Epic of Gilgamesh
The "Epic of Gilgamesh" was discovered by Austen Henry Layard, Hormuzd Rassam, and W. K. Loftus in 1853. The central character of Gilgamesh was initially reintroduced to the world as ""Izdubar"", before the cuneiform logographs in his name could be pronounced accurately. The first modern translation was published in the early 1870s by George Smith. Smith then made further discoveries of texts on his later expeditions, which culminated in his final translation which is given in his book "The Chaldaean Account of Genesis" (1880).
Poetry
The oldest surviving epic poem, the "Epic of Gilgamesh", comes from the 3rd millenniumBCE in Sumer (in Mesopotamia, now Iraq), and was written in cuneiform script on clay tablets and, later, on papyrus. A tablet dating to c.2000BCE describes an annual rite in which the king symbolically married and mated with the goddess Inanna to ensure fertility and prosperity; it is considered the world's oldest love poem. An example of Egyptian epic poetry is "The Story of Sinuhe" (c. 1800 BCE).
Other ancient epic poetry includes the Greek epics, the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey"; the Avestan books, the "Gathic Avesta" and the "Yasna"; the Roman national epic, Virgil's "Aeneid"; and the Indian epics, the "Ramayana" and the "Mahabharata". Epic poetry, including the "Odyssey", the "Gathas", and the Indian "Vedas", appears to have been composed in poetic form as an aid to memorization and oral transmission, in prehistoric and ancient societies.