The Oldest Story in the World: Gilgamesh, Death, and the Flood

Four thousand years ago a Sumerian king was made half a god, given a wild-man brother from the clay, and sent to kill monsters — and then made to watch that brother die, and to learn that even he must die. His hunt for a life without end carries him past the ends of the earth to the one man who survived the Flood, and home again empty-handed but wiser. Lost for two millennia, the story rose out of the ground in 1872, older than Genesis, when George Smith read of an ark, a mountain, and a dove sent out over the waters.