Quote by Sin-leqi-unninni: “Man is mortal. Only the gods live forever under the sun.”

One of the oldest recorded confrontations with death, this line names the central human problem: we know we will die, and we cannot accept it. The Epic of Gilgamesh is built around this grief — the king who loses his best friend and cannot stop reaching for immortality.

The Epic of Gilgamesh draws on Sumerian myths dating to around 2100 BCE and was written down in the cuneiform script of ancient Mesopotamia. The civilization of Sumer was one of the first urban cultures on Earth, developing writing, law, and literature in the region of modern-day Iraq.

Babylonian scholar and scribe who lived around 1200 BCE and is credited with the standard version of the Epic of Gilgamesh. He compiled and likely composed portions of the epic from older Sumerian and Akkadian sources. He is considered one of the earliest individually named literary authors in human history.