15 books like The Epic of Gilgamesh

Wisdom Sits in Places is a model for writers who want to describe the scope, importance, and the social and ecological applicability of indigenous wisdom.

In the book, Basso describes poetically how Western Apache elders teach us how spaces and places have histories the wisdom of which clears the mind and engenders respect for nature and for one’s fellow human beings. It is a key work for anyone who wants to write about wisdom.

A beautiful and touching account of the author’s travels in early 11th century Japan. Lady Sarashina is deep in sorrow from the death of her husband and searches for solace in nature and place on pilgrimage routes and at temples along the way. This is a profound weaving of mind, journey, and place, as she travels across the 72 seasons of Japan’s year. Emotions link land and mind. She is acutely attentive to cuckoo calls and cherry blossom, the rain pattering on bamboo at night, the cool water in the stone well. “Even as I wander on my journey,” she writes, “It always stays above me in the sky, this moon at dawn, this moon I gazed on in the capital.”

In one of the finest pieces of world literature, Robert Bringhurst recounts stories of the Haida mythtellers. The isles of Haida Gwaii are 160 km into the Pacific, drenched in rain, mist, and wind. Here was one of the world's richest traditions of story, place, and nature, where myths thought themselves into people. We have the extraordinary sagas of Raven Travelling, Goose Food, and the Qquana Cycle, some individual oral sagas more than 5,000 lines long. “Wealth has big eyes,” said one storyteller. Raven is the trickster of the North, is ingenious, ever-watchful from high spruce and red cedar. “Bring us good luck,” people called out. Says one, “He always fools everybody, so he gets by easy.” Yet many of the Haida people died on contact with colonial invaders, and the coastal villages and rows of totem house poles stand abandoned.

This is the most intense nature-writing and storytelling, as if written by bear or tiger, by the rainforest tree or tropical sea itself. Jay Griffiths becomes Joseph Campbell’s hero with a thousand faces, as we travel out in life, across the threshold and leaving behind ordinary world. Myth is story, and it is also how we live, battling against personal and historical limitations. Jay finds the secret openings and weaves an Odyssey to the wildness of earth and sea, water and fire. On the heroic journey, we are repeatedly tested, and come back with an elixir. Story itself becomes currency and guide. The monk and mystic, Meister Eckhart of Thuringia, wrote in the early 1300s, “There are many ways, Some are crowded, others less travelled, But every way, is the right one.”

History Begins at Sumer explains lucidly how the Sumerian people, particularly the city of Uruk on the banks of the Euphrates River in what is now Iraq, the city over which Gilgamesh is said to have ruled, was responsible for many world firsts.

These included the use of the wheel, literature, organised schooling, an administrative structure, and many of those features that enable the functioning of what we now would consider a true city. An example that others were soon to follow.

This most revealing book explains how, over 7,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, between the rivers Euphrates and Tigris, an area corresponding roughly with that of modern Iraq, urban living began.

The region where this remarkable phenomenon first occurred is known as Sumer. Where its people originated remains something of a mystery and the still imperfectly understood Sumerian language appears unrelated to any other known tongue, ancient or modern.  

This book, like the others, is an essential reference for anyone researching the subject.

It covers in detail geography, rivers and irrigation, archaeology and building, government and society, religion and myth, language and writing, architecture, and the arts, economy and trade, food and agriculture, arms and warfare, everyday life, customs and society in general.

Getting down to finer details is the strength of this book. A great asset it has to be for the finer points in developing a novel.

This large and sumptuous volume, published in 1962, is the oldest of my references for ancient history.

Although over sixty years old its text, compiled by numerous specialists in their day, is still largely authoritative.

Where it excels, however, is in a cover to cover wealth of detailed pictures showing people, activities, situations, and places from ancient times in numerous parts of the world.

I have found this book an invaluable source, particularly regarding fashion and dress, for the book featured here as well as for Mycenaean period novels I’ve also published.     

This book is simply the first written story ever found—and it’s about friendship! It was pressed into clay in the city of Nineveh around four thousand years ago and was re-found in the nineteenth century. It tells the story of a friendship between two men, Gilgamesh, the lord of his city, and Enkidu, ‘a wild man’ from the forests. The story recounts their adventures, then Enkidu’s death, and Gilgamesh’s grief at losing his friend. I find it extraordinary that so many thousands of years ago, human beings were concerned with the nature and power of friendship—it shows that the bonds of friendship are fundamental to human beings. 

Unlike the Homerian epics, Gilgamesh has been studied by scholars since only the late 19th century. (David Damrosch’s The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh details its fascinating discovery among a box of cuneiform shards in the British Museum.) Yet this Babylonian epic predates the Odyssey by over a millennium and relates a hero’s journey even more formidable. While Odysseus just wants to get back home, Gilgamesh seeks immortality itself. Bloody battles with giants, marathon sex with goddesses, heartbreaking love between two men, and the universal human quest to reconcile ourselves with death—Gilgamesh has it all.