Precedentthe patterns history keeps Start the walk →
Entry 13 of 240Invention

The Epic of Gilgamesh

c. 2100 BCE/Mesopotamia/Sumer / Babylon
Today Southern Iraq (copied across Mesopotamia)Span Sumer & Babylon · 3rd–2nd millennium BCE

The Epic of Gilgamesh — the story of a restless king's search for immortality — is the world's oldest surviving great work of literature, first set down on clay a thousand years before Homer. It did something new: it used writing not to count grain but to wrestle with death, friendship, and the limits of power. A technology invented for accounting had become the vehicle for humanity's oldest questions.

◆ Worth knowingGilgamesh contains a flood story — a man told to build a boat and save life from a deluge — written over a thousand years before Noah's. The scholar who first deciphered it in 1872 was so overcome he reportedly began tearing off his clothes.
◆ The mechanismInformation-medium revolution

A new way to record or transmit information lowers the cost of copying ideas and reorders who holds knowledge and power.

Also: Ideological movement

This is one stop on a walk through the whole human story, in order.

Precedent runs from 9500 BCE to the present in 240 short entries, a few a day. Under each one is the mechanism it's an instance of, and every earlier time you've walked past it. Free, no account needed.

Begin at 9500 BCE → Already walking? Open Precedent and you'll pick up where you left off.