand years, retold and reshaped by many hands. The oldest pieces are Sumerian poems about a king named Gilgamesh, who may have ruled the city of Uruk around 2700 BCE. Later, Babylonian scribes wove these separate tales into one long story, written in the Akkadian language on clay tablets. One scribe stands out. A priest and writer named Sin-leqi-unninni is credited with the standard version that survived, probably shaping it around 1200 BCE. He was not the inventor. He was more like an editor who gave the epic its lasting form. The story follows Gilgamesh, a proud king, and his wild friend Enkidu. When Enkidu dies, Gilgamesh is crushed by grief and sets out to escape death itself. He fails, but he learns to accept being human. Because the tablets lay buried and forgotten for millennia, the poem was lost until the 1800s, when archaeologists dug it up. That rediscovery gave us back the oldest long work of literature we know.