Many hundreds of years ago, before Homer wrote the famous Iliad and Odyssey and before the Old Testament was written, scribes in ancient Mesopotamia, now modern Iraq, composed the first epic ever written The Epic of Gilgamesh. Around the year of 3000 BC the inhabitants of the Fertile Crescent plains, surrounded by the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, began to establish a complex government and society, a first for mankind. Cuneiform, or the writing system of Mesopotamia, consisted of wedge-shaped letters inscribed on clay tablets through which modern historians got some of the earliest historical documentation. After the passages were translated, it was apparent that one of the major aspects of the epic was kingly obligations.

In the story of Gilgamesh, the reader can examine the character Gilgamesh as an example of Sumerian kingship. Gilgamesh was the first king of Uruk that historians can prove through documentations. He possessed beauty...