SOURCE: Foster, Benjamin R. Introduction to The Epic of Gilgamesh, translated and edited by Benjamin R. Foster, pp. xi-xxii. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001.

In the following excerpt, Foster provides an overview of the Epic of Gilgamesh and offers suggestions on how to read the work.

This four-thousand-year-old tale of love, death, and adventure is the world's oldest epic masterpiece. Over a millennium before the Iliad and the Odyssey, Mesopotamian poets wrote of Gilgamesh, hero-king of the Sumerian city of Uruk. The story has four main sections: first, Gilgamesh's abuse of his subjects, the creation of his rival—the wild man Enkidu—and their eventual friendship; second, the pair's heroic quest to the forest of cedars to slay a monster and bring back a gigantic tree, thus winning immortal fame for Gilgamesh; third, the death of Enkidu, which leaves Gilgamesh terrified at the prospect of his own...