Michael Dirda in the Washington Post:
The oldest surviving fragments of the Babylonian epic we now call Gilgamesh date back to the 18th century — the 18th century before the Christian era, that is, more than 3,700 years ago. Etched in the wedge-shaped letters known as cuneiform on clay tablets, Gilgamesh stands as the earliest classic of world literature. Surprisingly, it is a classic still in the making, for scholars continue to discover and piece together shards — in Akkadian, Sumerian, Hittite and other ancient languages — that occasionally add a few more lines to this story of an ancient Middle Eastern king’s quest for immortality and his coming to terms with the inevitability of death.
In The Buried Book, David Damrosch, a Columbia professor of comparative literature, organizes his text as an archaeological dig, opening with a prefatory account of Austen Henry Layard’s discovery and excavation of the ruins of Nineveh in the 1840s, then gradually working his way back from the Victorian era into ancient times. His first and second chapters describe the career of George Smith, a self-taught Assyriologist, who one momentous afternoon in 1872 was working at the British Museum, going through a pile of Layard’s clay tablets. Suddenly, Smith realized that he was reading about “a flood storm, a ship caught on a mountain, and a bird sent out in search of dry land.”
The discovery of this “Chaldean account of the Deluge” so electrified the young scholar that he danced around the museum and actually began to “undress himself.”
More here.