Originating nearly four thousand years ago in ancient Mesopotamia, the epic of Gilgamesh?tells the story of a tyrannical king and his wild counterpart, Enkidu, spawned by the gods to rein in the king's cruel tendencies. They face off in a violent wrestling match, but the clash forges a bond between them. The deep, fiercely intimate camaraderie that emerges carries the two men through extraordinary adventures, from a bloody battle with the fearsome forest guardian, Humbaba, to a cataclysmic struggle with the Bull of Heaven. As the friends venture further into the unknown, they find themselves confronted with the ultimate, defining fate of all humankind.

At once a story about love among men and a timeless meditation on loss, grief, and the longing to outlast death, Gilgamesh is at its core one of the oldest and most majestic depictions of human resilience and dignity.

Now, in the hands of Simon Armitage, poet laureate of the United Kingdom, this primeval epic swells and flows in rhythmic, contemporary English with a vitality and immediacy that only a genuinely poetic rendering can achieve. Grounded in the latest scholarship but always propulsively readable, Armitage's version brings the ancient text to new life, offering a new generation of readers a thrilling portal into the very dawn of storytelling.