Gilgamesh and the theft of the mystery of time

Author's name: Saeed Al-Ghanmeidar Publisher: Al-Rafidain Publishing and Distribution Year of publication: 2025 Literary classification: Literature Brief about the book: The book discusses the heroic Sumerian tales initially, which are scattered stories, their heroes are multiple characters, and it follows how the Babylonians integrated these scattered tales into a single narrative structure, organized by a single plot, and with a single hero. The unification of the scattered tales and their merging into one structure, with one plot and one hero, indicates a founding period, meaning the creation of a new genre that we now call "epic." This was then completed by researching the typological characteristics, social functions, and internal mechanisms for transmitting and performing the "epic" in its ancient cultural context, both as an oral text and as a written work. The study focused on extracting the fundamental units in the construction of the epic. Since the epic also involved symbolic construction alongside the narrative structure and independently of it, the research addressed the symbolic structures that the epic attempted to utilize. The book offers a "literary" study of an ancient text, meaning it employs various human sciences, as these fields exist in border areas, to be recruited within a framework belonging to the latest temporal methodologies that have proven their ability to analyze texts and trace their sources positively. It preserves the epic text's belonging to its past era and distant history when it was a pioneering work in exploring human consciousness and its ability to solve the problems of its time. Therefore, the research will focus on analyzing this text within its temporal context, but using a modern methodology that responds to the latest systematic achievements developed in our era.