The Epic of Gilgamesh

1839 Austen Henry Layard set off with a friend to Ceylon, but in Mesopotamia he was delayed by a reconnaissance of Assyrian mounds. It was from this reconnaissance of Nineveh that he found a buried library and lost literature. The importance of this find was not understood until much later when the clay tablets were deciphered. In 1853, Layard’s collaborator and successor unearthed the part of the library that contained the tablets of the Gilgamesh Epic. …

…immortality. One story is a bragging of one man's heroic life and the other is a history of one man's heritage. Some historians claim the Jews borrowed the stories from the Mesopotamian but another possibility is that they share a common history. All people would share these stories as a common history and it would not be one borrowing from the other but instead each writing down how the story was passed on to them.