Amazon.com description: Product Description: This brilliant new treatment of the oldest epic in the world is a literary event. Esteemed translator and best-selling author Stephen Mitchell breathes life into a 3,700-year-old classic, delivering a lithe and muscular rendering that shows how startlingly alive Gilgamesh is, how filled with intelligence and beauty. It is the story of literature's first hero, an historical king of Uruk in Babylonia, and his journey of self-discovery. Along the way, Gilgamesh discovers that friendship can bring peace to a whole city and that wisdom can be found only when the quest for it is abandoned.