The Epic of Gilgamesh

c. 2100 BCE — Mesopotamia, Sumer / Babylon

Today: Southern Iraq (copied across Mesopotamia)

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 knowing: Gilgamesh 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.

Pattern: Information-medium revolution — A new way to record or transmit information lowers the cost of copying ideas and reorders who holds knowledge and power.

Entry 13 of 240 in Precedent, a walk through the whole human story in order.