Gilgamesh

In 2018, researchers discovered that Gilgamesh’s buddy Enkidu, a wild man who becomes civilized after a marathon sex fest with a woman named Shamhat, had actually been going at it for twice as long as previously believed. (Two weeks, not seven nights.) 

The edition I read, a 2021 translation by Helle that was recommended by Defector, had long sections that were left blank—placeholders for the passages we haven’t found yet, and might never. But there is an echo between the story in Gilgamesh and the story of Gilgamesh, that I find deeply moving. 

The epic is, in part, about the power of knowledge. Gilgamesh, we are told, traveled to the end of the Earth following the death of his friend, and “brought home a story, from before the Flood.” (Yes, that flood.) He found some ancient kernel of knowledge—a lesson, incidentally, about immortality, from Utnapishtim, the Flood’s lone male survivor—and gave it a new life. And by engaging with the epic several millennia after it was lost, you can too. —T.M., Mother Jones