Finished "The Epic of Galgamesh", translated by Andrew George and published by Penguin Classics. I really enjoyed this, and learned a lot about Assyrian literature in the process.
Spoiler:
Gilgamesh (which, I now know, should be pronounced "Gil-GAR-mesh", with the stress on the second syllable) is an epic poem whose origins date from at least the 19th century BC, and is thus roughly contemporaneous with the great literary works of the Middle Kingdom of ancient Egypt.
It tells the story of Gilgamesh, the king of Uruk (in modern-day Iraq) who, as was fashionable at the time, was semi-divine, his mother being a goddess. Gilgamesh has no equal on Earth (being a hero and all) and so the gods send him a companion, a wild man called Enkidu. Gilgamesh and Enkidu have all sorts of jolly adventures, but then Enkidu dies. This leads Gilgamesh to the realisation that he too, no matter how great he is, faces the prospect of death, so he sets out to try to learn the secret of eternal life.
After many travels he crosses the ocean to an island where Uta-napishti lives. He was granted immortality after he became the only man to survive a flood that destroyed the Earth. He was warned by the gods about the flood, and built an ark, in which he took all the animals of the earth (sound familiar?). He, though, tells Gilgamesh that the circumstances that granted him immortality are unlikely to be repeated, and that immortality is achieved by being a good king and having your name remembered after your death, upon which Gilgamesh goes home and does Good Deeds as a king.
As many people will know, the Epic of Gilgamesh is the origin of the flood story that made it into the Book of Genesis in the Bible many centuries after its original composition, complete in every detail, a fact which excited Victorian Assyriologists no end when the Epic of Gilgamesh with first discovered in the library of the palace of Ashurbanipal (7th century BC) at Ninevah and the Akkadian language was deciphered.
The Penguin Classics edition, after a lengthy (and very interesting) introduction, first gives a translation of the most complete version of the Epic, which is the forementioned Akkadian version. Subsequent chapters then give the surviving fragments of the older Babylonian version of the text (which is a little different), and finally the very old group of separate Sumerian poems which seem to have been woven together into a unified whole to form the epic poem.
An extremely interesting read!