Attitudes towards Heroes

Epic of Gilgamesh

The oldest known hero tale, the Epic of Gilgamesh is the written version of a frame narrative that survives in the Akkadian language. Among the remarkably diverse cuneiform literary remnants of ancient Sumer, both king lists and fragments of stories attest to the historic existence of Gilgamesh, a king of the Sumerian city of Uruk (George, pp.58).

The state of development of those fragmentary tales suggests that, even as early 2300 BCE, verse accounts of the historic activities of Gilgamesh and mythical stories about his superhuman accomplishments were beginning to coalesce into a kind of proto-epic. Of this ...