The Epic of Gilgamesh stands at the very beginning of our world literature, written some 4600 years ago. Sure, Homer is old, but he is a mere babe when compared to this Epic - the Greek Iliad is only about 3000 years young. We have the last great king of the Assyrian Empire to thank for the preservation of the Epic. Assurbanipal was a blood thirsty megalomaniac conqueror, plunderer of Egypt and Susa, King of the World etc, but in his spare time he collected cuneiform tablets & this was one of them, copied for his famous library in Nineveh about 600 BC. The script is written in Akkadian, the Semitic language of the Babylonians and Assyrians. Akkadian adopted the Sumerian cuneiform script (which was actually the original invention of writing). In the semi-historical 'Sumerian King-List,' Gilgamesh is named as the fifth ruler of Uruk.