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).
Gilgamesh
Theodore Ziolkowski, a scholar of modern literature, states, that "unlike most other figures from myth, literature, and history, Gilgamesh has established himself as an autonomous entity or simply a name, often independent of the epic context in which he originally became known. (As analogous examples one might think, for instance, of the Minotaur or Frankenstein's monster.)" The "Epic of Gilgamesh" has been translated into many major world languages and has become a staple of American world literature classes. Many contemporary authors and novelists have drawn inspiration from it, including an American avant-garde theater collective called "The Gilgamesh Group" and Joan London in her novel "Gilgamesh" (2001). "The Great American Novel" (1973) by Philip Roth features a character named "Gil Gamesh", who is the star pitcher of a fictional 1930s baseball team called the "Patriot League". Believing that he can never lose, Gil Gamesh throws a violent temper tantrum when an umpire goes against him and he is subsequently banished from baseball. He flees to the Soviet Union, where he is trained as a spy against the United States. Gil Gamesh reappears late in the novel as one of Joseph Stalin's spies and gives what American literary historian David Damrosch calls "an eerily casual description of his interrogation training in Soviet Russia." In 2000, a modern statue of Gilgamesh by the Assyrian sculptor Lewis Batros was unveiled at the University of Sydney in Australia.