‘Gilgamesh,’ said the renowned German poet Rainer Maria Rilke in 1916, ‘is stupendous’. The great Babylonian epic inspired Rilke so much that he enthusiastically repeated the story to everyone he met. But for him, it was first and foremost a poem about the fear of death. Death and quest for immortality have fascinated poets and storytellers for centuries. They lie at the heart of this ancient work. Composed nearly four millennia ago in Mesopotamia (roughly equivalent to modern Iraq and Syria), The Epic of Gilgamesh is one of the world’s oldest written poems. Here I will explore three major aspects of the poem: the narrative of the epic itself; the story of its loss and erasure from public memory for some two thousand years; and finally its retrieval in the 19th century.