The oldest surviving writing in the world -- cuneiform tablets pressed into wet clay in ancient Mesopotamia, including fragments of the Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest literary work known to survive.
Cuneiform emerged in Mesopotamia around 3200 BCE, making it the oldest writing system known to survive in any form -- centuries older than Egyptian hieroglyphs, millennia older than any manuscript tradition elsewhere in this library. Most of what survives is mundane: receipts, tax records, a beer receipt among the very tablets analyzed as recently as this year. But scattered among the administrative debris are literary and mythic works, chief among them the Epic of Gilgamesh -- composed nearly 4,000 years ago, the oldest surviving work of literature in the world, telling the story of a king's journey, his grief at losing his friend Enkidu, and his failed search for immortality. This Oedio gathers real photographs of individual surviving tablets, beginning with the single most famous one: Tablet XI, the Flood Tablet, whose account of a god-sent deluge and a boat built to survive it was the discovery, in 1872, that first alerted the Victorian world to just how old some of its own scripture's stories really were.