Archeologists Are Scared of Opening Gilgamesh's Tomb And The Reason is Shocking

Archeologists Are Scared of Opening Gilgamesh's Tomb And The Reason is Shocking On April 29, 2003, the BBC ran a headline that stopped archaeologists worldwide in their tracks."Gilgamesh Tomb Believed Found." If that headline meant what it appeared to mean, it would have been the most significant archaeological discovery in human history. Gilgamesh is the oldest named hero in literature. His story, written on clay tablets approximately four thousand years ago, is the oldest surviving narrative in human history. Finding his actual tomb, the burial site of a figure who sits at the boundary between history and mythology, would rewrite not just what we know about ancient Mesopotamia but what we understand about the threshold between myth and memory. But the headline was doing something that science headlines do with uncomfortable regularity. It was saying something more confident than the evidence behind it actually supported. What had been found beneath the desert near the ancient city of Uruk in southern Iraq was not a tomb. It was a pattern of buried structures detected by a geophysical survey instrument, structures that a careful, measured German geophysicist said looked very similar to the description of Gilgamesh's burial place in the ancient text.