What I learned from this ancient epic is how much The Bible and Homer cribbed from it. The entire flood story is here in its original Sumerian form, complete with the cubits and the ark and the animals and the dove.

Also, the storytelling style we later came to associate with Homer is here. I'm thinking about the way Homer would have a character deliver some paragraph-long pronouncement to someone, who delivers it to someone else using the exact same spiel, and so on.

And epic? It's only a bit longer than an ambitiously extended short story! I thought an epic was supposed to be long! I guess back then, when you had to carve all those cuneiform letters out longhand (and by that I mean on stone tablets), anything seemed long.