When the fragmentary Epic of Gilgamesh was rediscovered in the 1850s among a buried pile of broken Babylonian tablets in modern-day Iraq, it created quite a stir, because: 1) It was the oldest discovered work of written literature in world history (the fragments were dated between 1800 and 2100 BC; for comparison, Moses, the Hebrew Exodus from Egypt, and even the Trojan War are traditionally dated to the late-Bronze Age Collapse of the 1300s BC); and 2) it introduced a Great Flood narrative older than the one found in Genesis.

In Gilgamesh chapter 5 (as arbitrarily demarcated in the Penguin Classics edition), an ancient immortal named Utnapishtim recounts to Gilgamesh how he built a boat to survive a mega-flood sent by the Gods to destroy the world, in a story with uncanny similarities to that of Noah in Genesis ch. 6-8. Religious believers (specifically Jewish, Christian, & Muslim) have of course seen in Gilgamesh independent proof that the Great Flood of Noah really happened, while non-religious critics see Gilgamesh as evidence that the Bible is derivative and unoriginal. Now, like all literature ancient and modern, your response to Gilgamesh will always reveal more about yourself than about the text.

But that’s not what most interests me about Gilgamesh personally. For one cannot discuss this text without acknowledging that Epic of Gilgamesh was by all currently available evidence the most widely-circulated work of literature treasured by the Babylonian empire. When Judah was sacked and destroyed shortly after Lehi left Jerusalem, this is apparently what Babylon’s emperors and generals were solemnly reading in their downtime. So powerful was Babylon at its height that its very name became synonymous with worldly arrogance and oppressive decadence. Hence why the Hebrew prophets felt so little sympathy at Babylon’s downfall less than a century later (“Come down and sit in the dust, O virgin daughter of Babylon; sit on the ground without a throne,” reads Isaiah 47:1); indeed, over a half-millennia after Babylon’s final fall to the Medes and the Persians, John the Revelator could still use the fall of Babylon as a metaphor for the destruction of the wicked at the Second Coming: “Woe, woe, the great city, Babylon, the strong city! For in one hour your judgment has come” (Revelations 18:10). Even today, LDS General Authorities will reference Babylon as a symbol for all that is worldly and wicked; “O Babylon, O Babylon, We Bid Thee Farewell” is a line from one of our most stirring hymns.

Hence why none of Babylon’s neighbors made any attempt to preserve the literature of Babylon after they fell; hence why the Epic of Gilgamesh was lost for nearly two-and-a-half thousand years. The irony here is that the Epic of Gilgamesh is itself also concerned with the impermanence of power and the vanity of ambition; its long disappearance was thematically apropos.

The epic itself (such as we have extant) narrates how the gods send the wild-man Enkidu to befriend the two-thirds demi-god Gilgamesh—king of Uruk in ancient Sumer—to make him less selfish, oppressive, and power-hungry. Enkidu challenges Gilgamesh to a wrestle, and though Gilgamesh ultimately prevails, the two become fast-friends. They go on an several adventures together: they defeat the monster Humbaba, kill the Bull of Heaven, and prevent the goddess Ishtar from raising the dead to consume the living, and so forth–all of which further cements their friendship. But then Enkidu falls sick (partly in retaliation from the gods for killing both Humaba and the Bull); he curses his ill-luck that dooms him to die from a mere disease, and not gloriously in battle (his death-bed soliloquy is cut short by a break in the clay tablets: “The next thirty lines are missing” informs the Penguin editor somberly.)

The loss of his best and only friend sends Gilgamesh into a deep depression, as he now becomes hyper-aware of his own mortality (he is only two-thirds god, after all). The gods refuse him reprieve, so he goes on a quest to the extreme ends of the earth to find the aforementioned Utnapishtim, the only mortal man to ever be granted immortality by the gods. After the latter briefly recounts his own survival of the Great Flood, he tells Gilgamesh where to deep-dive into the sea to find the hidden flower of immortality. Gilgamesh is successful in his deep-sea dive, and begins the long journey back to Uruk to show off the flower. However, as he falls asleep on the way home, a snake appears and gobbles up the flower (in a scene that numerous scholars have speculated is based upon–or even a source for–the story of the serpent and the Fruit of the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden). With heavy heart, Gilgamesh returns to Uruk empty-handed, albeit a more just and wise king now. His encounter with his own mortality has humbled him.

Hence the great irony that Babylon has been used from ancient times down to the present as a synonym for worldly arrogance, when the vanity of human pride is exactly the moral of their oldest known work of literature. When Babylon fell to the Medes and the Persians, they were ironically fulfilling the only lesson that Epic of Gilgamesh was ever attempting to impart to its readers.

And is perhaps still imparting: the Epic of Gilgamesh was rediscovered in modern times, after all (and that only a few short decades after a certain set of gold-plates were dug up in upstate New York). The over-riding moral of Gilgamesh is (as Mormon himself might frame it), “all things must fail,” and that included the Epic itself–yet still the Epic of Gilgamesh rose back from the dead! Things that were hidden are now declared from the house-tops. Gilgmamesh was right that all power must fall, that all arrogance is provisional, that nothing we build can last, including itself–yet still it resurrected and returned. Sometimes it doesn’t feel like an accident that Epic of Gilgamesh was rediscovered in these latter-days: just as the fall of ancient Babylon prefigures the fall of modern Babylon, so does the impossible resurrection of Gilgamesh prefigure our own.