Tale of Uruk

The Epic of Gilgamesh is an ancient Mesopotamian poem, considered the oldest known substantial work of literature. The standard Babylonian version, compiled by the scribe Sin-leqi-unninni was written around the 12th century BCE, consists of 12 tablets. This derived fiction is non-Western, in that it does not treat the text as a detached "ur-text" of world literature, as claimed by Euro-American classical studies, instead, it re-anchors the epic back in its Mesopotamian-Iraqi matrix, critiques the colonial epistemology that severed ancient from modern Iraq, and writes the text through comparative frameworks drawn from the Global South. The epic is laid out tablet by tablet.