Amiga classic. Updated on 25 July 2021
The world s oldest surviving work of literature begins and ends with a wall: the rampart of Uruk-the-Sheepfold, great city of ancient Mesopotamia. View its parapet that none could copy! reads Andrew George s English translation. Take the stairway of a bygone era . Uruk s wall is the crowning achievement of Gilgamesh, warrior-king, wanderer and cosmic nuisance. When we meet him in the poem he is terrorising his own subjects, brawling and womanising like only a 17-foot-tall demigod can. So the gods make Gilgamesh a rival to keep him busy: Enkidu, offspring of silence , a beastman moulded from clay. Having fought each other to a standstill, the pair become friends and go on bloody masculine adventures, ransacking a holy cedar forest and slaughtering the Bull of Heaven, a creature whose very breathing causes earthquakes.