The Epic ofGilgamesh is not the product of a single author in the modern sense. It has come to us as the progressive creation of several ancient near-eastern cultures, specifically the cultures of the Euphrates River valley. Originally an oral composition recited by communal storytellers, perhaps priests, to a listening audience, portions of the Gilgamesh epic were repeated, probably for many generations, before being "written" by scribes in an archaic form of writing called "cuneiform." Scribes "wrote" the ancient oral stories into clay tablets with a sharply pointed, triangular stick, and the tablets telling the Gilgamesh story were kept in royal libraries The most famous of these was the library of Ashurbanipal, king of Babylon during the seventh century B.C., but other portions of the Epic of Gilgamesh from different time periods have also been found......
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