Ancient Near East

The oldest voices on the shelf. The Epic of Gilgamesh was written on clay in Mesopotamia around 2100 BCE, lost for two thousand years, and dug up in Nineveh in 1853, so that the first great book in the human record is also one of the last to be read. It is about a king who loses his friend and goes looking for a way not to die, and comes home without one. Enheduanna, a priestess of Ur, is the first author in history whose name we know, and her hymn to Inanna is here.

The Hebrew Bible is the rest of the shelf, and the programs assign it in parts: Genesis almost everywhere, Exodus, Job, the Psalms, Deuteronomy, the prophets. It is the book the Western tradition read most, argued about most, and built most of its other books on, from Augustine to Milton to Dostoevsky. A student who has not read Genesis cannot fully read Paradise Lost, and the Book of Job is the shelf on evil and suffering in forty pages.

These are read at the start of the second year at St. John’s and Thomas Aquinas College, after the Greeks, and at the start of the first year at Columbia and Notre Dame, before them. Either order works. What matters is reading them as books, with the same attention the Iliad gets.